Let’s say I want to enter into a bet with my friend — if it rains 10 days from now, I will pay him $100; if it doesn’t, he will pay me $100.
- Would it be possible to take advantage of smart contract on Ethereum to do automatic payout to the winner of the bet?
One idea is to have each of us deposit $100 worth of ether into the contract and at the end of 10 days have the contract automatically send the contract balance to the winner upon consulting an external oracle for weather information.
- At the end of 10 days, if ether depreciated, how can the winner of the bet get $200 from the contract, thereby netting $100 himself from winning the bet?
I want to see if it's possible to model a bet using smart contracts but it seems if the underlying crypto-currency depreciates, the bet agreement could not be honored.
Best Answer
You can issue a new Ethereum token called "USD" and mint some coins for you and your friend. Then you can bet with this coin and later sell whenever you want this "USD" coins to the friend who lost for the amount of real USD you both had bet.
It's not the smartest solution, but if you both trust each other is the way of not losing money if eth depreciates.
If you wanted to scale it you should issue a intermediate "betting coin" which has always the same USD value, and can be deposited or withdrawn whenever your users need it.