| The billions of dollars of infrastructure doesn’t exist for no reason! The regulations and difficulty of starting a bank or mortgage company aren’t there for the hell of it! Name the specific parts of mortgages that you believe should not exist and that DeFi eliminates. Should we not do income checks on homebuyers to ensure that they can reasonably be able to pay the debt? If they can’t pay their debt, what happens to the home? Is it collectively owned by the smart contract? How does that work? Where does the deed go? Speaking of the deed, what if there’s a bug in the contract? Are we really going to pretend that these contracts have the force of law and a house can be stolen because someone wrote a bug? Or are we accepting that we can override the contract and none of the benefits of “smart contracts run[ning] forever” are real? How should a smart contract value a home, to determine if the loan is adequately backed? If the buyer wants a $1m mortgage on what is actually a $10k plot of land, they can default and the contract (?) gets (??) an asset two orders of magnitude less than the check it wrote. Hand-waving “well every real estate transaction will also be on the blockchain with perfect metadata so AI can make that decision” is not an answer. How does a DeFi platform prevent money laundering? Should it not? This requires people! And regulations! This is a tiny slice. But we cannot pretend that any of this makes sense without thinking more than one layer deep. Which is really the problem. |
Let's use your example of mortgages. When you get a mortgage, your lender wires money to the seller. How do they do that? They use Fedwire, which is a system maintained by the Federal Reserve for banking transfers. Such a system can be totally replaced by a blockchain. If you replaced Fedwire with a blockchain, you wouldn't remove the regulatory and legal requirements, you would just replace a legacy technical system with something that is more powerful. A blockchain can do everything Fedwire can do, and a blockchain implements this functionality in a more generic fashion that allows for additional constructs, like smart contracts, to be added.
Following your mortgage a little further: most mortgages are not held by the bank. The was the main issue in the financial crisis in 2008. Banks don't hold mortgages, so they were very loose in who they lent to. Rather than hold on to the mortgages, the bank sends them to a clearing house that packages up the mortgages into a mortgage backed security. All of this infrastructure could be replaced by a smart contract.
A blockchain can be thought of as a generalization of a financial system (system here meaning the technical system, i.e. the nitty gritty details of how and when money is moved). This is a powerful generalization and can implement existing financial systems in a much more efficient manner. As an individual, I could implement a mortgage-backed security system. That type of productivity is not possible in our current financial system.
This does not mean that I'm advocating for some type of anarchistic hellscape where regulations fall by the wayside. You can still have the same set of regulations, but implement the underlying nuts and bolts financial system in a way that's more efficient, standardized, and democratic.