Re: Smart Contracts - just a buzzword or are they applicable to the real world?
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That being said, I fully agree -- decentralized storage systems are a very interesting use case for smart contracts.
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That being said, I fully agree -- decentralized storage systems are a very interesting use case for smart contracts.
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I´d contradict this statement by using your own argument from a previous
post in this thread
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What I meant to say is this: From a practical perspective, a new decentralized solution needs to be significantly more
convenient and / or cheaper than an established centralized one. Even if both solutions are equally viable,
people will rather stick with an established solution rather than trying the new one. Put differently, smart contracts
either need to find a business that they can vastly improve upon (like Uber / Lyft did with Taxis) or find an underserved niche (like Bitcoin did with global P2P payments).
What I meant to say is this: From a practical perspective, a new decentralized solution needs to be significantly more
convenient and / or cheaper than an established centralized one. Even if both solutions are equally viable,
people will rather stick with an established solution rather than trying the new one. Put differently, smart contracts
either need to find a business that they can vastly improve upon (like Uber / Lyft did with Taxis) or find an underserved niche (like Bitcoin did with global P2P payments).
People will probably stick with Dropbox, iCloud and similar services for data storage (and
businesses with services like Amazon AWS that are very flexible). These services work
fine for most use cases and the average user is either not aware or not particularly interested
in decentralized, trustless solutions. The fact that a service like iCloud is heavily integrated into
the Apple ecosystem makes it even harder for a decentralized competitor like Sia to gain any traction.
Of course Sia is trying to attract attention by more attractive pricing, but I´m sceptical whether
this will be enough to gain any traction.
Another use case I have been thinking about is related to the hotel industry. E.g. you could
probably automate the booking / check-in process by using a smart contract (a smart contract
checks for availability of the room for the selected dates and releases a code or passphrase
to unlock the room after verifying the successful payment).