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> They do not move the physical gold If you're not moving the gold, who needs escrow? You're just describing a cash settled spot market. > the cost of trustin

> They do not move the physical gold If you're not moving the gold, who needs escrow? You're just describing a cash settled spot market. > the cost of trusting a delivery person remains fairly constant Indeed, as you're having no effect on either escrow or post-settlement delivery. But that's my point, smart contracts don't make a blind bit of difference. > Amazon and eBay are also facilitators of value transactions The value is in the goods turning up. Smart contracts don't help at all outside digital assets. Or more specifically, the payment process is trivial compared to the logistics process. The value is almost all in the latter. That's not generally true for digital assets. But today, the main challenges with those are to do with rights and marketing/discovery. Again, that's the value, today, of Amazon in that space. Disrupting transactions is irrelevant. Now, I'm not saying the tricky bits can't be disintermediated. That's already started. But TBH if and when that does occur, why go to all that trouble and leave the transaction system as a fee taker? Disintermediate that too.

arbol 9y ago
Supply chain mistakes are costly and can result in unsaleable stock. There are existing standards (see GS1) but they are full of errors due to disparate systems and varying interpretations of XML messages. Smart contracts have the potential to reduce the cost of goods delivery through shared supply chain management systems, placing less risk on a potential 'new to market' market place or 'direct to consumer' seller. These are both direct challenges to Amazon and eBay. Expensive digital assets will always require a mediation fee. You could write your own contract to transfer the assets for free but you would probably want to pay to guarantee that it worked. Of course, if the digital transaction is of a suitably small value, a direct transfer of assets may be preferred via a self-authored contract. The loser in this case is VISA or whichever payment provider scalps off the top of music/movie/book/... sales currently. I wasn't trying to specifically cite transactions as being the main target of smart contracts (although they are the most obvious). The example was to show how existing processes of a transactional nature can be recreated with less complexity and therefore utilise less resources. There is an endless list of examples where this holds to some extent.
- lucozade 9y ago
  If you have a big supply chain, like Amazon does, then managing the complexity of that chain is a tough problem. I happen to agree with IBM that a distributed ledger like technology can help with that. Not a public one, obviously as that would just be silly, but it would make sense for Amazon to run one. We're doing a variant of this in my field. But it doesn't make any sense to use smart contracts to manage the supply chain complexity of a business that, by definition, doesn't have a complex supply chain i.e. a direct to customer seller. Especially a seller of digital assets. > Expensive digital assets will always require a mediation fee Why? Most mediating supplies an overt service for those fees as well as the mediation. For example, producers at studios, editors at publishers, rights management and marketing/discovery at Netflix etc. Remove the value add and you're left with a commodity. In that scenario you might have very small margin services but, just as likely, would be ad led services for free. I mean, they have useful financial information. There'll be a group that doesn't want that but there's no clear evidence it'll ever be more than niche. So yes, there's value there but I just can't see any reason, for any of the examples you cite, to believe that incumbents will be challenged. If anything it may help entrenchment.

arbol 9y ago

Supply chain mistakes are costly and can result in unsaleable stock. There are existing standards (see GS1) but they are full of errors due to disparate systems and varying interpretations of XML messages. Smart contracts have the potential to reduce the cost of goods delivery through shared supply chain management systems, placing less risk on a potential 'new to market' market place or 'direct to consumer' seller. These are both direct challenges to Amazon and eBay. Expensive digital assets will always require a mediation fee. You could write your own contract to transfer the assets for free but you would probably want to pay to guarantee that it worked. Of course, if the digital transaction is of a suitably small value, a direct transfer of assets may be preferred via a self-authored contract. The loser in this case is VISA or whichever payment provider scalps off the top of music/movie/book/... sales currently. I wasn't trying to specifically cite transactions as being the main target of smart contracts (although they are the most obvious). The example was to show how existing processes of a transactional nature can be recreated with less complexity and therefore utilise less resources. There is an endless list of examples where this holds to some extent.

lucozade 9y ago
If you have a big supply chain, like Amazon does, then managing the complexity of that chain is a tough problem. I happen to agree with IBM that a distributed ledger like technology can help with that. Not a public one, obviously as that would just be silly, but it would make sense for Amazon to run one. We're doing a variant of this in my field. But it doesn't make any sense to use smart contracts to manage the supply chain complexity of a business that, by definition, doesn't have a complex supply chain i.e. a direct to customer seller. Especially a seller of digital assets. > Expensive digital assets will always require a mediation fee Why? Most mediating supplies an overt service for those fees as well as the mediation. For example, producers at studios, editors at publishers, rights management and marketing/discovery at Netflix etc. Remove the value add and you're left with a commodity. In that scenario you might have very small margin services but, just as likely, would be ad led services for free. I mean, they have useful financial information. There'll be a group that doesn't want that but there's no clear evidence it'll ever be more than niche. So yes, there's value there but I just can't see any reason, for any of the examples you cite, to believe that incumbents will be challenged. If anything it may help entrenchment.