[leppr]

It doesn't take much imagination to come up with many settings where a trusted, fair, omnipotent third-party arbitrator is absent.

Those unregulated environments are the trust settings where cryptocurrency will shine, not the local, already regulated economies.

Applications like "real-estate on the blockchain", "event tickets on the blockchain" are mostly just opportunistic buzzword riders. What cryptocurrency best serves is international trade and black markets. All the places that can't be regulated by traditional means, or that intentionally steer away from regulators.

[TeMPOraL]

> What cryptocurrency best serves is international trade

I fear the day we go to war because of some clerk's off-by-one error in a "smart" contract.

Honestly though, I'd think programmers of all people would be first to realize that using code to represent law affecting anything in the physical reality is a dumb idea. Think of any time you had to write a program to conform to customer's requirement document. Does anyone here had, even once, done that without discovering holes, inconsistencies or unintended consequences in the document? And this is essentially the same exercise as formulating a "smart contract", except the code can now ruin someone's life.

(There's some middle ground to be had here, though. A way of optimizing the "long tail" of legal problems, without trying to do the near-impossible thing of codifying intent.)

[leppr]

You just have to remember that there are humans behind it all. Before a war happens, we would agree to fork the chain, like most people did with Ethereum's DAO hack [1].

There certainly could be many life changing bugs happening for smaller entities. But that's not a cryptocurrency-specific point. Humans are more and more willing to accept trusting technology with their lives (factory robots, pacemakers, automated cars, risky snapchats).

The key for cryptocurrencies is to keep humans in the loop: keep it incremental and require human confirmation for meaningful transactions. Machine learning can be used to detect anomalies in busy transaction flows.

[1]: https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/the-dao-the-hack-...