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Could the early web have been developed into what it became with a "wait for it to work risk-free" mentality? Yes, the DAO was a reliable repository for 100s o

Could the early web have been developed into what it became with a "wait for it to work risk-free" mentality? Yes, the DAO was a reliable repository for 100s of $M, until it turned out that it wasn't. This case isn't the first thing to go wrong in tech, and should not be an endless source of FUD for the platform. Pets.com and eToys and so many other web sites financially collapsed. Microsoft Windows was vulnerable. 1B Yahoo user accounts were hacked. A Tesla crashed, a SpaceX rocket blew up, and who knows, maybe some people will die in a hyperloop accident eventually. The tech world is full of huge fails, yet we deal with them, learn from them, and move forward.

davidgerard 10y ago
> The tech world is full of huge fails, yet we deal with them, learn from them, and move forward. Just look at the success story of Sand Hill Exchange! https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/bitcoin-bucket-shop-kicks-bucket https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/bitcoin-b... As Matt Levine puts it: > Or maybe it is a story about the interaction of the tech and financial industries. Tech is an industry of moving fast and breaking things. Finance is an industry of moving fast, breaking things, being mired in years of litigation, paying 10-digit fines, and ruefully promising to move slower and break fewer things in the future. My generic view of tech businesses trying to disrupt finance is that they tend to think that they are solving a technical or data or customer service problem, but the problems of finance are always and everywhere regulatory problems. The value of a bank is not that it can raise money from savers to lend to borrowers; it's that it has special regulatory status to raise that money in the form of bank deposits. The raising-money-from-savers stuff can be replaced by a web page; the regulatory stuff is more complicated. Sand Hill Exchange found that out the hard way: It made a minimal product that some people liked, attracted users, iterated on the product, made it better and seemed to be on its way to building something useful and interesting. The Sand Hill kids thought that was what they were supposed to do. Now they've learned -- no thanks to me! -- that, in finance, it's not so simple. The thing about finance is, there's been literally no scheme, no way to cut corners, that hasn't been tried and probably regulated against. And the SEC isn't there to harsh your mellow, they'd love you to do well. They're there because every regulation has an actual scam/disaster that caused it to be there. Bitcoin has frequently been noted to be an iterative exploration of why each and every financial regulation exists. There is only old ground to be broken here, and by crikey cryptos are going to break it. Again.
m12k 10y ago
Could the early web have been developed if the technological requirements had been that no user ever see a 404? Web technology could be developed as freely and ad-hoc as it was because it was good enough for it to 'mostly work' most of the time in the beginning. When we're dealing with a technology that transfers money, then it's being developed to function under an enormous pressure that will exploit any weakness immediately, and cause it to fail critically if any exists. In that regard it's more like building a rocket than building a photo sharing site.

davidgerard 10y ago

> The tech world is full of huge fails, yet we deal with them, learn from them, and move forward. Just look at the success story of Sand Hill Exchange! https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/bitcoin-bucket-shop-kicks-bucket https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/bitcoin-b... As Matt Levine puts it: > Or maybe it is a story about the interaction of the tech and financial industries. Tech is an industry of moving fast and breaking things. Finance is an industry of moving fast, breaking things, being mired in years of litigation, paying 10-digit fines, and ruefully promising to move slower and break fewer things in the future. My generic view of tech businesses trying to disrupt finance is that they tend to think that they are solving a technical or data or customer service problem, but the problems of finance are always and everywhere regulatory problems. The value of a bank is not that it can raise money from savers to lend to borrowers; it's that it has special regulatory status to raise that money in the form of bank deposits. The raising-money-from-savers stuff can be replaced by a web page; the regulatory stuff is more complicated. Sand Hill Exchange found that out the hard way: It made a minimal product that some people liked, attracted users, iterated on the product, made it better and seemed to be on its way to building something useful and interesting. The Sand Hill kids thought that was what they were supposed to do. Now they've learned -- no thanks to me! -- that, in finance, it's not so simple. The thing about finance is, there's been literally no scheme, no way to cut corners, that hasn't been tried and probably regulated against. And the SEC isn't there to harsh your mellow, they'd love you to do well. They're there because every regulation has an actual scam/disaster that caused it to be there. Bitcoin has frequently been noted to be an iterative exploration of why each and every financial regulation exists. There is only old ground to be broken here, and by crikey cryptos are going to break it. Again.

m12k 10y ago

Could the early web have been developed if the technological requirements had been that no user ever see a 404? Web technology could be developed as freely and ad-hoc as it was because it was good enough for it to 'mostly work' most of the time in the beginning. When we're dealing with a technology that transfers money, then it's being developed to function under an enormous pressure that will exploit any weakness immediately, and cause it to fail critically if any exists. In that regard it's more like building a rocket than building a photo sharing site.