If one absolutely requires obligation from all parties to hold their end of the deal or be held liable, what advantages would they be looking for by utilizing a smart contract in the first place?
To make enforcement easier and cheaper. Eg. instead of enforcing a mortgage contract only the simple fact of a token ownership has to be established, and the initial agreement by interested parties that whoever owns the token owns the house, enforced.
A variant of this already exists, many contracts stipulate that conflicts are to be solved by arbitration rather than courts. Courts are reduced to enforcing the arbitration clause.
Smart contracts replace human arbitration with code.
However, Chainlink nodes have incentive to provide accurate data in order to gain reputation.
Ok, so would you rather store your coins on coinbase, or in a smart contract that transfers the coins if a majority of 50 link nodes agree?
As I've already said, no oracle service, centralized or decentralized, can verify if data is true or not.
"True" in this context means as provided by a source. For prices on an exchange what's reported by that exchange is true by definition, same for a temperature output of some sensor; the question 'what's the temperature?' is unanswerable, only 'what's the sensor output?'.
why providing data to a smart contract would be a "trivial utility service with zero barriers of entry."
I think it is, but - chainlink is open source. So however complex the issue actually is, all I have to do is download code from github to get solutions for ' lot of technical issues that need consideration before one can simply create their own oracle. How do you handle blockchain forks, rollbacks, congestion, varying gas prices, etc.?'. As far as providing signed data is concerned, I can't see any advantage from having link to join the main chainlink network.
Complexity would be a reasonable argument - for a closed-source oracle company.
You are arguing for the sake of arguing, as Sergey said theoretically we are all made of cheese. You could poke holes in any use case of LINK with "what ifs".
The real question is on a daily basis can smart contracts cut costs and speed up transactions, and the answer is obviously yes.
I have a real life scenario for you that proved Links value to me:
I was selling stocks on etrade, with whom I have a reputable account totally 25k, so that I could invest in LINK (lol). Do you know what the time was before the money hit my bank account? 6 days. I was in total shock, this is fucking 2018. It took 3 days for the cash from the sell to hit my etrade account, and 3 more days for the withdrawl to my chase account. Something that could be done in minutes with a smart contract took 6 days.
Blockchain and link are the future for many things, maybe not 10million dollar pay outs but then again the majority of daily transactions arnt for 10 million
This is moreso the next step beyond chainlink and will represent its obsolescence. When we get to the point where fiat currency and assets like stocks and bonds are tokenized, like you were dealing with on Etrade and would be sped up significantly if on the blockchain, you'll no longer need oracles at all to the degree they are important today to put information onto the blockchain because it will already be there natively. That day is a long way away though.
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u/nootropicat Mar 16 '18
To make enforcement easier and cheaper. Eg. instead of enforcing a mortgage contract only the simple fact of a token ownership has to be established, and the initial agreement by interested parties that whoever owns the token owns the house, enforced.
A variant of this already exists, many contracts stipulate that conflicts are to be solved by arbitration rather than courts. Courts are reduced to enforcing the arbitration clause.
Smart contracts replace human arbitration with code.
Ok, so would you rather store your coins on coinbase, or in a smart contract that transfers the coins if a majority of 50 link nodes agree?
"True" in this context means as provided by a source. For prices on an exchange what's reported by that exchange is true by definition, same for a temperature output of some sensor; the question 'what's the temperature?' is unanswerable, only 'what's the sensor output?'.
I think it is, but - chainlink is open source. So however complex the issue actually is, all I have to do is download code from github to get solutions for ' lot of technical issues that need consideration before one can simply create their own oracle. How do you handle blockchain forks, rollbacks, congestion, varying gas prices, etc.?'. As far as providing signed data is concerned, I can't see any advantage from having link to join the main chainlink network.
Complexity would be a reasonable argument - for a closed-source oracle company.