<story><title>What Is Ethereum?</title><url>http://whatthefuckisethereum.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joe_the_user</author><text>Interesting;&lt;p&gt;The document mentions creating a crop-insurance application that would depend on a weather feed.&lt;p&gt;The problem is if the weather feed isn&amp;#x27;t something that&amp;#x27;s uniformly secureable the result could be bad given that the insurance application would take action automatically and no  appeal to any higher authority concerning the fraud would be possible - without a &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; as happened earlier. Hack an insecure feed, an insecure site or whatever and viola, free money.&lt;p&gt;And this seems like a problem any interface with the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; would face. The idea of automatically occurring, no-appeal financial transactions &lt;i&gt;sounds&lt;/i&gt; but I would claim it&amp;#x27;s always going to be problematic - only a fool or a crook  would put their money in this kind of system and the crook only puts in enough money to remove the money of the fool.&lt;p&gt;The ideal of say, money, is it belongs to you, where you is a broad but understandable concept. Something that belong to &amp;quot;whoever has X, Y, Z pieces of information about you&amp;quot; may sound great until someone beside you gets that information &lt;i&gt;and there is no recourse&lt;/i&gt;. Indeed, the person who had the information &amp;quot;did nothing wrong&amp;quot; if the account really, really did belong to &amp;quot;whoever has this information&amp;quot; rather than belonging to you.</text></item><item><author>cslewis</author><text>Few weeks ago I decided to spend a weekend to try to understand Ethereum. I found the whitepaper to be pretty instructive (it even helped me cement my understanding of bitcoin).
Here is an annotated version of the whitepaper by vitalik:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fermatslibrary.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;ethereum-a-next-generation-smart-contract-and-decentralized-application-platform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fermatslibrary.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;ethereum-a-next-generation-smart...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blunte</author><text>This to me is one of the fundamental problems (or challenges) of smart contracts - they remove humans and human judgment from the core, but they just push it to the edges.&lt;p&gt;You still end up trusting a human - an &amp;quot;oracle&amp;quot;.  You trust the weather feed, or you trust some exchange to give you the accurate price of some other asset.  If that oracle is mistaken (bug, intentional misinformation), the smart contract can be manipulated.</text></comment>
<story><title>What Is Ethereum?</title><url>http://whatthefuckisethereum.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joe_the_user</author><text>Interesting;&lt;p&gt;The document mentions creating a crop-insurance application that would depend on a weather feed.&lt;p&gt;The problem is if the weather feed isn&amp;#x27;t something that&amp;#x27;s uniformly secureable the result could be bad given that the insurance application would take action automatically and no  appeal to any higher authority concerning the fraud would be possible - without a &amp;quot;fork&amp;quot; as happened earlier. Hack an insecure feed, an insecure site or whatever and viola, free money.&lt;p&gt;And this seems like a problem any interface with the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; would face. The idea of automatically occurring, no-appeal financial transactions &lt;i&gt;sounds&lt;/i&gt; but I would claim it&amp;#x27;s always going to be problematic - only a fool or a crook  would put their money in this kind of system and the crook only puts in enough money to remove the money of the fool.&lt;p&gt;The ideal of say, money, is it belongs to you, where you is a broad but understandable concept. Something that belong to &amp;quot;whoever has X, Y, Z pieces of information about you&amp;quot; may sound great until someone beside you gets that information &lt;i&gt;and there is no recourse&lt;/i&gt;. Indeed, the person who had the information &amp;quot;did nothing wrong&amp;quot; if the account really, really did belong to &amp;quot;whoever has this information&amp;quot; rather than belonging to you.</text></item><item><author>cslewis</author><text>Few weeks ago I decided to spend a weekend to try to understand Ethereum. I found the whitepaper to be pretty instructive (it even helped me cement my understanding of bitcoin).
Here is an annotated version of the whitepaper by vitalik:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fermatslibrary.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;ethereum-a-next-generation-smart-contract-and-decentralized-application-platform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fermatslibrary.com&amp;#x2F;s&amp;#x2F;ethereum-a-next-generation-smart...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>RexetBlell</author><text>The weather feed can provided by several oracles, and the contract can take the median value.&lt;p&gt;You could program whatever logic you want into the insurance. For example, some kind of dispute resolution system that appeals to a higher authority.&lt;p&gt;How do insurance companies deal with this problem today? Why do you trust the insurance company not to lie and say that the weather was fine? Whatever that mechanism is, it can be programmed into a smart contract.</text></comment>