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Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

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Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#71

Post by igk »

haywirez wrote: post #64
pavel_lishin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A crypto-contract can't evaluate the work you've delivered. If we enter into some arbitrary crypto-contract for me to build you a chair in exchange for 20 currencies, and I bring you a stump I hacked out of the woods, there's no underlying system that can tell me to fuck off and that I'm not getting paid.

Isn't this fully addressed by decentralized arbitrators and reputation systems, with a solid economic incentive setup? After all, we are just remaking human civilization on top of more efficient, modern platforms...the same old mechanisms will apply, they'll just (hopefully) work faster & better.

Thing is, that's not how it's pitched, and the trade-off needs to be worth it. I personally would rather we found a way to do verifiable e voting (no idea how though, some cryptographic way to sign the logic used to express the program so you can verify it's the thing everyone agreed on?) and remade our cooperation systems into a working version of libertarian communism/syndicalistic anarchism. IIRC rojave is trying something like that right now?

Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#72

Post by joosters »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #53
monkmartinez wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no underlying system that can tell me to fuck off and that I'm not getting paid. You are right. This is why these things will not go anywhere. Ultimately they need some kind of "back up"... For example, the system we currently have flows like so: Nation state Military > Federal Police > Local Police > Physical Intimidation via face to face meeting. At every step, stop when lawyers and/or politicians get inv…

Well, you could have trusted third-party arbiters who would evaluate whether or not to release the funds on delivery of the good or service. But that brings on a whole new level of reputation-economy things you have to think about.

Then what's the point of doing the transaction with a digital contract in the first place? Weren't they meant to remove the need for trust or centralised arbitration?

We already have well-established mechanisms to arbitrate these kind of disagreements, e.g. courts. Adding blockchains to the process just makes it more complicated for no gain.

Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#73

Post by joosters »

primitivesuave wrote: post #45

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 deci…

and would be free of taxation and government regulation

Laws do not magically vanish when something goes into a blockchain.

Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#74

Post by joosters »

anigbrowl wrote: post #61
aaron-lebo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah but what if a DAO doesn't have a physical office that can be shut down? It's very difficult to stop the spread of something people want to use, and will only become more so.

The DAO didn't need a physical office for it to be 'hacked' and drained.

And a car sharing scheme would need physical cars, making it pretty easy to take down the system or haul the car owners to court if the service is breaking laws.

Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#75

Post by joosters »

izqui wrote: post #11
JorgeGT wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Bad assumption there, Aragon companies will be able to handle tokenized fiat (USD, EUR, etc). Santander is working on a stable coin project to tokenize EUR and USD http://www.coindesk.com/santander-vies-become-first-bank-iss...

People say 'stable coins' as if it's a simple matter to create them. There have already been several cryptocurrencies that were meant to be locked in value to a real-world currency or commodity. They all fail in the end, and any system relying on them will collapse when the values diverge.

You cannot perfectly link a real world item to a digital asset without losing the 'trust-free' nature of cryptocoins. You always end up having to trust someone. And once you do that, you've lost all of the advantages of the digital asset.

Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#76

Post by joosters »

izqui wrote: post #23
monkmartinez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the stable coin look like? I mean, we already have 700+[1] "coins." we are way passed the ridiculous stage on that front. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies

A stable coin is a crypto asset that is backed by a real value. If you own 1 EthUSD, there is a warranty that someone will give you 1 USD for that token

A real-world warranty, which means you can't rely on it. You might own as many EthUSD tokens as you want but you can never be sure that someone will buy them from you at the 'fixed' price.

Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#77

Post by joosters »

izqui wrote: post #14
theamk wrote: post #9

I know this is old news, but I still have to say this: So if someone installs malware on your laptop, they get to own your shares forever? Living dangerously, man!

That's why the needed security measures need to be in place. Using a hardware wallet like Ledger rules that scenario out.

You can't trust hardware wallets either - people have been handing out free hardware wallets at conferences that steal the user's coins.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/caution-scammers-can-steal-yo...

Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#78

Post by DennisP »

seagreen wrote: post #10
izqui wrote: post #3

This is Jorge, Tech Lead at Aragon, a platform for creating companies on top of the Ethereum blockchain (DACs). Here is our launch post and mission statement: https://medium.com/aragondec/introducing-aragon-unstoppable-... 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 amb…

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/s…

Disclaimer: I write and audit Solidity for a living.

The max-callstack issue isn't a problem anymore due to a change in the EVM.

TheDAO was hit with a reentrant call. It's pretty easy to avoid that class of bugs by either (1) putting any external calls (including ether transfers) after all state changes, or (2) using address.send instead of address.call.value. Also, TheDAO was a very convoluted contract; better coding practices help a lot. Any contract that's at all hard to understand is a huge red flag for me.

Solidity may not be a perfect language but it's rapidly improving, statically typed, and has a set of best practices which are fairly well known at this point. The current alternatives aren't nearly as well tested or reviewed, and don't have clear advantages anyway.

There are various experimental projects for more advanced functional-style languages but they're not ready yet. There's also someone at the Foundation working full-time on formal proof systems.

Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#79

Post by DennisP »

primitivesuave wrote: post #45

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 deci…

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.

Re: Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

#80

Post by monkmartinez »

smokeyj wrote: post #65
monkmartinez wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who or what backs up the arbitrator? This is why we have guns, police, prisons, and militaries and lawyers....

> Who or what backs up the arbitrator? Ethereum contracts are turing complete. The payout function can be contingent on either the buyer or arbitrators releasing the funds. The arbitrators can be determined before hand or rely on an external contract that offers arbitration services. The possibilities are truly endless.

> The payout function can be contingent on either the buyer or arbitrators releasing the funds.

How long is the discovery period? What about "returns"? What if the arbitrator is working with the seller and scams me? When does "I have a big gun and I am not afraid to use it" come into the function?

> The arbitrators can be determined before hand or rely on an external contract that offers arbitration services.

And how much will those services cost? Who vets the arbitrator? What is my recourse if arbitration fails?

> The possibilities are truly endless.

Yes, I agree. This is just built for a place that does not yet exist.

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