 Every day, it's again closer, going faster You are watching the Daily Decrypt, where currency competition is alive and well. I'm your host Amanda B. Johnson, and today's episode is brought to you by Bank to the Future. Every day, it's again... Throughout history, we see that new technologies have been adopted when one condition was met, that their benefits outweighed their costs. The benefit of, say, churning out fast documents that were all uniform made the cost of the typewriter worth it. And the benefits of going faster and not having to, say, feed and shelter and tie up your horses made the cost of an automobile worth it. So let's talk the costs and benefits of smart contracts. Smart contracts being pieces of code that live on blockchains that can execute transactions without human involvement. I experimented with them myself recently. A little backstory, about a month and a half ago I was thinking that I would like to have a system in place at the Daily Decrypt where I could issue a partial refund to a sponsor whose video had not reached, say, 2,000 views within seven days. And one day it struck me it would be the shit if I could do this using a smart contract. And so I started looking around for a solution. In fact, I made a post in the Ethereum subreddit detailing my ideas and a company picked up on it and actually wrote a smart contract intended for the Daily Decrypt's specifications. The contract would take the URL of a video, monitor the feed of its view count and then send a 25% refund to the sponsor of that video if 2,000 views was not achieved within seven days of the video being published. Brilliant, right? That is until we tried to use it. First, we had to download a special kind of browser called MIST. Now this browser can interact with Ethereum DApps or decentralized applications which we needed to do in order to be able to access the smart contract's functionality. The MIST browser comes with a complete copy of the Ethereum blockchain which either because of its size or because of its bandwidth requirements crashed my computer over and over again. So we had to uninstall it and put it on my partner's computer instead as his computer is nicer than mine. Once we did that, we had to navigate the MIST browser to navigate to the proper DApp and then the proper smart contract hosted within the DApp. The code for which I can be sure took hours upon hours if not days of coding from the employees of this company. If I had had to pay them to write this smart contract for us there's no way we would have been able to afford it. I know that they were doing it pro bono to basically test out their own capabilities. Understandable. Once we got to the smart contract we had to enter parameters for it like the URL of the video and its view count threshold and only then would it generate the payment address for the sponsor to send to. Execution of this required that we pay Ethereum transaction fees, pay a fee to the smart contract company and pay the general fee of any inflationary cryptocurrency which is consistently creating new coins to incentivize its infrastructure. Three fees. But then this morning, just this morning, I was perusing the YouTube channel of an acquaintance of mine named Dave Ridley and I realized that he has a sponsorship policy in place in which he will give something back to sponsors if a threshold of view counts is not reached within a certain number of time. He doesn't need a smart contract to do it and now I realize neither does the daily decrypt need a smart contract to offer a partial refund policy to our sponsors. And so this brings us to the crux of the video, brothers and sisters, which is to say perhaps smart contracts are a bit like doing cartwheels and backflips from point A to point B. Yes, cartwheels and backflips are fancy and they are fun to watch, but they're not the easiest way, the most efficient way, or the cheapest way to get from point A to point B. That would just be walking. And whether or not any of us readily admits to it, in the end humans always choose the solutions that are cheapest, fastest and easiest. In other words, I never realized how high cost and low benefit using a smart contract would be until I tried to use one and it is my suspicion that most people who see this video have never tried to use a smart contract for a business application either. And so as someone who's tried that, I just thought that I would decrypt that for you. Today's episode is brought to you by BankToTheFuture.com, the online investment platform that invests in the future of finance. One of their investments was in the blockchain as a service company, Factum. And below you can find a video link that explains the impact they're having by opening up storing data on the Bitcoin blockchain. You can learn more at BankToTheFuture.com. Now it is time for you, dear viewer, to tell me what you think of my little tale. Am I a witch that should be burned at the stake as a heretic? Or perhaps is there a little something to be learned from experience? Only you can decide. Leave a comment below. Have you ever wondered how much of a bite cryptocurrencies have taken out of fiat currencies? Using the metric of the US dollar, join us as we examine the total market capitalization in six month snapshots starting in 2013.