Now we have flight delay insurance bot. It's already added to the Bot Store.
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Who funds the bot? I mean the bot can be profitable or loosing money depending on the probability and randomness of flight delays. I wonder who will eat the loss or profit?
Anyone who wants to take the risk
I don't think so. I think the bot owner is going to take profit or loss.
Imagine if someone insured flights from Qatar Airways a month ago.
The bot or the bot owner could have gone broke?!
Actually, this is a very good question.
If I take out an insurance policy on a flight a month from now, does the smart contract system place my (potential) payout in some kind of escrow account at the time I take out the policy - or am I just hoping the Bots wallet has enough funds remaining in a month to cover what it owes me?
When you establish an insurance contract the bot puts the money into the contract (just like you) and it stays there until the contract expires. So insolvency is not an issue in this case. That's the big advantage of smart contracts. The insurance payment is guaranteed by mathematics and algorithm. There's no way that you won't be paid. That's not the case with traditional insurance companies. They can go broke and not pay their clients.
My question regarding who funds the bot is aimed at providing transparency. Of course the owner of this bot has the right to stay anonymous because it actually doesn't matter if it is run by tonych or ISIS. The bot will work the same in either case because it's mathematically guaranteed. Nevertheless it would be nice if we know.
The other question that arrives is who decides which bot is added to the bot store? If I copy-paste the bot that tonych just opensourced and start running a similar bot will it be added to the bot store automatically? If not, who decides which bot is added to the bot store and which is not?
I assume there needs to be someone deciding, otherwise a bad actor could spam the bot store with copy-pasted bots just to make trouble and cause problems.
All of this comes down to the centralization issue. How much power does any individual has (or can have) over the operation of the network? Decentralization is crucial for the byteball network to succeed but unfortunately on this front we don't know much.
Decentralizing the byteball network will be painful for tonych and it's understandable. Byteball is his baby, he worked very hard for over two years to develop and write the code. Giving up control over this network is like leaving your beloved baby on the mercy of other people. That's is not easy but at some point it has to start otherwise it will continue to be "one man cryptocurrency" - one man is a single point of failure easy to attack by bad (state or non state) actor and destroy the network. We should address this issue if we want to have any hope in byteball to succeed.