Vitalik Buterin: evaluation

Transcript context

…As for frictionless trading, let’s take what’s called the Oracle problem. As you well know, you can have smart contracts on Ethereum, but those are closest to frictionless when everything is within the system. But if you have an external event — a property title — and you need someone in the physical, real world to rule how an actual piece of property is assigned to someone and how that information is then translated into cyberspace, does the Oracle problem mean that the frictionless trading of, say, Ethereum, is never actually that scalable, or is there some way around it that we don’t yet see? It depends what specific thing you’re trying to do frictionlessly. For example, moving ether from one account to another is absolutely frictionless. Converting ether into fiat currency is absolutely not frictionless. It is very possible that it’s not going to significantly get more frictionless in the near- and medium-term future because of all of the banking issues, where cryptocurrency exchanges have a hard time getting and maintaining bank accounts. If you’re talking about participating in some kind of pure financial derivative system, then I think it will be frictionless. But determining how or why someone should be paid, someone has to rule that, right?…

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