POC Smart Contracts

[Carl Cook]

Hi all,

Just some general notes about the POC smart contracts. I am sure this is all well known, but I thought I'd document it here.

• One of the biggest issues is the efficiency. I know that this is just a POC, but setting a date range of availability where this ends up writing to the entire availability array, gets quite expensive (compared to forcing more of the work towards read-time, where it's free to read).
  
• Atomic units of transactions is also a minor issue. For example, right now it's not possible to update a set of room types, or even a set of special prices for a given room type. Really, it would be great to be able to set all rooms to a "good" new state, and then commit this to the chain as a single atomic unit. Admittedly there are ways around this, such as wrapping all calls to WTIndex within a proxy contract that makes all calls on my behalf.
  
• Having better access control would also be useful, e.g. a list of accounts that can manage a hotel, rather than a single account
• It also appears possible to change the price of a room after it has been booked for that given night. Sure, not if you use Lif, but if you use Fiat, then this is problematic. I am sure it is possible to do a lookup to figure out (and prove) what the price was at the time of booking, but still, this is an issue
• Getting back to efficiency again, to add a new room type, add amenities, add a description, add new rooms/units, and then set prices, takes about ten minutes of transactions (and costs an inordinate amount of ether in gas fees). Again, this could be optimized/reduced. On the mainnet, this set of transactions would cost around USD30 (to publish just a handful of rooms for a single room type)

I understand that the contracts are just a POC, but I think the above touches on some fairly fundamental challenges, and I'm sure you have many proposals to address each.

Cheers,
Carl

[Jakub Vysoky]

Hello Carl,

first of all thank you for the first message in our fresh new google group. We hope this channel will be the one for sharing news and discussing tech. Of course, anytime something more live is needed, we can arrange a call (we are thinking of some regular call updates with Q&As) or a chat (still not sure what is the best platform after our attempts with slack and rocket).

Let me get to some of your questions. Most important thing to tell you is that we are already working on second generation of the platform, where only very tiny piece of information is stored directly on the blockchain (hotel instances so far) and inventory is stored off-chain - ideally on distributed storages like Swarm. With current performance we want to give you an option to use centralised storages as well. Anything with https should work (eg S3).

I believe this will resolve some efficiency issues and especially cost and performance.

Access control: we've been talking about ACLs but would like to keep the system simple for now. What we really want to implement soon though is a multisignature wallets for the hotel owners. Because we are aware that the key management will be one of the big blockers for adoption this new technology.

Good thing is, if we keep things standardised with the rest of the blockchain ecosystem, we will be able to use the same solutions or aproaches as others. Because it is a feature for the whole industry - think family/company wallets or even personal stuff controled from multiple devices.

Oh - I think it is already pretty long response, but I believe others will add their $.05 too.

Thank you again and let's keep having those great discussions, this is the thing that will make this platform working, usable and great!

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Jakub Vysoky

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