Altcoin News: Are Autonomous Agents Real Competitors for Ethereum’s dApps?

July 30, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Smart Contracts were created to ensure that conditions are met in a contract before the parties involved in the contract have rights to a prize or payments, for instance, there could be a smart contract setup for a bet such that the one who places the bet only gets paid when the team he chooses wins, so the whole process is automated, and thus avoids the problems of human error in the form of erroneous judgments or one defaulting on the contract.

Smart contract’s functions are basically dependent on the action of all of the nodes that are on the blockchain network, as it is their role to ensure that a transaction only gets added to the distributed ledger when all the conditions are met.

It may interest you to know that smart contracts are a decentralized mode of transacting that does not have any ties with the legal system of any government. However, the smart contracts have only been applied to use in Person-to-Person applications such as Person-to-Person insurance, Person-to-Person prediction markets, and Person-to-Person conditional markets, and that invariably means functioning as the mediator between two equals that are free.

Away from P2P protocols where smart contracts have been applied, there is the need for a system that checks the activities and functions of the central authority in situations where centralized systems have interactions with multiple users. When that is done, the central authority will have to perform its functions based on the immutable public rules, and that is just what Autonomous Agents are designed to do.

Autonomous Agents (AA)

Whenever Autonomous Agents are employed, they act strictly based on a program that is connected to it, just the way an ATM receives your card and data in order for you to get some money from it, hence, the operations are based on certain rules that the ATM cannot ignore, while you as the owner of the card can cancel operations among other actions.

With the AA, it becomes easy to perform different tasks including the transfer of data to the distributed ledger, transfer of tokens/coins to another user or back to a user.

There are several applications of AA that Ethereum’s dApps would have to contend with (Ethereum’s dApps have limited applications, because they are limited to P2P protocols), and that is due to the fact that Autonomous Agents have the ability to have interactions with multiple users, and are always on hand to receive and execute requests, some of the applications include:

· Margin trading · Payment channels · Stable coins (algorithmic) · Tradable shares · Decentralized exchange · Game economies · Automated investment portfolio management · Collateralized lending · Derivatives · Etc.

Autonomous Agents are able to perform their functions based on a computer program called Oscript, and that is the language used to write the Autonomous Agents program. Interestingly, the language is simple, especially for developers who know C, C++, PHP, Java, JavaScript, etc. Oscript has a lot of variables attached to the actions of describing the condition of the ledger, as well as the activation and request attached to transactions received. Some of the variables include:

· Asset information · Attestations · Data feeds · Data received · Amounts received · Sender/Receiver information · Balances · Logical operations · Arithmetic operations · If/else operations · Etc.

One of the amazing things about Autonomous Agents is the enhanced transparency that it brings to its operations, such that the user sees everything in a readable format.

Author: Marko Vidrih