How smart do you need to be to use a Smart Contract? Right now, pretty damn smart; because unless you can go into reading the code in smart contracts to understand what it is they are doing, you are exposed to potential risk! It’s one thing to say ‘do your own research’, and ‘use at your own risk’, but is it reasonable to expect all end users to be able to read code and understand it? I certainly don’t believe that this is fair, or scalable as it creates a risk vector which we have seen time and again exploited in the blockchain world.
I believe Dapps need to have a universal framework that interacts with blockchain operations to more easily reflect what is happening in a way that people can understand. In other words, get the code speaking our language instead of us needing to speak code.
In my last article, Not a People Problem, a Systemic One - The Way Forward for Worker Proposal Integrity in Blockchain, I identified the systemic issues and challenges we face when it comes to managing integrity with people and how they can interact in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO). Let us consider now the way we humans should be interacting with Dapps.
Look at any blockchain project and you will find a fragmented and dangerous variation in how end users interact with smart contracts via various user interfaces.
The Interface Medium for Advanced Blockchain Smart Contracts
Require a graphical user interface (GUI) which can provide not only a higher value user experience, but also empower people to more easily understand the smart contracts they are interacting with.
Peerplays will enable Dapp developers to utilize a common blockchain focused Dapp browser which will utilize some of the best components in the popularized Scatter multi-chain wallet. In order to facilitate a completely trustworthy ecosystem with a higher degree of security, this browser will communicate only within the Peerplays blockchain P2P encrypted layer.
Utilizing the browser all begins with first creating a Peerplays user which has all necessary objects associated with it, such as IPFS as part of the application bundle. A decentralized namebase would allow Dapps to be associated with usernames as the means of addressing. Upon visit, it's a request call for the IPFS bundle which provides the Dapp interface for the end user. Depending on the user’s settings, they may then be able to share their bundle as part of the network as well.
Each browser bundle operates as a node within the Peerplays network which all Dapp developers are able to leverage in their deployment. The browser will include service discovery and auto connect to available APIs associated with the Dapp blockchain accounts. Depending on the user settings, they may opt-in to provide these service discovery, API, IPFS storage, and other node operating functions necessary in a decentralized application environment.
Using This Common Framework
All Peerplays services will be able to have interfaces like Explorer, wallet, BookiePro, Bookie Sportsbook, Sweeps, easy5050, RNG, and DEX features made accessible to everyone. Other Dapps and games will have a delivery and viewing mechanism which will surpass the performance and security of the current world-wide-web. This provides the added benefits of decentralized trustworthy infrastructure including such things as gamified operations and identity.
In the end, this will make publishing a ‘Hello World’ Dapp as easy as creating a Peerplays account and publishing the app through the browser in your accounts IPFS address. By lowering the technical barrier to entry and taking the browser based approach that makes the end user part of the network instead of the classic client-server method employed today even in blockchain design, we are able to expand and build a wide array of new services to create an ecosystem that can place the power of this execution environment in the hands of the very same people using it.
This effectively would be the beginnings of Peerplays becoming a new blockchain network within the Internet where gamified smart contracts live and thrive.
Through this we gain a higher level of assuredness in the interactions people make in Dapps thanks to a clear and easy to understand framework which communicates with the end user in a way they can easily visualize. I believe this will help to reduce errors in Dapps, and keep the integrity of the networks using such a framework to the highest standard.
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This is the 12th in a series of articles I will be making over the next month. Be sure to subscribe to get notified of future posts to find out where this goes.
Have thoughts on what I shared? Feel free to leave a comment and share!