Unfortunately... People like centralized systems,-- they have lots of nice usability properties, people are willing to ignore their flaws/risks, they are easy to develop, and *critically* they are easy to monetize.

By contrast, smart contracts are essentially cryptographic protocols themselves-- inheriting the extreme difficulty and risk that normally comes with making a novel cryptographic protocol. They also inherit the development and usability challenges of distributed systems, and they're difficult or impossible to monetize-- which reduces the incentive to engage in the extraordinary amount of work needed to create them.

As a result even most things that hype "smart contracts" are pure pretext and misdirection. Mostly just borderline or outright scam tokens traded on promises which will never be met (if they're even possible to meet).  Or you get insanity like Ethereum's operators going and editing the blockchain state to take funds they personally lost due to a bug in some goofy contract they were participants in and then everyone involved trying to pretend that this wasn't an example of centralization that totally mooted any purpose for a smart contract in the first place ...

But there are many things possible, much more than even the simple example imagined by Satoshi, and the prospects seem tantalizing... but because of the lack of incentive and the risk of loss (other than for the operators of centralized systems where the funds can just be clawed back) it's a bit slow going.

Thought Bitcoin's history there have been a number of other just-for-fun smart contracting examples, e.g. https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/293382.0 but a much smaller number of actual production uses.

There are some interesting smart contract things going on-- for example lightning protocol in Bitcoin is an example of using smart contracts for an actually useful purpose which isn't really just a cover for centralization or a ponzi scheme.

And most people don't even realize that it's Bitcoin smart contracts that power lightning-- maybe we should expect that when a smart contract system works people won't realize it's a smart contract at all.

Another important advance for smart contracts is, in my opinion, the taproot proposal in Bitcoin:   With taproot the common case of cooperating participants in a smart contract becomes indistinguishable from an ordinary boring payment. The full cost of public contract execution is then only needed if the contract participants try to cheat.  This makes smart contract usage much more cost efficient, censorship resistant, and private.  They doesn't make them less difficult to develop but it means they don't need to necessarily have a high operating cost.

There is ongoing research going into new tools for building smart contract languages which provide for a firm theoretical grounding to them, which should make it possible for stronger analysis of smart contracts which will ultimately make it easier to author them and be confident that they'll behave like you expect.

Taproot, and Schnorr, and SIGHASH_NOINPUT, oh my!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSUVRj8iznU

That's really cool,
Thanks.

I will respond to one thing satoshi said in the post you cited:

With SW, it would be possible to craft a signed 'child' transaction the is dependent on the transaction releasing the coin to the fraudster.

What satoshi described also does not allow for the two parties to mutually agree to split up the coin, for example if a seller is unable to deliver all of a set of goods due to unexpected circumstances, but SW should allow for this to be addressed as well.

---

My understanding of SW and LN is it is theoretically possible to have a trust-less cross-chain transaction if both blockchains have adopted SW, or something substantially similar (transactions that can be time locked from the time of confirmation, and the ability to sign dependent transactions without the signed 'parent' signed transaction). This would be most advantageous for people wanting to trade coin for a stable coin (bitcoin for USDT).

I disagree. Many people who've discovered Decentralized technology (Bitcoin, BitTorrent, IPFS, etc.) still prefer centralized technology.
It's been proven by :
1. how many people store their Bitcoin on custodial wallet or exchange (which isn't intended to store Bitcoin)
2. low volume of DEX

in brief, "discrete log contracts" is the new shiny. well, it's actually old-ish as Bitcoin concepts go (Tadge Dryja described the initial idea more than 200,000 blocks ago! ), but I don't think anyone was working on an implementation until... 2019? I'm guessing. There's still work to do before it's usable, but there seems to be quite a bit of activity on the project.

Thank you guys! Very informative. I am also very interested to see what Gmax thinks, as both a Mr Robot and a very finance savvy dude..we are lucky to have him here.

Found this gem from fake Satoshi in my pics I thought I’d share for a laugh. (My statement doesn’t make a ton of sense not being able to see what I was replying to just FYI ).. is this even true?

So Satoshi “prepared” but did not “implement” (as also stated in his Escrow thread), which means my Twitter exchange with Craig 100% proves he’s not Satoshi right?  Lol, what a fool.

“I don't believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea.  So much of the design depends on all nodes getting exactly identical results in lockstep that a second implementation would be a menace to the network”... is he saying that a second layer is not a good idea ?  Of course things change. I know Szabo supports it, he even yelled at me for not mentioning it as a needed upgrade in a Twitter discussion   

Just curious if any breakthroughs have come in the SC space, or are we still where we were at when I last posted on here?

Are Bchain oracles legitimately helping advance SC concepts/proposals..or are Oracles just nonsensical hype ruining certain important features kind of like how POS blockchains do vs POW?

What prompted me to ask for an update was all the talk around SCs being game changers in spaces such as finance and NFTs (gaming/music/gambling etc)..but it seems they’ve not really provided anything game changing in these spaces yet and it’s all pure hype.  

Is there any sort of blog or mailing list where updates in the SC space are talked about by those who know what they’re doing..Kind of like the cpunk mailing list, but for non-experts like myself? ( I feel my questions here may be venturing off topic a bit, but I don’t know of any other place period where I can discuss these things and know I’m getting legit information).

Aside from Taproot which now avaialble on mainnet, some people discuss RGB[1] and Taro[2] protocol.


Some technical from article Bitcoin Magazine[3] might be good source. They usually don't use meaningless buzzword or technical jargon when it's not needed.

[1] https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/5382633.0
[2] https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/5393585.0
[3] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical][url]https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical[/url]

We are at a Point where Tokens on the Major Blockchains, now need to gear towards the Smart Media Token (SMT) Sidechain, Mining Wallet Development so that Tokens can be integrated into all aspects of online activity. The HIVE and STEEM Front Ends offered by PAL Network along with their DEX, is what every Blockchain needs right now.

Plus, eBay or Etsy type applications, that also merge into DTube type dApps, creating a full Social Economy.

As an example, why is there no MEE6 Bot that Mints you a Token, gives everyone a Wallet, and Runs a Group and Token to then be traded on a DEX meant for these. On all Chat Platforms.