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This shouldn’t be surprising. Permissionless systems often innovate orders of magnitude faster than permissioned systems. So many of these threads are filled w

This shouldn’t be surprising. Permissionless systems often innovate orders of magnitude faster than permissioned systems. So many of these threads are filled with comments of the form “well why do we actually need a blockchain for that? Can’t we just do the thing with centralized databases?” But the point is after 50 years the centralized databases haven’t built those systems. Smart contracts, and instant finality transfers, and a public identity tied to private keys could all exist on ACH. Yet they only happened when blockchains came along. Blockchains aren’t a technical innovation, they’re a sociological innovation. They remove the responsibility of a centralized administrator if shit hits the fan. Visa won’t allow smart contracts in its network, because it has too much to lose. In Ethereum if the DAO breaks there’s no one to sue. Result smart contracts exist in Ethereum but not Visa. Same story holds true with the Internet. Do we really need a decentralized network designed to withstand a nuclear war? Surely a single telco network could just as easily serve up websites. Except it never did. The Internet won because it was permissionless and therefore innovation occurred much more rapidly.

annoyingnoob 5y ago
> They remove the responsibility of a centralized administrator if shit hits the fan. I'd argue that they remove the liability of a centralized administrator but not necessarily the need for administration. This is why you see coins/tokens with some kind of voting scheme. Will be interesting to see if at some point in the future we see voting rights as presenting a liability.
anonporridge 5y ago
> there’s no one to sue This is a feature, not a bug. Legal risk holds back a ton of innovation from taking over processes normally governed by nature, which we can't sue, to those governed by people and institutions, who we can sue. It prevents us from taking risk, even if we know we can probably solve the problem better than nature. You can't sue a decentralized system, because there's no throat to choke.

annoyingnoob 5y ago

> They remove the responsibility of a centralized administrator if shit hits the fan. I'd argue that they remove the liability of a centralized administrator but not necessarily the need for administration. This is why you see coins/tokens with some kind of voting scheme. Will be interesting to see if at some point in the future we see voting rights as presenting a liability.

anonporridge 5y ago

> there’s no one to sue This is a feature, not a bug. Legal risk holds back a ton of innovation from taking over processes normally governed by nature, which we can't sue, to those governed by people and institutions, who we can sue. It prevents us from taking risk, even if we know we can probably solve the problem better than nature. You can't sue a decentralized system, because there's no throat to choke.