12 ms·

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

191 points by luisivan 10y ago

camdenlock 10y ago
Oh dear...
izqui 10y ago
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-companies-58c1fd2d00ce#.i4z2dku09 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 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.
- Alex3917 10y ago
  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.
  - izqui 10y ago
    I completely agree, insurance and proper bug bounty mechanisms are being worked on.
- seagreen 10y ago
  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 http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html)
  - izqui 10y ago
    Solidity http://solidity.readthedocs.io http://solidity.readthedocs.io
  - izqui 10y ago
    I think that Solidity is quickly getting ready for prime time and in 2017 we will see tons of very big and high stake projects getting deployed. That being said, there are already projects like http://rouleth.com http://rouleth.com that has been managing an over $100k bankroll with no issues for 8 months now. To sum up, if the needed security measures are taken, you should be good. And we won't be encouraging anyone to run a company with Aragon in production for the next months until proper security audits have been done.
    - seagreen 10y ago
      Please consider trying to get off of Solidity at some point. It doesn't matter how much auditing is done, if you're building on a shaky foundation mistakes will eventually slip through. Solidity is definitely a shaky foundation. I really admire projects like yours for their daring, but that needs to be backed up with hard engineering work. I would hate to see smart contracts go down the path of the "Internet of things" -- finally succeeding only to cause more harm than good due to compounding security vulnerabilities.
  - semiel 10y ago
    Solidity is not an ideal language, but I also think that the ~deep concern~ everyone has about it is overblown. C is a pretty problematic language too, but plenty of reliable software is built in it. Engineering and testing practices are more important than bikeshedding the language itself.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  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?
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    It also includes: You can replace every intermediary with a more efficient and fair decentralized solution. How? Decentralized solutions by their nature are less efficient than centralized solutions. One of the most basic needs in humans’ lives is to transact. Create products, provide services, sell them to others. Add value to their lives. The market. It’s the core of everything we do, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. The market system is how we live. What does this mean? It sounds like something you'd hear on Silicon Valley. Very rah-rah but where's the substance? I feel like this is a cool technical solution that is not realizing that the real issue is social and bureaucratic. The way they are pitching themselves doesn't give me faith that they have a solid plan. Hopefully that's not unfair.
- alexmingoia 10y ago
  Are you dogfooding Aragon? Do you get paid and manage your shares through it?
ggoerlich 10y ago
I don't get the "shareholder" scenario. How can this work with any legal and/or financial/banking regulations?
- JorgeGT 10y ago
  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...
  - izqui 10y ago
    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-issue-digital-cash-blockchain/ http://www.coindesk.com/santander-vies-become-first-bank-iss...
    - JorgeGT 10y ago
      Your link talks about a conceptual project that isn't in any way running yet nor has been approved by the National Bank of Spain. How can Aragon companies comply with their INSS obligations today?
      - obsolete_ideas 10y ago
        Please note the central words on this project's website: Unstoppable companies: Create value without borders or intermediaries. In other words, your concerns are not this project's concerns—not even in the slightest; this project probably considers your world view to be not only obsolete, but in need of distruption that is so extreme as to be radically revolutionary. Your "Spain" (and, especially, your "Spanish Social Security Institute") are utterly meaningless in this project's vision of the future.
      - izqui 10y ago
        It is a responsibility of the individual to follow the laws of her jurisdiction. It is a global project, so we won't be working with every local regulatory body. Aragon is creating a framework (as an open source project) for running Blockchain companies. We don't provide legal advice nor services, we don't take any responsibility for a hypothetic bad usage of our software.
empath75 10y ago
So what happens when someone finds a flaw in the contract and empties you out?
- izqui 10y ago
  That's why initiatives such as https://openzeppelin.org https://openzeppelin.org are needed. We build on top of them and all our contracts will be throughly audited before going into production
  - kej 10y ago
    Regardless of how audited the code is, the DAO fiasco showed that the Ethereum miners will modify the "immutable" blockchain if it reaches an unpopular result, even when the bug is in a contract and not Ethereum itself.
- dleslie 10y ago
  Evidently, you hard fork the chain. Ethereum proved that automated systems that serve human needs will eventually incur human intervention.
  - izqui 10y ago
    "automated systems that serve human needs will eventually incur human intervention" this is just wrong. The world is moving towards more automated systems, the fact that there was one mistake at a given point in time doesn't mean anything. By mistake I mean putting so much money on an unproved experiment.
    - brilliantcode 10y ago
      so if your account gets emptied by hackers, it's justified because this is just how decentralization works? Who is claiming this is "how the world works now" and who asked for a solution? It seems to me Ethereum and other products built on it solves problems imagined by the creators and balk when people poke holes at it, without responding with a modicum of rationality but a lot of self fulfilling prophecy. Why would anyone expose themselves to more risks by using Aragon? Why decentralize and create more problems when everybody has been using centralized systems without issues over the past few centuries? What problem is it that you are solving with Aragon? I don't see one. Better yet, are you running Aragon to run your company? This question has come up multiple times in the comments with no response. It's pretty telling.
theamk 10y ago
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!
- izqui 10y ago
  That's why the needed security measures need to be in place. Using a hardware wallet like Ledger rules that scenario out.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    Until is gets stolen and you can't prove you own anything, or?
    - izqui 10y ago
      Exactly.
      - brilliantcode 10y ago
        So if Facebook ran on Aragon, and the shares got hijacked, tough shit? Zuckerberg can't prove himself? Some guy in Yekaterinburg is the new CEO?
        vkou 10y ago
        If history is any indication, you collude with the miners and hard-fork. They have incentive to do that, because their work becomes worthless if ETH were to lose value because that kind of theft would destroy user confidence in the cryptocurrency. I think the rest of the world would call that state of affairs a 'bubble'.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        Now what do you do once a court hands down a ruling requiring said shares be transferred to a given person? Guess what, they're not going to accept "we can't" as a valid answer.
vitiell0 10y ago
When I try to enter my email for the mailing list I am getting the error: invite_limit_reached I'd like to just keep up with the project. Is this intentional or is there another way to join the mailing list?
- izqui 10y ago
  I'm just aware that we reached the limit. Talking to Slack now to get it waived
Jd 10y ago
My 'cryptoequity' project was on the Hacker News front page a couple years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992667 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.
- clavalle 10y ago
  > 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?
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    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.
    - monkmartinez 10y ago
      > 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 involved.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
alexmingoia 10y ago
Is https://aragon.one https://aragon.one itself using Aragon? If not, why?
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  Peculiar how author dodges this question, the answer is presumably no. 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?
  - syrrim 10y ago
    The current product is only considered by the creators to be alpha. They don't expect anyone else to found their business on it, and they aren't yet making their business rely on it. Even if it does become more stable in the future, they haven't made the case that this is well suited for all businesses. It is designed to enable cooperation between stakeholders; a company with one major stakeholder has little need for it.
primitivesuave 10y ago
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.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  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. What benefit does it offer other than being cool?
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    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.
    - joosters 10y ago
      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.
efields 10y ago
"It may take a while to load – beware of the bugs and glitches. Chrome-only for now" Says so much with so little.
anigbrowl 10y ago
invite_limit_reached when I try to sign up :-/
naragon 10y ago
Coolest thing I've seen today, if only because my last name is Aragon.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago
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. http://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists/ 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 10y ago
  This is why ethereum classic exists, but it's also shown that smart contacts are generally unreliable. 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.)
che_shirecat 10y ago
why does your "press" link to a public dropbox folder for branding material? this is all so amateur
dyu- 10y ago
Looks like they're using unmodified semantic ui[1] based from their screenshot. 1. semantic-ui.com
Fej 10y ago
To repeat a comment I heard elsewhere - 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.
dlevi 10y ago
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.

191 points by luisivan 10y ago

Oh dear...

izqui 10y ago

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-companies-58c1fd2d00ce#.i4z2dku09 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 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.

Alex3917 10y ago
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.
- izqui 10y ago
  I completely agree, insurance and proper bug bounty mechanisms are being worked on.
seagreen 10y ago
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 http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html)
- izqui 10y ago
  Solidity http://solidity.readthedocs.io http://solidity.readthedocs.io
- izqui 10y ago
  I think that Solidity is quickly getting ready for prime time and in 2017 we will see tons of very big and high stake projects getting deployed. That being said, there are already projects like http://rouleth.com http://rouleth.com that has been managing an over $100k bankroll with no issues for 8 months now. To sum up, if the needed security measures are taken, you should be good. And we won't be encouraging anyone to run a company with Aragon in production for the next months until proper security audits have been done.
  - seagreen 10y ago
    Please consider trying to get off of Solidity at some point. It doesn't matter how much auditing is done, if you're building on a shaky foundation mistakes will eventually slip through. Solidity is definitely a shaky foundation. I really admire projects like yours for their daring, but that needs to be backed up with hard engineering work. I would hate to see smart contracts go down the path of the "Internet of things" -- finally succeeding only to cause more harm than good due to compounding security vulnerabilities.
- semiel 10y ago
  Solidity is not an ideal language, but I also think that the ~deep concern~ everyone has about it is overblown. C is a pretty problematic language too, but plenty of reliable software is built in it. Engineering and testing practices are more important than bikeshedding the language itself.
monkmartinez 10y ago
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?
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  It also includes: You can replace every intermediary with a more efficient and fair decentralized solution. How? Decentralized solutions by their nature are less efficient than centralized solutions. One of the most basic needs in humans’ lives is to transact. Create products, provide services, sell them to others. Add value to their lives. The market. It’s the core of everything we do, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. The market system is how we live. What does this mean? It sounds like something you'd hear on Silicon Valley. Very rah-rah but where's the substance? I feel like this is a cool technical solution that is not realizing that the real issue is social and bureaucratic. The way they are pitching themselves doesn't give me faith that they have a solid plan. Hopefully that's not unfair.
alexmingoia 10y ago
Are you dogfooding Aragon? Do you get paid and manage your shares through it?

ggoerlich 10y ago

I don't get the "shareholder" scenario. How can this work with any legal and/or financial/banking regulations?

JorgeGT 10y ago
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...
- izqui 10y ago
  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-issue-digital-cash-blockchain/ http://www.coindesk.com/santander-vies-become-first-bank-iss...
  - JorgeGT 10y ago
    Your link talks about a conceptual project that isn't in any way running yet nor has been approved by the National Bank of Spain. How can Aragon companies comply with their INSS obligations today?
    - obsolete_ideas 10y ago
      Please note the central words on this project's website: Unstoppable companies: Create value without borders or intermediaries. In other words, your concerns are not this project's concerns—not even in the slightest; this project probably considers your world view to be not only obsolete, but in need of distruption that is so extreme as to be radically revolutionary. Your "Spain" (and, especially, your "Spanish Social Security Institute") are utterly meaningless in this project's vision of the future.
    - izqui 10y ago
      It is a responsibility of the individual to follow the laws of her jurisdiction. It is a global project, so we won't be working with every local regulatory body. Aragon is creating a framework (as an open source project) for running Blockchain companies. We don't provide legal advice nor services, we don't take any responsibility for a hypothetic bad usage of our software.

empath75 10y ago

So what happens when someone finds a flaw in the contract and empties you out?

izqui 10y ago
That's why initiatives such as https://openzeppelin.org https://openzeppelin.org are needed. We build on top of them and all our contracts will be throughly audited before going into production
- kej 10y ago
  Regardless of how audited the code is, the DAO fiasco showed that the Ethereum miners will modify the "immutable" blockchain if it reaches an unpopular result, even when the bug is in a contract and not Ethereum itself.
dleslie 10y ago
Evidently, you hard fork the chain. Ethereum proved that automated systems that serve human needs will eventually incur human intervention.
- izqui 10y ago
  "automated systems that serve human needs will eventually incur human intervention" this is just wrong. The world is moving towards more automated systems, the fact that there was one mistake at a given point in time doesn't mean anything. By mistake I mean putting so much money on an unproved experiment.
  - brilliantcode 10y ago
    so if your account gets emptied by hackers, it's justified because this is just how decentralization works? Who is claiming this is "how the world works now" and who asked for a solution? It seems to me Ethereum and other products built on it solves problems imagined by the creators and balk when people poke holes at it, without responding with a modicum of rationality but a lot of self fulfilling prophecy. Why would anyone expose themselves to more risks by using Aragon? Why decentralize and create more problems when everybody has been using centralized systems without issues over the past few centuries? What problem is it that you are solving with Aragon? I don't see one. Better yet, are you running Aragon to run your company? This question has come up multiple times in the comments with no response. It's pretty telling.

theamk 10y ago

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!

izqui 10y ago
That's why the needed security measures need to be in place. Using a hardware wallet like Ledger rules that scenario out.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  Until is gets stolen and you can't prove you own anything, or?
  - izqui 10y ago
    Exactly.
    - brilliantcode 10y ago
      So if Facebook ran on Aragon, and the shares got hijacked, tough shit? Zuckerberg can't prove himself? Some guy in Yekaterinburg is the new CEO?
      - vkou 10y ago
        If history is any indication, you collude with the miners and hard-fork. They have incentive to do that, because their work becomes worthless if ETH were to lose value because that kind of theft would destroy user confidence in the cryptocurrency. I think the rest of the world would call that state of affairs a 'bubble'.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      Now what do you do once a court hands down a ruling requiring said shares be transferred to a given person? Guess what, they're not going to accept "we can't" as a valid answer.

vitiell0 10y ago

When I try to enter my email for the mailing list I am getting the error: invite_limit_reached I'd like to just keep up with the project. Is this intentional or is there another way to join the mailing list?

izqui 10y ago
I'm just aware that we reached the limit. Talking to Slack now to get it waived

Jd 10y ago

My 'cryptoequity' project was on the Hacker News front page a couple years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992667 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.

clavalle 10y ago
> 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?
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  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.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    > 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 involved.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

alexmingoia 10y ago

Is https://aragon.one https://aragon.one itself using Aragon? If not, why?

brilliantcode 10y ago
Peculiar how author dodges this question, the answer is presumably no. 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?
- syrrim 10y ago
  The current product is only considered by the creators to be alpha. They don't expect anyone else to found their business on it, and they aren't yet making their business rely on it. Even if it does become more stable in the future, they haven't made the case that this is well suited for all businesses. It is designed to enable cooperation between stakeholders; a company with one major stakeholder has little need for it.

primitivesuave 10y ago

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.

aaron-lebo 10y ago
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. What benefit does it offer other than being cool?
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  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.
  - joosters 10y ago
    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.

efields 10y ago

"It may take a while to load – beware of the bugs and glitches. Chrome-only for now" Says so much with so little.

anigbrowl 10y ago

invite_limit_reached when I try to sign up :-/

naragon 10y ago

Coolest thing I've seen today, if only because my last name is Aragon.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago

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. http://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists/ 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 10y ago
This is why ethereum classic exists, but it's also shown that smart contacts are generally unreliable. 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.)

che_shirecat 10y ago

why does your "press" link to a public dropbox folder for branding material? this is all so amateur

dyu- 10y ago

Looks like they're using unmodified semantic ui[1] based from their screenshot. 1. semantic-ui.com

Fej 10y ago

To repeat a comment I heard elsewhere - 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.

dlevi 10y ago

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.