When I bought my house, I paid the title escrow company thousands of dollars to perform a very simple service. Hold the deposit money in escrow, and release it

When I bought my house, I paid the title escrow company thousands of dollars to perform a very simple service. Hold the deposit money in escrow, and release it specific parties based on certain conditions. There's no reason in the future why that service couldn't be performed by an off-the-shelf smart contract for essentially nothing. Home buyer sends deposit money to the contract. If buyer exercises a contingency before date M, release money back. If user doesn't, transfer funds to home seller. In case of dispute, defer decision to a pre-agreed upon adjudication agent and pay said agent to render a decision. There are so many stories like this in the plumbing of the financial system. It's ironic, because high finance is built upon layers and layers of complex abstraction. The way someone a sophisticated hedge fund decides how to allocates assets, hedge exposures, levers positions, manage risk, and execute trades is like something straight out of science fiction. But the way the money actually moves from point A to point B is stuck in the 19th century. It's hard to overstate how much of the value collected by the financial industry is actually just handling the nuts and bolts of physically moving money around in a trusted way. For every quant building a derivatives pricing model based on stochastic calculus, there's a dozen low-level clerks sending each other wire instructions by fax and filling out boilerplate KYC notifications.