I find the entire thing interesting and in fact the most boring bit is the instant millionaire greed fueling unfounded hype.
If I had the great idea I wouldn't be hear talking about it. I'm getting a better and better grip I feel but it could all be fallacy too!
But, someone or some group are going to be far more able to see the bigger picture I imagine and unleash something completely new, practical and useful.
Makers build things and post it to a Website and price it in some crypto currency.
People buy it by sending money to a smart contract.
A third party "oracle" is used to remit payment when the order is received. For instance the company that ships the product will signal delivery to the contract.
The company that hosted the product takes a percent of the transaction payable after the final payment goes through.
The investors in the ICO for the product get profits distributed threw the contract hosted on the same blockchain.
The host of the site gets paid from the profits based on the contract and their payment address.
Managers, marketing, developers, all staff gets paid from a piece of the profits. This is all defined in the smart contracts.
This is far away from today and simplified and with many scams in-between as well. But smart contracts on a block chain which interact and signal other contracts, etc with a block chain on a blockchain used for proof of work and payment.
A company in this form could outperform and be more efficient than one today. This is what would be useful.
Smart contracts won't take off for the simple reason that they don't offer anything that existing processes don't already handle better than even the theoretical best case that smart contract proponents have offered.
I think the thing they offer is the potential for great efficiency and thus lower cost and also a lower barrier to entry for systems that require trust.
What I'm most optimistic about is the next phase - how can we scale this and then what can we build on top to further practical use? That's a more interesting discussion than dismissing it all together.
Bitcoin introduced the blockchain and some good ideas about how it could be used. Ethereum ran with some of those ideas. There's even more ideas on how this can expanded we'll maybe see in a few years.
The customer benefit is that because the business is run more efficiently things can be priced cheaper. This gets passed down to the consumer and producer.
It's far more than escrow. It's a distributed business where many of the functions of the business are automated all enforced on the same blockchain.
Could be crazy - I'm not pitching this! I'm sure many people have better grasps of the potential and imaginations. But you clearly don't see how a company can be run more efficiently (but massive margins) with a distributed, partially anonymous structure where obligations and payments are guaranteed through the shared system.
Everything you've described (i.e., payments) can already be handled by existing automated financial systems like ADP, Peoplesoft, Intuit, etc. Order status is already handled by existing invoicing systems (i.e., Square) and delivery providers (i.e., UPS). And all of these systems can be made to integrate with each other; plenty of businesses do that every year.
Now imagine we could do this in a public way that can't be cheated easily at all? We create new efficiency, ironically, by centralizing much of this on a globally distributed blockchain with computational rules enforcing the flow of business. Suddenly we don't need these companies because their most valuable asset, trust, has been automated away.
The business that figures out how to do this will claim the market of existing companies.
Software eats the world. Why wouldn't it continue to in a way that eats the existing software centralization?
It doesn't mean it's free but it certainly looks to have the ability to outperform current business models which came to be because they outperformed previous business models.
This is not unreasonable, but you have to admit that it is a far cry from imminent revolution and a key reason why people are skeptical of this technology especially considering the bottomless pit of grandiose hype that accompanies it.
> One concept would be to raise funds that can allow you arbitrage at a scalable level. Request funds (ICO) and have the smart contract enable a certain subset of those funds for your organization to use to arbitrage other crypto's. Profits are spread across stakeholders based on their investment, represented as the tokens they generated in the ICO.
Ok, but all you've really described here is a higher level abstraction for playing the cryptomarkets rather than a useful product or service that is enabled by the technology itself. If you aren't interested in gambling your money on the cryptomarkets then this idea is useless.