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I take issue with this part of the article: > Absent clear and easily enforceable property rights, relying solely on private investors to monitor and disciplin

I take issue with this part of the article: > Absent clear and easily enforceable property rights, relying solely on private investors to monitor and discipline the behaviour of opaque intermediaries has never been safe and effective. There is no prospect for a technological solution to these age-old problems. The technical solution to opaque intermediaries is already here, and it's transparent intermediaries (enabled by smart contracts.) They let you replace an opaque piece of code running in a company's back room with a transparent piece of code that can be publicly read, understood, and audited. It can make an interaction with an intermediary very predictable and reliable, because you can trace/simulate the intermediary's exact code execution path (and thus know exactly what they are going to do with your money) before you even send the request. It's striking to me that the author doesn't state his opinion on smart contracts anywhere in the post. It makes me wonder whether he really thought they weren't a topic that readers would naturally use to contextualize his post, or whether he's ignorant of their existence. That's aside from the entire premise of the article being based on this idea that "crypto" is some monolithic corrupting force, rather than simply a messy emergent series of public databases that are as unthinking and uncaring as MySQL or Git. > Both crypto and traditional finance are simply combinations of a database and computer code. It would be straightforward for a group of technicians to convert any set of conditional cash flows from one into the other. The author seems so close to "getting it". If only he asked the question "now what changes when the general public has unfettered real-time read access to those databases and computer code," perhaps he could see the uniqueness of the design space, and appreciate that there's much more emergent game theory to work through before writing crypto off as being on a path of implosion into irrelevancy.

polygamous_bat 4y ago
Can you show me a smart contract that will let me exchange some amount of cryptocurrency for a banana? Ideally one which allows me to go after the banana seller if it turns out to be rotten, or worse, poisoned. If you can't, then please understand that in the real world you will always need a counterparty and a thousand intermediary for something as simple as a banana. All the "smart" contracts [1] are good for is a fancy way of swapping shitcoin A for shitcoin B, and until that changes none of what you said has any effect. [1] smart until they end up on rekt.news leaderboard.
- everfree 4y ago
  > Can you show me a smart contract that will let me exchange some amount of cryptocurrency for a banana? Agricultural futures contracts technically do what you're describing, and trading them currently involves a lot of intermediaries that could theoretically be replaced with smart contracts in a straightforward way. And Unisocks exchange lets you exchange cryptocurrency for a tokenized sock, by the way, redeemable on demand. Technically this disintermediates online shops and payment processors, though obviously it's a toy project and there's a whole lot more that it doesn't disintermediate. Systems like these are inherently composable, for instance you could imagine an international shipping company wrapping the sock token into their own token, creating a token that represents a sock shipped to anywhere in the world. In this way, smart contracts enable obligations to be nested in a way that is completely transparent to the public. Your query comes off to me like a 70's computer critic saying "can you show me a computer program that will let me exchange some amount of money for a banana?" Of course computer code can't reach out of the screen and put a banana into your hand, yet software can and does help facilitate coordination between you, the distributor, and the grower. > If you can't, then please understand that in the real world you will always need a counterparty and a thousand intermediary for something as simple as a banana. Try something intangible. Like a banana futures contract, a share of stock, a domain name, a concert ticket, a video game license/skin, a stock photo license, a building key card, with proper regulation a property deed, the list goes on. We live in a society where a few bits in a bank/government database somewhere are the biggest separator between the homeless and the wealthy. The vision of smart contracts is to bring more accountability, transparency, and predictability to the processes that handle those critical bits of data. A snippet of code isn't going to be solely responsible for putting a banana on your table, but eventually it might make it a bit easier for a South American banana farmer to financially hedge his crop, for a consumer to transparently trace which shipping companies signed off for the banana before it was purchased at the supermarket, or even enable a banana DAO which could make sure everyone in a banana supply chain gets paid without requiring a traditional corporate structure.
  - roland35 4y ago
    Yes obviously we all know a Blockchain can't reach into the real world and put a banana in my hand... But the point is that what does Blockchain give anyone that a simple app (zelle, PayPal, bananas r us, etc) doesn't? I still need to trust the vendor.

polygamous_bat 4y ago

Can you show me a smart contract that will let me exchange some amount of cryptocurrency for a banana? Ideally one which allows me to go after the banana seller if it turns out to be rotten, or worse, poisoned. If you can't, then please understand that in the real world you will always need a counterparty and a thousand intermediary for something as simple as a banana. All the "smart" contracts [1] are good for is a fancy way of swapping shitcoin A for shitcoin B, and until that changes none of what you said has any effect. [1] smart until they end up on rekt.news leaderboard.

everfree 4y ago
> Can you show me a smart contract that will let me exchange some amount of cryptocurrency for a banana? Agricultural futures contracts technically do what you're describing, and trading them currently involves a lot of intermediaries that could theoretically be replaced with smart contracts in a straightforward way. And Unisocks exchange lets you exchange cryptocurrency for a tokenized sock, by the way, redeemable on demand. Technically this disintermediates online shops and payment processors, though obviously it's a toy project and there's a whole lot more that it doesn't disintermediate. Systems like these are inherently composable, for instance you could imagine an international shipping company wrapping the sock token into their own token, creating a token that represents a sock shipped to anywhere in the world. In this way, smart contracts enable obligations to be nested in a way that is completely transparent to the public. Your query comes off to me like a 70's computer critic saying "can you show me a computer program that will let me exchange some amount of money for a banana?" Of course computer code can't reach out of the screen and put a banana into your hand, yet software can and does help facilitate coordination between you, the distributor, and the grower. > If you can't, then please understand that in the real world you will always need a counterparty and a thousand intermediary for something as simple as a banana. Try something intangible. Like a banana futures contract, a share of stock, a domain name, a concert ticket, a video game license/skin, a stock photo license, a building key card, with proper regulation a property deed, the list goes on. We live in a society where a few bits in a bank/government database somewhere are the biggest separator between the homeless and the wealthy. The vision of smart contracts is to bring more accountability, transparency, and predictability to the processes that handle those critical bits of data. A snippet of code isn't going to be solely responsible for putting a banana on your table, but eventually it might make it a bit easier for a South American banana farmer to financially hedge his crop, for a consumer to transparently trace which shipping companies signed off for the banana before it was purchased at the supermarket, or even enable a banana DAO which could make sure everyone in a banana supply chain gets paid without requiring a traditional corporate structure.
- roland35 4y ago
  Yes obviously we all know a Blockchain can't reach into the real world and put a banana in my hand... But the point is that what does Blockchain give anyone that a simple app (zelle, PayPal, bananas r us, etc) doesn't? I still need to trust the vendor.