Quote from: mehransaam on January 26, 2014, 07:21:26 AM

Quote from: dtothemt on January 26, 2014, 06:56:17 AM

I'm a very procedural programmer, so I am having trouble wrapping my head around your contracts system because it seems to be very abstract.

Can you please explain in more detail (preferably with an example) of how to make a useful contract in more of a real world scenario? Since it obviously can't do anything useful inside the ethereum network without also communicating outside of the network?

If it snows more than 2 inches on thursday or Friday, buy two lift tickets for Saturday at the ski resort.

If my favorite sports team wins the wednesday game, buy 2 tickets in Section C rows 10-16 for the friday game.

If a samsung galaxy tab 2 is offered at ebay for < $x, buy it.

It would definitely help if the Ethereum folks could present a real-life example of how this will work. They are speaking too much in hypothetical and theoretical concepts. As if trying to be-all and end-all in developing the platform/infrastructure/scripting/etc. for crypto-currency 2.0 when there hasn't been any proof-of-concept that can be shown off. To me, all their pitches are in the ethereal world.

In the above examples, I think these are conditional orders and not contracts. A contract is between two entities or people -- i.e. an agreement. For example, a futures contract for soybeans/oil/gold/etc. traded on exchanges such as CME/CBOE is a standard contract that can be traded. It's terms are known beforehand because they are standardized -- fixed amount per contract, fixed delivery amount, fixed periodic delivery date, etc.

I believe this is what they mean by contract. And what they are trying to do is to remove the middle-men (e.g. CME, CBOE) with a decentralized approach. But I'm not 100% sure because of they give no concrete examples -- i.e. in the intro video.

I suggest they crank out a proof-of-concept example/prototype or at least state the first application they want to implement once a good chunk of Ethereum is completed. Much easier for folks to wrap their minds around a real example rather than via concepts that seem extremely difficult (in my mind) to integrate.