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There would be no way to raise fees or otherwise exploit their market position for rent-seeking once they had attained market dominance.

acdha 9y ago
Can you explain why you believe that would be true? The system can’t prevent normal economics from functioning and while competition can act as a check, that’s equally true now – eBay and Amazon both have tons of competition.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  Because the fees, and other properties of the platform, can be encoded in immutable smart contracts where they can't be changed.
  - acdha 9y ago
    That doesn't really answer the question: that prevents you from changing a contract after accepting it but it doesn't prevent someone else from saying that they will no longer sign contracts at old rates. This is good because otherwise the system would be completely unworkable in the real world where prices and exchange rates change over time — for example, suppose that a shipping partner increases their rates to handle fuel price increases — you'd need a way to charge more for shipping as soon as that happens. The same would apply to anything involving cryptocurrencies with their wildly-fluctuating exchange rates which don't match the real money either side will need to use.
    - CryptoPunk 9y ago
      >>that prevents you from changing a contract after accepting it but it doesn't prevent someone else from saying that they will no longer sign contracts at old rates. When I refer to a contract, I'm referring to the smart contract that operates a platform, like a market. A market is a persistent platform, so the rules encoded into a smart-contract based market when it's created will apply indefinitely. >>The same would apply to anything involving cryptocurrencies with their wildly-fluctuating exchange rates which don't match the real money either side will need to use. Yes, but the fee charged by the platform can be a fixed percentage of the transaction volume it facilitates, so it doesn't have to deal with exchange rates.

acdha 9y ago

Can you explain why you believe that would be true? The system can’t prevent normal economics from functioning and while competition can act as a check, that’s equally true now – eBay and Amazon both have tons of competition.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
Because the fees, and other properties of the platform, can be encoded in immutable smart contracts where they can't be changed.
- acdha 9y ago
  That doesn't really answer the question: that prevents you from changing a contract after accepting it but it doesn't prevent someone else from saying that they will no longer sign contracts at old rates. This is good because otherwise the system would be completely unworkable in the real world where prices and exchange rates change over time — for example, suppose that a shipping partner increases their rates to handle fuel price increases — you'd need a way to charge more for shipping as soon as that happens. The same would apply to anything involving cryptocurrencies with their wildly-fluctuating exchange rates which don't match the real money either side will need to use.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    >>that prevents you from changing a contract after accepting it but it doesn't prevent someone else from saying that they will no longer sign contracts at old rates. When I refer to a contract, I'm referring to the smart contract that operates a platform, like a market. A market is a persistent platform, so the rules encoded into a smart-contract based market when it's created will apply indefinitely. >>The same would apply to anything involving cryptocurrencies with their wildly-fluctuating exchange rates which don't match the real money either side will need to use. Yes, but the fee charged by the platform can be a fixed percentage of the transaction volume it facilitates, so it doesn't have to deal with exchange rates.