The pure (if you like) smart contacts do transactions. You give me 100 apple tokens and I give you 50 pear tokens. The contract ensures nothing else can happen.
They get more sophisticated e.g. automatic market makers. But same idea just swapping.
Voting is also possible e.g. release funds if there is a quorom. Who to release them to could be hard coded or part of the vote.
For external info from the real world e.g. "who got elected" you need an oracle. I.e. you trust someone not to lie and not to get hacked. You can fix the "someone" to a specific address but you still need to trust them.
Just wanted to add that the oracle can have also majority mechanisms, can stop being used if it drifts too much or is unavailable for too long. People running the oracle can be incentivized by staking some amount of money that they lose if they do not meet SLA-like conditions, etc. It requires trust but it is not just all trust or nothing.
That's a great explanation. I'm sure it's a lot deeper than that but I've never really understood the purpose. I'm not a crypto guy at all so it's nice hearing real world applications rather than just "stock market babble".
Smart contracts are actually pretty cool, but the entire ecosystem is made dramatically worse by the tokens having speculative value. It’s necessary for the economics to work out, but it dampens the coolness of the technical aspects because it attracts sleazeballs and enables fraud/crime.
The "worse" part about it is due to our society and what motivates people to do work. It has little to do with the technology and just a reflection of reality.
I think you get that, but I don't see another way to create a high performance trustless network.
Yeah, I see it as a necessary evil. It costs real money to operate the infrastructure that it runs on. I'm hoping now that the hype has died down a lot the swindlers will move on and real use cases will start showing up.
They get more sophisticated e.g. automatic market makers. But same idea just swapping.
Voting is also possible e.g. release funds if there is a quorom. Who to release them to could be hard coded or part of the vote.
For external info from the real world e.g. "who got elected" you need an oracle. I.e. you trust someone not to lie and not to get hacked. You can fix the "someone" to a specific address but you still need to trust them.