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Another idea: Etsy. Makers build things and post it to a Website and price it in some crypto currency. People buy it by sending money to a smart contract. A

Another idea: Etsy. Makers build things and post it to a Website and price it in some crypto currency. People buy it by sending money to a smart contract. A third party "oracle" is used to remit payment when the order is received. For instance the company that ships the product will signal delivery to the contract. The company that hosted the product takes a percent of the transaction payable after the final payment goes through. The investors in the ICO for the product get profits distributed threw the contract hosted on the same blockchain. The host of the site gets paid from the profits based on the contract and their payment address. Managers, marketing, developers, all staff gets paid from a piece of the profits. This is all defined in the smart contracts. This is far away from today and simplified and with many scams in-between as well. But smart contracts on a block chain which interact and signal other contracts, etc with a block chain on a blockchain used for proof of work and payment. A company in this form could outperform and be more efficient than one today. This is what would be useful.

nradov 9y ago
So basically just clone Etsy plus an escrow service. We already have those, so what. Where is the compelling customer benefit?
- nemo44x 9y ago
  Not at all. The customer benefit is that because the business is run more efficiently things can be priced cheaper. This gets passed down to the consumer and producer. It's far more than escrow. It's a distributed business where many of the functions of the business are automated all enforced on the same blockchain. Could be crazy - I'm not pitching this! I'm sure many people have better grasps of the potential and imaginations. But you clearly don't see how a company can be run more efficiently (but massive margins) with a distributed, partially anonymous structure where obligations and payments are guaranteed through the shared system.
  - gamblor956 9y ago
    You must not have any experience on the operational side of a real business? Everything you've described (i.e., payments) can already be handled by existing automated financial systems like ADP, Peoplesoft, Intuit, etc. Order status is already handled by existing invoicing systems (i.e., Square) and delivery providers (i.e., UPS). And all of these systems can be made to integrate with each other; plenty of businesses do that every year.
    - nemo44x 9y ago
      And plenty of cuts are taken and taken and taken. There is an inherit inefficiency that exists right now because it is indeed necessary. The people, private systems and other parts that makeup the "trust" of it all that makes it work. Now imagine we could do this in a public way that can't be cheated easily at all? We create new efficiency, ironically, by centralizing much of this on a globally distributed blockchain with computational rules enforcing the flow of business. Suddenly we don't need these companies because their most valuable asset, trust, has been automated away. The business that figures out how to do this will claim the market of existing companies. Software eats the world. Why wouldn't it continue to in a way that eats the existing software centralization? It doesn't mean it's free but it certainly looks to have the ability to outperform current business models which came to be because they outperformed previous business models.
just_one_time_ 9y ago
Root is not worth arguing about this. He is an old time SV Rich Lister who now sees the new thing coming and all he can do is try and shit on it so he can keep his amazing job as long as possible before anyone resizes he is no longer relevant.
gamblor956 9y ago
You literally just described Ebay/Paypal but with smart contracts. Worse, with the additional requirement that everyone has to use smart contracts for it to work at any level. Additionally, your example glosses over all of the real world problems, like seller/buyer fraud, that smart contracts and blockchains do nothing to address. Smart contracts won't take off for the simple reason that they don't offer anything that existing processes don't already handle better than even the theoretical best case that smart contract proponents have offered.
- nemo44x 9y ago
  I'm not saying mine is a great example, especially with the current state of the technology. If I had a fool proof example I'd be building it! I think the thing they offer is the potential for great efficiency and thus lower cost and also a lower barrier to entry for systems that require trust. What I'm most optimistic about is the next phase - how can we scale this and then what can we build on top to further practical use? That's a more interesting discussion than dismissing it all together. Bitcoin introduced the blockchain and some good ideas about how it could be used. Ethereum ran with some of those ideas. There's even more ideas on how this can expanded we'll maybe see in a few years.

nradov 9y ago

So basically just clone Etsy plus an escrow service. We already have those, so what. Where is the compelling customer benefit?

nemo44x 9y ago
Not at all. The customer benefit is that because the business is run more efficiently things can be priced cheaper. This gets passed down to the consumer and producer. It's far more than escrow. It's a distributed business where many of the functions of the business are automated all enforced on the same blockchain. Could be crazy - I'm not pitching this! I'm sure many people have better grasps of the potential and imaginations. But you clearly don't see how a company can be run more efficiently (but massive margins) with a distributed, partially anonymous structure where obligations and payments are guaranteed through the shared system.
- gamblor956 9y ago
  You must not have any experience on the operational side of a real business? Everything you've described (i.e., payments) can already be handled by existing automated financial systems like ADP, Peoplesoft, Intuit, etc. Order status is already handled by existing invoicing systems (i.e., Square) and delivery providers (i.e., UPS). And all of these systems can be made to integrate with each other; plenty of businesses do that every year.
  - nemo44x 9y ago
    And plenty of cuts are taken and taken and taken. There is an inherit inefficiency that exists right now because it is indeed necessary. The people, private systems and other parts that makeup the "trust" of it all that makes it work. Now imagine we could do this in a public way that can't be cheated easily at all? We create new efficiency, ironically, by centralizing much of this on a globally distributed blockchain with computational rules enforcing the flow of business. Suddenly we don't need these companies because their most valuable asset, trust, has been automated away. The business that figures out how to do this will claim the market of existing companies. Software eats the world. Why wouldn't it continue to in a way that eats the existing software centralization? It doesn't mean it's free but it certainly looks to have the ability to outperform current business models which came to be because they outperformed previous business models.

just_one_time_ 9y ago

Root is not worth arguing about this. He is an old time SV Rich Lister who now sees the new thing coming and all he can do is try and shit on it so he can keep his amazing job as long as possible before anyone resizes he is no longer relevant.

gamblor956 9y ago

You literally just described Ebay/Paypal but with smart contracts. Worse, with the additional requirement that everyone has to use smart contracts for it to work at any level. Additionally, your example glosses over all of the real world problems, like seller/buyer fraud, that smart contracts and blockchains do nothing to address. Smart contracts won't take off for the simple reason that they don't offer anything that existing processes don't already handle better than even the theoretical best case that smart contract proponents have offered.

nemo44x 9y ago
I'm not saying mine is a great example, especially with the current state of the technology. If I had a fool proof example I'd be building it! I think the thing they offer is the potential for great efficiency and thus lower cost and also a lower barrier to entry for systems that require trust. What I'm most optimistic about is the next phase - how can we scale this and then what can we build on top to further practical use? That's a more interesting discussion than dismissing it all together. Bitcoin introduced the blockchain and some good ideas about how it could be used. Ethereum ran with some of those ideas. There's even more ideas on how this can expanded we'll maybe see in a few years.