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Comment by globuous | Hacker News Reader

I like to think of smart contracts as ways to program money. Imagine if you could program a dollar bill. Then there's lots of cool stuff that could be done :)

If you could program money, you might not really need insurers anymore. You could just program insuree's money so it redistributed appropriately in case of flooding (for eg). No need to give you money to an entity and have a conflict of interest with your insurer.

Smart contracts are ways to program money by sending it to special addresses. These addresses contain a script that will decide how to redistribute the money. It's like if you insurance was a program.

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It's like if you insurance was a program.

That's an interesting way to think about it, but how do you communicate to the program that a tree fell on your car and you need it to give you money for a new one?

Basically what's the mechanism for communicating certain cases or conditions to the program, how does the program verify the claims you make to it, and how many of the scenarios where that works are practical for any real world applications?

I'd argue most consumer insurance programs depend a lot on interpretation. You don't want to be exposed to Inadvertent Algorthmic Cruelty when you're in a situation where your civil insurance should kick in.

IMO Smart contracts are a good way to model and trade securities, options or futures instead, leaving the underlying assets to be managed by real world humans who can make things happen out of the blockchain.

You'd still be able to rely on human interpreters, who would do all the on-the-ground work the insurance adjuster does. There would be a clearinghouse for those jobs, and contractors would do them.

The incentives could be set up such that the cost of being caught straying from protocol would be higher than the fraud opportunity.

Or you could just reply on network-of-trust. Brand loyalty, etc. Choose Aetna claim investigators! We Follow Protocol

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