At this point I wouldn't bother with smart contracts and just use it as a medium of exchange or investment.

However, if Ethereum sticks around there will be standardized, off the shelf contracts for people to use that have wide-spread testing/adoption. Once we reach that level of maturity then it could make sense to use it for things like escrow on a contract/purchase.

How do you use ETH on a contract to purchase goods? How does the contract know when it has been completed?

I can imagine using ETH for escrow; but there has to be a human in the loop for escrow, to direct escrow funds to be released. I guess one could contrive a situation where a "contract" could autonomously determine when it had been completed. But that's not the general case.

You put $10k in escrow to buy a house. Either both parties agree (human intervention) that the requirements have been met and the escrow is released to the seller, or the funds are returned to the buyer after some deadline.

Always good to have a consultant around to explain the tough words ;)

> How does the contract know when it has been completed?

Escrow, or an oracle (checking, say, FedEx delivery.)

There already is: https://openzeppelin.com/

Most people use them for their projects, but you don't hear about them because they don't make it to hacker news as only crypto pessimism is upvoted here.

What do you dislike about the EVM?

This is admittedly secondhand knowledge, but my understanding is that the EVM was written with 128 bit words, and consequently cannot be implemented using any common general purpose computer hardware. All of its operations have to be implemented in software, making it significantly slower than it could be as a result.

Isn't the whole point making the decentralized network itself the computer...?

Market makers need the ability to process transactions quickly. There is indeed a network of computers involved, but each computer is, well, a computer, and needs to make computations in order for transactions to process.

Does a zkEVM by Loopring+Vitalik consulting on it scratch your itch?