My 'cryptoequity' project was on the Hacker News front page a couple years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992667), in which many commentators noted that many high value applications were probably illegal.
As enthusiastic as I remain about the overall premise of equity replacements issued on cryptographically secure ledgers (including Etheruem, which I started with by running the educational channel Ethercasts), I don't see anything in this presentation that indicates that the massive challenges regarding nation-state regulation have been solved.
Even were one to go on the premise that one can effectively run this in a sandbox away from standard nation-state regulation, one has the more general problem of enforceability of contracts, etc. If I hire you via a crypto-contract but then you don't deliver the associated goods, what recourse do I have?
This and related effects caused ~2 years of delays in my own implementation.
I'll note I remain optimistic and positive about all related efforts in this field.
> If I hire you via a crypto-contract but then you don't deliver the associated goods, what recourse do I have?
Isn't this sort of a "solved" question, in the sense that we know there's only so much a computer can do? The practical answers are, of course, reputation systems and incentivization systems like escrow. Both of those are areas of active research.
> one has the more general problem of enforceability of contracts, etc. If I hire you via a crypto-contract but then you don't deliver the associated goods, what recourse do I have?
I thought the point of crypto-contracts was to make enforcement as automatic as possible...if that is not fully true, are there any neutral verifications services that can hold things in escrow?
You just do exactly what ethereum did. Pay off a securities regulator in the smallest state of Switzerland to say it isn't a security while simultaneously getting an opinion letter in the US saying the same thing.
Sovereign sanctioning and alot of capital
SEC hasn't challenged it yet though but I mean, you can be rich and bring your project to the world.
We are still early, but we are now in Alpha stage. We have published a small sneak peek of what we are building on aragon.one so you can try out how managing an Aragon company will be like.
Our ambition is for Aragon to be the backbone of a new generation of companies that will thrive in the new decentralized economy. We have focused on building a modular system, in the frontend and in the smart contracts, so modified versions for specific company types/industries could be build (pe. Aragon for Hedgefunds, Aragon for Non-Profits or Aragon for Open Source projects).
Aragon is a fully decentralized app that only needs having a connection to a Ethereum node in order for the core functionallity to work. We will be packaging it and distributing in a Electron binary for ease of use with non-iniciated users. We have integrated Metamask in Electron, so the app can be standalone (more on this soon).
Even though every screenshot in the website and the demo is live code running against the EVM (via TestRPC) and the alpha is working, we are not open sourcing the contracts for a couple of weeks (some cleaning and refactoring needs to be done before they are ready to be public). All the frontend code will be open source too, but we don't have a specific timeline for this. We are open source first and open source only, our core technology needs to be open source so it can be under the scrutiny needed for Aragon to be a secure technology.
The launch post seems to say that Ethereum|Aragon can solve the nation state problem, taxes and a whole host of other "problems" associated with running a business.
How?
How does Aragon eliminate the IRS or DIAN if you are doing business in America or Colombia, respectively?
How does it eliminate regulations on interstate and international commerce?
What companies would actually use this to run their verses say Quickbooks, right now?
What companies have been built on Ethereum so far and how have the principals done with regard to taxes and tariffs?
What language are the contracts written in? Do you have a specification of that language?
EDIT: Nevermind, I see in an another comment that you're using Solidity. Thanks for the answer!
Now I have a new question. What do you think about the claim that, "Solidity, while being an interesting proof of concept, is dangerously under-contained and very difficult to analyze statically." (http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html)
Conceptually I like the idea of running our company on this. But do you have any sort of insurance in case something goes horribly wrong?
I'd probably be willing to use this for a side project, but I feel like the prospect of saving even a substantial amount of legal fees isn't enough to risk everything on a new technology that would be a full-time job to actually understand.
That's not to say it's not a good idea, because it is a good idea, but there's a really big lift in terms of getting mainstream adoption.
I think Ethereum undermined their whole reason for existence when they did a fork in response to a valid contract because enough people did not like the results.
The fact that they called it a hack when it explicitly followed the Ethereum guidelines calls into doubt the sincerity of the people behind Ethereum.
If people want to actually have malleable contracts in the case of fraud, the courts provide a much more accountable process that has had centuries of fine tuning.
Is there a way to pay for domain, DNS, and hosting costs with Ethereum? If so, one could build a wide-range of SaaS products that accept payment in Ethereum, and would be free of taxation and government regulation. While the SEC understandably exists to prevent defrauding of investors, this dashboard gives an investor perfect clarity into a company's financial strength and liabilities, and allows for an informed decision to be made without any official paperwork.
What would be really interesting is if some day you could buy a self-driving car with Ethereum. With an Uber-like app that accepts payment in Ethereum, and blockchain investments to rapidly scale the business up and reinvest profits, one could see a self-driving car company dominate the market in a far shorter time than it took Uber to do so.
It's even possible that some day we see a unicorn startup with a solo developer.
> While the SEC understandably exists to prevent defrauding of investors, this dashboard gives an investor perfect clarity into a company's financial strength and liabilities, and allows for an informed decision to be made without any official paperwork.
No, it gives insight into what has been done in Ethereum using the accounts tied to this "company". If investors are led to believe that this gives perfect clarity, that makes defrauding investors trivially easy by simply keeping things outside of what gets recorded. Keeping multiple books is the oldest trick in the book.
Namecoin exists, but governments are never gonna just be like "hey, don't pay taxes, no problem".
What would be really interesting is if some day you could buy a self-driving car with Ethereum. With an Uber-like app that accepts payment in Ethereum, and blockchain investments to rapidly scale the business up and reinvest profits, one could see a self-driving car company dominate the market in a far shorter time than it took Uber to do so.
Why can't a regular company do that? Blockchian payments are really the very least of your problems if you are trying to create a profitable self-driving car company.
That'd be feasible, it just needs hosting companies willing to take payment in ether.
One the other hand, the Ethereum Name Service should be going live before long, and within the next year or so it should also have Swarm (distributed data storage) and Whisper (secure messaging) live as well, both integrated into Ethereum. The ultimate goal is that you wan't need web hosting.
I can understand the disbelief over the "maximalist" approach that suggests that regulations, government intervention, taxes, etc. will be circumvented by decentralized companies running on blockchains. Yet I believe that this efforts should be encouraged as they are exploring the kind of wild, uncharted territory in which the most exciting innovations can unexpectedly arise.
I also believe that some of the tools these guys are building can be very useful for conventional companies too. There's a whole lot of bureaucracy and inefficiency in running a company.
See eShares and his elegant and simple solution for cap management. I believe there are many other areas in which similar improvements can be made, and software needed to run a blockchain company could also be used to improve procedures at conventional companies.
Or the "Adding a new employee to your payroll is as easy as creating a recurring payment" scenario. Good luck having the Spanish Social Security Institute accept the mandatory monthly payments (cotizaciones) in ETH...
[+] [-] Jd|9 years ago|reply
As enthusiastic as I remain about the overall premise of equity replacements issued on cryptographically secure ledgers (including Etheruem, which I started with by running the educational channel Ethercasts), I don't see anything in this presentation that indicates that the massive challenges regarding nation-state regulation have been solved.
Even were one to go on the premise that one can effectively run this in a sandbox away from standard nation-state regulation, one has the more general problem of enforceability of contracts, etc. If I hire you via a crypto-contract but then you don't deliver the associated goods, what recourse do I have?
This and related effects caused ~2 years of delays in my own implementation.
I'll note I remain optimistic and positive about all related efforts in this field.
[+] [-] wyager|9 years ago|reply
Isn't this sort of a "solved" question, in the sense that we know there's only so much a computer can do? The practical answers are, of course, reputation systems and incentivization systems like escrow. Both of those are areas of active research.
[+] [-] clavalle|9 years ago|reply
I thought the point of crypto-contracts was to make enforcement as automatic as possible...if that is not fully true, are there any neutral verifications services that can hold things in escrow?
[+] [-] elastic_church|9 years ago|reply
Sovereign sanctioning and alot of capital
SEC hasn't challenged it yet though but I mean, you can be rich and bring your project to the world.
[+] [-] izqui|9 years ago|reply
We are still early, but we are now in Alpha stage. We have published a small sneak peek of what we are building on aragon.one so you can try out how managing an Aragon company will be like.
Our ambition is for Aragon to be the backbone of a new generation of companies that will thrive in the new decentralized economy. We have focused on building a modular system, in the frontend and in the smart contracts, so modified versions for specific company types/industries could be build (pe. Aragon for Hedgefunds, Aragon for Non-Profits or Aragon for Open Source projects).
Aragon is a fully decentralized app that only needs having a connection to a Ethereum node in order for the core functionallity to work. We will be packaging it and distributing in a Electron binary for ease of use with non-iniciated users. We have integrated Metamask in Electron, so the app can be standalone (more on this soon).
Even though every screenshot in the website and the demo is live code running against the EVM (via TestRPC) and the alpha is working, we are not open sourcing the contracts for a couple of weeks (some cleaning and refactoring needs to be done before they are ready to be public). All the frontend code will be open source too, but we don't have a specific timeline for this. We are open source first and open source only, our core technology needs to be open source so it can be under the scrutiny needed for Aragon to be a secure technology.
[+] [-] monkmartinez|9 years ago|reply
How?
How does Aragon eliminate the IRS or DIAN if you are doing business in America or Colombia, respectively?
How does it eliminate regulations on interstate and international commerce?
What companies would actually use this to run their verses say Quickbooks, right now?
What companies have been built on Ethereum so far and how have the principals done with regard to taxes and tariffs?
[+] [-] alexmingoia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seagreen|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: Nevermind, I see in an another comment that you're using Solidity. Thanks for the answer!
Now I have a new question. What do you think about the claim that, "Solidity, while being an interesting proof of concept, is dangerously under-contained and very difficult to analyze statically." (http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html)
[+] [-] Alex3917|9 years ago|reply
I'd probably be willing to use this for a side project, but I feel like the prospect of saving even a substantial amount of legal fees isn't enough to risk everything on a new technology that would be a full-time job to actually understand.
That's not to say it's not a good idea, because it is a good idea, but there's a really big lift in terms of getting mainstream adoption.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|9 years ago|reply
The fact that they called it a hack when it explicitly followed the Ethereum guidelines calls into doubt the sincerity of the people behind Ethereum.
http://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists/
If people want to actually have malleable contracts in the case of fraud, the courts provide a much more accountable process that has had centuries of fine tuning.
[+] [-] ReverseCold|9 years ago|reply
Random plug for non Turing complete smart contact systems like Decred.
(I don't own any decred, nor am I part of the team, I just idle in IRC.)
[+] [-] alexmingoia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brilliantcode|9 years ago|reply
It's so disruptive even the creators choose to use the old "outdated" way it claims to be solving.
If you don't eat your own dog food it means you don't have confidence in it. So why push the garbage on to somebody else who will take all the risks?
How the heck does this make frontpage?
[+] [-] primitivesuave|9 years ago|reply
What would be really interesting is if some day you could buy a self-driving car with Ethereum. With an Uber-like app that accepts payment in Ethereum, and blockchain investments to rapidly scale the business up and reinvest profits, one could see a self-driving car company dominate the market in a far shorter time than it took Uber to do so.
It's even possible that some day we see a unicorn startup with a solo developer.
[+] [-] vidarh|9 years ago|reply
No, it gives insight into what has been done in Ethereum using the accounts tied to this "company". If investors are led to believe that this gives perfect clarity, that makes defrauding investors trivially easy by simply keeping things outside of what gets recorded. Keeping multiple books is the oldest trick in the book.
[+] [-] aaron-lebo|9 years ago|reply
What would be really interesting is if some day you could buy a self-driving car with Ethereum. With an Uber-like app that accepts payment in Ethereum, and blockchain investments to rapidly scale the business up and reinvest profits, one could see a self-driving car company dominate the market in a far shorter time than it took Uber to do so.
Why can't a regular company do that? Blockchian payments are really the very least of your problems if you are trying to create a profitable self-driving car company.
What benefit does it offer other than being cool?
[+] [-] joosters|9 years ago|reply
Laws do not magically vanish when something goes into a blockchain.
[+] [-] DennisP|9 years ago|reply
One the other hand, the Ethereum Name Service should be going live before long, and within the next year or so it should also have Swarm (distributed data storage) and Whisper (secure messaging) live as well, both integrated into Ethereum. The ultimate goal is that you wan't need web hosting.
[+] [-] fudged71|9 years ago|reply
already possible. this allows you to create a ZERO person startup. you can be a contractor to a software algo.
[+] [-] dlevi|9 years ago|reply
I also believe that some of the tools these guys are building can be very useful for conventional companies too. There's a whole lot of bureaucracy and inefficiency in running a company.
See eShares and his elegant and simple solution for cap management. I believe there are many other areas in which similar improvements can be made, and software needed to run a blockchain company could also be used to improve procedures at conventional companies.
[+] [-] empath75|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dleslie|9 years ago|reply
Ethereum proved that automated systems that serve human needs will eventually incur human intervention.
[+] [-] izqui|9 years ago|reply
We build on top of them and all our contracts will be throughly audited before going into production
[+] [-] efields|9 years ago|reply
Says so much with so little.
[+] [-] ggoerlich|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JorgeGT|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theamk|9 years ago|reply
So if someone installs malware on your laptop, they get to own your shares forever? Living dangerously, man!
[+] [-] izqui|9 years ago|reply
Using a hardware wallet like Ledger rules that scenario out.
[+] [-] Fej|9 years ago|reply
Just as Bitcoin lovers are learning the hard way why we have banking regulations, so are Ethereum followers learning the hard way why we have courts.
[+] [-] camdenlock|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitiell0|9 years ago|reply
I'd like to just keep up with the project. Is this intentional or is there another way to join the mailing list?
[+] [-] izqui|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dyu-|9 years ago|reply
1. semantic-ui.com
[+] [-] naragon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] che_shirecat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|9 years ago|reply