What kind of actual real world use-cases has ethereum's programmable "contracts" enabled? It's been out there for a while yet I fail to see where it made an impact.
DeFi is where it's really taking off. The things we were promised in 2017 are finally starting to come around. I recommend looking at Synthetix https://www.synthetix.io/. They're doing some really cool stuff with synthetic assets.
That, and also many projects rebranded and also pivoted!
Most of them are interoperable with each other instead of trying to be unique and original, which has sparked something analogous to the Industrial Revolution over the last year.
For anyone else passing by, on the technical side, this is because of the "composability" concept coming to fruition in early 2020, the idea that outputs from one team's smart contracts can be used as the inputs for a different team's smart contracts.
I agree it's hard, outside of finance, to find interesting use cases. One use case that I personally enjoy was the use of smart contracts to enable the building of decentralized ISPs[0].
One of the most exciting upcoming topics on the Avalanche (sorry, not Ethereum) ecosystem is ILOs (Initial Litigation Offering). Initial Litigation Offering is a blockchain-enabled token that would give investors access to a portion of payouts from lawsuits.
There is decentralised finance (defi). One example of application is lending your money (in stablecoin or token format) in a lending protocol of your choice. You can expect a very good yield compared to traditional finance. Aave and Compound are the most famous. This is one type of the many financial applications developed on Ethereum's smart contracts.
Typically when I see that said, its impossible to tell if someone genuinely has no idea or if they have a comprehensive view but move the goal post of “use case” for arbitrary reasons
Do you want to be inspired and be part of that ecosystem, or do you want to drone on about how you could do any example use case some other irrelevant way that nobody can interact with
Third party temporary reading for medical datas.
For instance any kind of temporary access for something you need to keep private most of the time might be achieve through smart contracts.
