Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
What’s a fundamental non-currency infrastructure affordance of blockchains that can’t be delivered with web2 or older stacks easily? A near-example is NFTs bought on one site showing up on another, which you can’t do in web2 (closest is walled garden/game badges). Things like this but more infrastructurey in flavor, and neither finance related, nor fun and games. Maybe like DeFi for nonFi things?
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Mark Beylin ⏻↑
@beylin
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking here but I’ll take a stab at it My favorite example for why smart contracts are civilizationally important is - imagine a game of rock paper scissors where two players want to bet on the outcome but don’t trust each other to pay fairly if they lose. They need a third party to escrow the funds and take a % cut of the winnings. With smart contracts, you no longer need a human being to escrow the execution of your game logic to determine who wins. “Game” here is also intentionally vague because it can range from basic R/P/S all the way to real business logic based on specific (real world) data inputs. Zooming out, a surprisingly large % of our economy is made up of businesses whose entire job is charging an escrow % for managing logical execution of logic between two parties (or “brokering the relationship”).
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Mark Beylin ⏻↑
@beylin
When you combine this with the openness property you already described (where markets natively self-advertise for any interested party) the result is that you can vastly undercut the margins on a ton of these businesses. This isn’t just currency as a product, it’s a large portion of the financial services industry that simply no longer needs to exist (because the value of local relationship management with high fees isn’t worth as much in the end as global relationship self-selection with low fees). This result is only possible because the network itself is the one executing all business logic— instead of saying “we have this solution to digitally connect you to the highest trust person in your area to do this deal”, blockchains give us an efficient solution to connect you to the highest bidder on your deal, who you no longer need to trust as part of the deal’s execution. For specific examples of this see the entire financial services industry (at every level); also insurance.
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