[ForHackernews]

Why does any of this require ethereum?

We have all kinds of markets already, ones that are much faster, more liquid and more efficient than any blockchain-backed exchanges.

There's nothing stopping a recording artist from incorporating and listing shares on any traditional exchanges, or you from making a new exchange.

Literally the only things Ethereum adds are decentralization and no way to dispute or reverse transactions, but for 99% of users those are ANTI-features.

[tomhoward]

> There's nothing stopping a recording artist from incorporating and listing shares on any traditional exchanges

There absolutely is: it is almost unimaginably expensive and administratively complicated, hence the only entities to IPO these days are companies valued in the tens of billions, who have exhausted all other options for raising capital privately and need to raise at least hundreds of millions or billions more.

I’m no expert on Ethereum or blockchain generally, but the potential for low-friction micro-investing in small businesses, artists or even individuals seems highly compelling to me.

[cwkoss]

The issue I have with this is that those regulations still exist.

For a recording artist to raise funds in this way still requires that they deal with all the administrative complications - laws just tend to not be enforced very frequently in this new space.

If Jay-Z launched Jay-Zcoin and raised $100M, the SEC and IRS are going to be poking around his finances and looking for any place he violated the law and imposing fines.

I think a lot of the "potential business models" for ethereum that people discuss may be (sometimes) technically robust, but the are also usually extremely fragile politically.

[tomhoward]

Of course tax laws still apply, as they should.

But Jay-Z raising $100M is the wrong use-case example; he’s already a superstar and already wildly rich so doesn’t need investors, or can easily get them the old fashioned ways (eg record company advance) if he does.

A more apt one is a little-known up-and-comer raising $20k, as they currently might on Kickstarter or Patreon, but possibly using the smart-contract features of Ethereum to link the provision of rewards to some programmed metric like number of Spotify plays.

[TheAdamAndChe]

To trust a currency, you must trust the institutions that manage that currency. You have no control over it.

To trust a cryptocurrency, you must trust the algorithm that runs it. It's fully auditable and predictable.

It still takes me several business days to complete an ACH transaction in the US, and requires I trust the banking system. Transferring cryptocurrencies happen much faster and don't require the same kind of trust or centralized management.

What you see as anti-features are good reasons why they won't replace the dollar yet, but they still have a place in the market.

[ForHackernews]

The US ACH system is extremely slow and still involves nightly batch jobs.

Many other countries have systems that allow for nearly immediate person-to-person money transfer without blockchains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service This is not a good argument for cryptocurrency.

Regarding "trusting" an algorithm: in the real world you also have to trust the implementation, and the configuration, and eventually humans involved in the transaction. How often do we see some big data breach on HN? Very rarely has any cryptographic algorithm been broken, but often one of the other links in the trust chain has broken.

[rhlsthrm]

> Very rarely has any cryptographic algorithm been broken, but often one of the other links in the trust chain has broken.

The whole point of Ethereum is to reduce/eliminate those links in the trust chain.

[kingaillas]

>To trust a cryptocurrency, you must trust the algorithm that runs it. It's fully auditable and predictable.

What happens when Ethereum 2 inevitably hits a security bug, much like the ones Ethereum 1 hit that led to the DAO hack/theft (some might say... worked exactly as coded)?

[parksy]

Compare it to traditional security. If you want to steal a few dollars you just need a sharp bit of metal and an easily frightened shopkeeper.

Of course when you leave, the shopkeeper (assuming you didn't murder them) can use a phone to inform the authorities. Then a manhunt begins involving resources like police and their cars, radios, guns, protocols, legal justice system, forensic investigators etc.

Is the sharp piece of metal a bug? Is the patch just more force, monitoring and authority?

Edit: And is the cost and risk of trusting an algorithm comparable to the human cost and risk in maintaining current securities "authenticity", which is basically a might is right system?

[gnasr]

>We have all kinds of markets already, ones that are much faster, more liquid and more efficient than any blockchain-backed exchanges.

You are talking probably from a developed country point of view. For those like me who lives in a developing country none of those are accessible for everyone, only for a few percentage of the society. Cryptocurrencies solves a lot of problems for people in oppressed countries or with a lot of terrible regulations and high inflation rates.