The critical role of CX in the commodification of smart contracts

in #skycoin6 years ago

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It would require some remarkable skills to successfully argue against the statement that ease of use drives adoption. Whether it is a flaw in human nature, some form of deep intelligence evolving to a state of Nirvana, or something altogether more nefarious is immaterial but the fact is that humans don't like to expend unnecessary energy and developers are no exception to this rule. Well, most of them anyway..... One can't rule out the possibility that somewhere in a basement someone is coding directly in binary just for kicks.

Taking into account then the exception which proves the rule, let us then ponder smart contracts, their impact on society as we know it and the reasons why we don't yet feel that impact.

The concept of smart contracts were unleashed unto the world a few years ago when the Vitalik ascended from the basement, braved natural sunlight and bestowed Ethereum upon us. The cryptoverse rejoiced for Ethereum was to hail in a new era of trustless transacting. The next step on the path towards a fully decentralised world in which governments, lawyers and other parasitic middlemen would be obsolete as we traded among each other governed only by code secured by Blockchain, shining in transparency and immutability. Alas, the joy was short lived as the flagship DAP, the mother of all decentralised organisations, The DAO was hacked shortly after going live and immutability sank to a watery grave in the wake of the socially engineered strongarm move euphemistically known as the hardfork which followed.

What goes up must come down and the downers just keep on coming. It is now clear that Ethereum suffers from a fundamental design flaw which can no longer be corrected without starting from scratch. Kinda like the MS Windows file system where no one thought to build in ownership and access rights which oversight led to decades of privilege escalation exploits, Ethereum's designers didn't consider the overhead of having every DAP and every transaction on a single Blockchain. "Etherum spams it's own Bockchain to death" - Synth.
Finally, and to bring me back to my opening statement, developing an application or smart contracts on Ethereum requires a steep learning curve whereby a developer needs to wrap his head around a new language. Those that did take the trouble to do so, charge a premium because you know.... supply and demand...

While this is great for the select few collecting hundreds of Dollars per hour to code smart contracts, it is actually hampering the large scale adoption of this revolutionary technology as affordability remains almost exclusively within reach of the wealthy centralised hierarchies which Blockchain was supposed to collapse.

When a neophyte starts researching Skycoin, one of the first insights gained is that the early Skycoin developers set out to fix the problems with Bitcoin and Ethereum. CX is part of this solution.

CX is a Turing complete scripting language designed specifically for the Skycoin ecosystem. It is a deterministic language designed to be easy to learn and fun to implement which was written from the ground up to be used for writing Blockchain applications. Python and Golang are widely used scripting languages and any developer wth Python or Golang skills can learn CX in a few hours. What this translates to is the potential for rapid mass adoption of smart contracts and DAPs as CX is virtually immediately accessible to hundreds of thousands of developers, enough to tip the supply and demand scales in favor of the masses.

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Despite it’s seeming simplicity derived from the elegant manner in which it solves a complex problem, CX is much more than just a scripting language. It is in fact both a language as well as a specification which does not impose syntax but describes structures and processes which has to be complied to in order for a dialect to be considered a CX. This abstraction-to-principle principle brings about agility and speed which makes CX suitable for the development of complex applications such as databases, multi platform games, blockchains, cryptocurrencies and much more.

A very active user and developer community is fast coagulating around CX and if you are curious to see some early examples, head over to the CX playground and take a look at some examples of CX in action or join the CX game devs telegram group and chew the fat with some actual CX developers.

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CX is the way! The news w/Binance should be sending a clear message.

Great article on CX, I would love to try using it.

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