Smart contracts becoming something tangible for general public is good news for crypto .
For the Nu community I find particularly interesting the chapter about Using Bitcoin over etheroum and viceversa, especially the bit about issuing a currency
Ethereum would never be possible without bitcoin—both the technology and the currency—and we see ourselves not as a competiting currency but as complementary within the digital ecosystem. Ether is to be treated as “crypto-fuel”, a token whose purpose is to pay for computation, and is not intended to be used as or considered a currency, asset, share or anything else.
There are many ways in which you can use Bitcoins within the Ethereum ecosystem:
Trade BTC for ETH: multiple third party companies are working to make the exchanging of ether and bitcoins as easy and seamless as possible. If so desired one could trade a bitcoins for ether with the purpose of executing contracts and trade it back immediately in order to keep their value pegged and secured by the bitcoin network.
Use a pegged derivative: Ethereum is a great tool for creating complex trading between multiple parties. If you have a source for the price of Bitcoin that all parties trust, then it’s possible to create an ethereum based currency whose value is pegged to the market value of Bitcoin. This means that you could trade a btc to a token that is guaranteed to always trade back to the same amount of bitcoins while still being fully compatible with other ethereum contracts. There are multiple ways of doing that and as some of these projects go live and are tested by the community, we will list them here.
Use a Bitcoin relay to convert a 2 way peg: the bitcoin relay is a piece of code that allows you to sidechain a bitcoin into ethereum. This means that you can use bitcoin native limited scripting capability to lock a bitcoin into a contract that is directly connected to an ethereum contract, which can then issue an ethereum based token that is guaranteed to be backed by bitcoin. The relay is under development and as implementations are tested and proved to be secure, we will list them here
The dai is a unique blockchain asset with price stability that allows borrowers and lenders to come together in a decentralized and permissionless, yet low risk, credit system. Borrowers (called dai issuers) can issue dai by locking bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrency collateral on the Ethereum blockchain, and sell these dai for hard currency to lenders (called dai holders) who hold them as an investment to earn yield, a continuous income stream from the interest dai issuers pay on their issuance debt. Maker is an autonomous application that provides full default insurance to the users of the system in exchange for 10% of all interest.
@mhps I think so too, but I’m not an expert. It seems to lack functionalities such as motions and voting. Besides, ethereum may not be the best choice for this kind of app.
It will suffer from the same scalability problems as BitUSD. It’s a product that is very similar to the BitShares collateral system that doesn’t make much sense. I need to read into it more, but it also seems that it will be very expensive to use on the Ethereum platform.
I don’t know much about Ethereum, but I remember NewMoneyEra on Peercointalk chat saying that other cryptos like Peercoin or Bitcoin will be able to be used on their platform. For people more familiar, is this true and is there any development we need to work on in order to enable NuBits/NuShares to be used on the Ethereum platform?
Definitely not the Ethereum expert here, but as so-called proxy coins they can live on the Ethereum blockchain as far as I understand. The advantage of that is that you would be able to use the smart contracts with the Turing complete language with those proxy coins. It is no different than creating Ether on the Nu blockchain and have them pegged and saying there is now a voting system for Ether.