I recorded an episode of Block Stars today with my colleague, @justmoon and it was awesome. It will probably wind up being two episodes because we covered so much.
One interesting thing we talked about was why we decided not to build smart contracts into the XRP Ledger. And we did something that it never occurred to me to do before.
Ethereum, of course, made the opposite choice. They build smart contracts into their blockchain directly. We decided not to. So, with the benefit of everything we know now and with Ethereum for contrast, ...
We thought through the reasons we made our decision and looked at Ethereum to see if we were right or wrong. And the answer is very much both.
We were right that adding smart contracts makes a platform worse for payments. And we were right that it would introduce fee instability, performance issues, and have lots of attack surface.
But, obviously, Ethereum was wildly successful and for good reasons. So in that sense, we were wrong.
I also discovered a few things that I knew but didn't really knew that I knew because I never got a chance to look back and process them. One thing was the path of smart contracts leading us to Codius which led to ILP, which led to web monetization and Coil.
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