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.
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Ha!
Still, I stand by both my statements, as I believe that decentralized storage is easier to solve than some of the other hypothetical scenarios already mentioned in this thread for one simple reason:
[...] So the smart contract can directly interact with the service, not with a "representation" of it. No oracle is needed. [...]
(granted, many use cases that often get hyped in the context of smart contracts are imho close to impossible, so "easier to solve" is a rather relative expression)