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Comment by jakecrouch | Hacker News Reader

What is the advantage of using the blockchain rather than creating a fully centralized debt exchange?

I guess easier access to global markets, and reduced counter party risk with the exchange. Having the loans fully or over-collateralised (in the absence of credit scoring and real world debt collection) definitely reduces potential applications though.

Congrats on the launch still, great name ;)

I'd recommend reading this blog post we put out. It explains better than I can in a short comment: https://blog.dharma.io/dharma-an-open-protocol-for-generic-t...

I am interested in knowing if there are advantages to using blockchain generally outside of Bitcoin - I don't understand it in this case from reading the post. A centralized exchange could be fully transparent, publishing every transaction, and handle every type of debt, if it wanted to.

Censorship resistance is a big factor - since no one entity controls the Ethereum blockchain or smart contracts that have been deployed to Ethereum, there is no way to shut down the service. This paves the way to a single global capital market that is much more inclusive and efficient than the haphazard and heavily intermediated capital markets we have today.

It absolutely is not censorship resistant. It is 100% mob rule. Smart contracts are complete horseshit and this one will be no different. See also: the DAO. Can’t work and never will.

A privately owned centralized debt exchange company can go out of business.

And one of these can fork itself to leave you stranded if the mob (or top of the pyramid) switch to another more popular fork. You’ll be left holding a bag of worthless tokens. You’ve traded the entire legal infrastructure for mob rule.

This project, like all crypto projects, is fundamentally flawed. The only difference is this one somehow managed to con a bunch of VC folk into funding it.

If a blockchain forks you have copies on both forks. What are you talking about?

Investor buy-in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com