I might have missed it but danosphere, how are you guys enabling smart contracts on your blockchain? Cause the whole certificate thing looks more like asset on next and not really a smart contract. Another query I had was, how do you stop people from issuing worthless certificate to bloat the blockchain?
Good question! "Smart Contracts" as interpreted in the vein of Nick Szabo would probably require leveraging multiple Syscoin services such as a certificate and an offer (offer's have the cost, quantity, and payment flow attached). In the demo video, we only show the certificates side of that (and an
extremely rudimentary example at that). Based on my understanding (
reading here) an offer would need to be combined with a cert to produce a "smart contract" like flow. I need to do more reading on this definition of smart contracts and then I can give a more thorough reply on how that relates to Syscoin, or if its something different entirely. Based on my initial reading it seems to be a combination of offers and certificates, but I do need to read more. The important part here is there is no central authority (a bank, a broker, a ticket reseller) enforcing or maintaing the certificate/contract and its provable ownership, the network facilitates that.
It is not the same thing as the NXT asset exchange. Our "offers" feature is "sort of" like the NXT assets (NXT assets are rather confusing imo -
this doesn't look like something I can just buy), our offer implementation is more understandable from a normal user/marketplace perspective. Its like listing an item for sale. From what i understand of NXT asset exchange it has to do with shares of NXT (or something), the marketplace looks like a blog so its hard for me to determine what exactly is going on there. And I read their whitepaper and it wasn't the most informative so providing concrete comparisons to NXT I won't do- but i will read up more on the generally understood concept of crypto-smart-contracts and provide a better explanation of how Syscoin plays into that role.
Also as I mentioned earlier Syscoin is not a ground up rewrite like NXT. It takes well-reviewed codebases (Litecoin, Bitcoin, Namecoin) and combines their features and build on them.
I guess I have to wait for someone to actually look at the syscoin implementation and decide if it is a true smart contract implementation. An asset on NXT also has a certificate (example the bithaus broken shares) with offers. But it is not a smart contract. If syscoin is doing the same, then its not a smart contract too. Only thing which might be missing is the enforcement part. The assets (or certificates) maybe withdrawn by the issuer at any time (at least thats what I think happens on NXT or MSC or XCP), so there is no absolute enforcement.
Actually you can buy those shares (if you are interested in bithaus
):
https://nxtblocks.info/#section/assets_exchange -> search for bithaus and you will find bids/offers.
The url you have posted is just a repository of the available assets in the market. Hence the blog like structure. Actual bids/offers are available via the nxt asset exchange or you can see them on the above site.
The nxt exchange is not really about nxt shares rather anyone can issue an asset (or certificate) with offers and let people set a market if they are interested in trading further.
That said, looking forward to a more in-depth reply, once you gone through the crypto smart contract concepts.