[52-6F-62]

I always understood it to be more of the automating of contract fulfillment.

That's probably not the universal take. My take is there is a place for automated smart contracts, and a place for traditional contracts. For instance, you can hardly prove beyond any doubt that a package was delivered successfully and so payment can be dispersed. Too much room for fraud there. But for many other digital services I think it would work out fine. AFAIU it's been working quite well for microgrid projects.

(Specifically smart contracts and ethereum as a whole, not really the DAO. Don't know much about that)

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> But for many other digital services I think it would work out fine.

A centralized system works fine for those situations though. Adding Eth into the mix doesn't improve anything in this scenario.

[52-6F-62]

Maybe so. Horses got people from A to B just fine as well.

I'm not sold one way or the other yet, but the amount of trust some institutions have taken on and abused has been a bit ridiculous the past few years (and emerged unscathed themselves while their clients were left to deal with it).

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Cryptocurrency is wholly impractical to the point of being totally useless with regard to displacing trust in centralized institutions.

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Forgive me, but you haven’t been very convincing.

Anecdotally, centralized institutions have broken many peoples’ trust in the past. It’s starting to look like a bit of a wash to me—not that I’m racing to close my accounts. Just the same, I’m not ready to write off an early tech that is still being developed and experimented on.

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> Forgive me, but you haven’t been very convincing.

I don't need to convince anyone; it is a self-evident truth that cryptocurrency is wholly impractical for displacing centralized institutions. It's self-evident because it hasn't happened and there isn't even a whiff of a possibility that it could. Cryptocurrencies are a strange and interesting technical novelty, but they are closer to a video game than anything resembling a challenge to currently centralized institutions.

> centralized institutions have broken many peoples’ trust in the past

You keep repeating that but its irrelevant. Whether or not centralized institutions are breaking people's trust, cryptocurrency is obviously not a solution to the problem.

> not that I’m racing to close my accounts

Of course you're not because cryptocurrency is obviously not an alternative to a bank account in the same way that a drone is not an alternative to a car.

> Just the same, I’m not ready to write off an early tech that is still being developed and experimented on.

I'm not telling you to "write off" anything, what does that even mean? If you want to close all your bank accounts and meet up with people in the streets to trade cryptocurrency tokens in order to manage typical financial obligations then that is your prerogative; it doesn't mean that such a lifestyle has any appreciable impact on the existence of centralized institutions.

[52-6F-62]

I think you're taking a lot of liberties in your assumptions about what I've said, and what the technology is or is about.

It seems to stem from one strain of thought surrounding the tech, implied by your use of "cryptocurrency" as the new descriptor and not focusing on the concept of smart contracts.

For the record, I never suggested trading cryptocurrencies as a medium for barter and exchange was a practical or desirable idea.

One viable use, currently implemented and being tested, is the use of smart contracts as an immutable record for tracking grants and other funding provided to organizations by the National Research Council of Canada:

Prototype: https://nrc-cnrc.explorecatena.com/en

It's not as self-evident to me as it might be to you—that's not really an explanation. You're quite aggressive in your disdain for this specific technology—I'm kind of baffled.