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A truly decentralised P2P Insurance

hack.ether.camp

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Re: A truly decentralised P2P Insurance

#3

Post by [deleted] »

kpi wrote: post #2

note that we just released a first demonstrator for devcon2 https://fdd.etherisc.com some more information on https://medium.com/the-future-requires-more/youll-love-to-be... and some discussion on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/529o5p/flightdela...

[deleted]

Re: A truly decentralised P2P Insurance

#4

Post by HairyGing3r »

kpi wrote: post #2

note that we just released a first demonstrator for devcon2 https://fdd.etherisc.com some more information on https://medium.com/the-future-requires-more/youll-love-to-be... and some discussion on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/529o5p/flightdela...

Thanks for sharing, see you in Shangai!

Re: A truly decentralised P2P Insurance

#6

Post by joosters »

How can Ethereum-based insurance products ever be competitive? For an insurance smart contract to work, all the money must be tied up in the contract (otherwise, there would be no way to guarantee that you could be paid out). But in the real world, insurers don't just leave their money sitting uselessly in a pot, they put it to work, investing it. So the smart-contract based insurance is always going to be less efficient...

Re: A truly decentralised P2P Insurance

#7

Post by kbody »

Any example that this would be useful and most of all actually applicable to real-world? The example of air flight delay is already done (see: https://www.airhelp.com ) with much better payout.

The problem I see on such "presentations" is that they focus on abstract ideas instead of taking a pragmatic approach of how to actually make it usable on a real use-case outside of the experimental playground. Sorry for the rant but it's really disappointing to keep seeing ideas that immediately fall apart when they close to be actually implemented/used.

Re: A truly decentralised P2P Insurance

#8

Post by jtchang »

I find a lot of the lingo that Ethereum uses to be crazy confusing. However the concept is appealing to distribute risk. It will only work though if there is an easily verifiable source of truth for what you are trying to distribute the risk for. For example if it was car insurance and you were trying to distribute accident risk there has to be a uniform and guaranteed way to say "this accident happened and it cost $5000". This is where the insurance company adjusters come in. You'd need infrastructure that isn't easily hacked that can guarantee a repair took place.

However for life insurance this might be possible. I think you can verify death 100% (or maybe not since there is probably fraud there as well).

Stuff like options on stocks and price can definitely be verified fairly easily.

Re: A truly decentralised P2P Insurance

#9

Post by usgroup »

If you guys hope to have an limit order-book for this you may find yourself running into serious limitations with ethereum. Storage related operations are expensive. A frequently transacted market would make the costs prohibitive.

Re: A truly decentralised P2P Insurance

#10

Post by jtchang »

joosters wrote: post #6

How can Ethereum-based insurance products ever be competitive? For an insurance smart contract to work, all the money must be tied up in the contract (otherwise, there would be no way to guarantee that you could be paid out). But in the real world, insurers don't just leave their money sitting uselessly in a pot, they put it to work, investing it. So the smart-contract based insurance is always going to be less effic…

Maybe the lower premiums would cancel out the amount that real world insurers can make. Though I kind of agree with you that having a bunch of money sitting there doing nothing is bad.
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