[oellegaard]

While I personally don’t believe in Bitcoin or any other crypto currency, I couldn’t stop laughing about your comment on the blockchain.

I have met so many people obsessed with building things on top of the blockchain and when you ask them what it is they need it is essentially a database and they don’t want it to be public. Fortunately the recent years this has been a decreasing trend. Only now a days the requests are to replace developers with 10x AI agents.

[matwood]

Yeah. The reality is that we enter into very few zero trust transactions. I don’t need a blockchain to guarantee things when the law and contracts have handled that fine for a very long time.

[everfree]

Possession is 9/10 of the law. A guarantee of possession gives you that 9/10. A legal contract leaves you calling a lawyer to grasp at the other 1/10, if it's even worth it for the financial value of your contract.

In short, the legal system is pretty useless in enforcing any broken contract that's worth less than a few thousand dollars, especially one of any complexity.

And as an aside, I feel like I enter into low-trust transactions all the time. Don't you?

* I don't trust people who sell products to me online. I've gotten bad product many times. But I need to be able to buy from independent sellers online.

* On a related note, I don't trust half the websites I put my credit card info into. But it's an important part of sending money over the internet.

* I don't trust my ride share drivers or short-term-rental hosts. I could do without short-term-rentals by only staying at trusted hotels, but I can't really do without ride shares.

* When I trade a stock with some random counterparty, I don't trust them to actually deliver the stock to me at T+1. But I need to be able to trade stocks with whoever else can give me the best price.

The typical solution is to have a corporation step in to act as judge and jury for contract breaches that are too small to be worth bringing to court (brokerages, credit card companies, Amazon, PayPal, AirBnB, Uber). In fact, these companies' main value creation has come from adding a layer of trust to traditionally zero-trust transactions. Thus, these zero-trust transactions have been able to thrive while the dispute resolution corporation charges fees for their value-added trust.

The only reason these roles traditionally have to be performed by companies is that autonomous money-custodying software did not exist. But programmable blockchains now allow for this. You could easily imagine a dispute-resolution alternative to PayPal where the organizational structure is a piece of autonomous software directly employing people/AI, rather than a traditional corporate entity.

[cryptoegorophy]

No, the idea is anonymity. How can you trust the contract between you and some user across the world? Yes, crypto solves it. Law won’t help when someone tries to scam you across the world, at least in majority of cases.

[JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B]

> between you and some user across the world? Yes, crypto solves it

Crypto solves a problem that less than 0.1% of the world have. It's not very useful. Local laws and regulations are way more effective for me.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

A friend who in cybercrime talks weekly about scammers using Bitcoin ATMs and there being no way to get it back compared to traditional banking where he regularly gets victims their money back.

[matwood]

> Yes, crypto solves it.

The vast majority of scams are run through crypto now. In fact, crypto is a step backwards and makes it easier to scam people.

[everfree]

Crypto lets you engage in any contract you and your counterparty can codify. The reason that so many scams are run through crypto is because the vast majority of people either don't use smart contracts (in which case you're just sending your money to someone and praying), or if they do, they don't read or understand the smart contracts they're using.

The solution to this is maturity. The endgame is to be able to create smart contracts that are as readable to a layperson, if not more readable, than legal contracts. And to come up with a set of standard smart contract templates vetted by programmers, just as today we have a set of standard legal contract templates vetted by lawyers.

That, and encouraging people to actually read what they sign, whether it's a pen-and-paper signature or a cryptographic signature.

[JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B]

> they don't read or understand the smart contracts they're using

I'll tell my parents to learn JavaScript or Rust to make sure that there is no bug in the smart contracts they are signing.

[everfree]

Aside from my point that most contracts can be based on highly-vetted templates, smart contracts don't need to be written in JavaScript or Rust. They can be written using little puzzle pieces that anyone can understand.

https://i.imgur.com/MgEw0Bd.png

As a fun fact, a puzzle-piece style editor like this is how I wrote my first computer program as a toddler.