Quote from: StanJones on October 26, 2017, 10:05:45 AM

Hi. Why do you need smart contracts? . How do you differ from your competitors? Id like to know more about this project whom should I contact?

Hi there Stan, my name is Garrison Breckenridge, Co-founder of Embermine.

Smart contracts can help eliminate the unnecessary frictions in the creative/collaborative process. The origins of Embermine are directly tied to the failure of an independent publishing company that used Amazon as its enterprise backbone. This means 30% cut on every sale, monthly checks (from each region; US, UK, etc), at a two-month latency. This is not only incredibly inefficient for the author, but also the publisher, with the latter being a central point of vulnerability and human error. We originally tried to think of a way to do automated distributed payments that honor royalty agreements with traditional payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, or Square, but ran into a wall. That wasn't a solution; that granularity of control was missing. Then I discovered Ethereum, after which my partner James Drake and I promptly fell into the winding rabbit hole that is blockchain.

Agreements between parties are the backbone of commerce, usually enforced by a legalese prose document. Unfortunately, these documents can lead to ambiguity and are subject to "whim". Smart contracts are just automated processing scripts--code--that doesn't have any legal binding to them, but they can be an operable form of an agreement, namely how assets (or some unit of value) are moved about. Who, what, when, how, why? Code is law is code. Both software and law are modular, with a lot of boilerplate information (text). By isolating the parameters and creating a What You See is What You Sign user experience, we can allow creatives to leverage this technology for their own business endeavors and agreements.

Now you can introduce the element of the Ricardian contract (Ian Grigg), in which the paramaters of the smart contract are matched with the "params" of a no-nonsense natural language document. This allows one to clarify intent behind the programmed agreements to eliminate ambiguity; this can also serve as a necessary mechanism for arbitration in the event of a dispute.

We are bringing digital scarcity to creative works. This not only allows a digital secondary market, but transaction fees as these assets change hands go back to the project of their origin and are then processed by the Compact, the nexus of code and prose contracts the govern a particular project and enforce ownership and compensation.

There are other projects working to make the creative space fairer for the actual creatives: Decent, CreativeChain, SingularDTV, Opus, Resonate, Token FM, Mycelia, and many others. It is encouraging that others are trying to solve the same problems. To go into detail on why our approach is different from each of these projects would be tedious. That being said...

We are about to release a revised whitepaper that details the design of the platform. We are also in the midst of updating our website.

If you want to stay tuned into our development and interact with our community, please join https://t.me/embermine. This is where the community developed organically and where a lot of the dialogue happens (more so than Bitcoin Talk). We're working on making sure this thread is updated along with the rest.

Thanks for reaching out Stan.