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Comment by pyentropy | Hacker News Reader

My instinct was to close the site immediately but decided to read what Woz is up to.

Navigation didn't work for some stuff on mogile but I dowloaded the PDF whitepaper and I must say this is more shallow than most "tokens".

If I understand correctly, people invest money into a pool that is distributed for companies/industries to spend, in order to increase their energy efficiency. Once they are done ("once" should be "if"), part of their savings goes to the investors. I think it is reasonable to assume that such process doesn't need any crypto proof and ultimately depends on lawyers, salesmen and bankers. Making a company or an industry more efficient requires talent and strategy, not just pouring money and it is a very risky and long process. If these guys feel competent to make a profitable energy efficiency fund, they should start one. And with clear legal protection for the investors, not a token.

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> I think it is reasonable to assume that such process doesn't need any crypto proof and ultimately depends on lawyers, salesmen and bankers.

This is true of basically every single cryptocurrency project.

The main problem the cryptocurrency tends to solve is that the lawyers, salesmen and bankers have an annoying tendency to insist you follow the law and don't steal everything.

It has the AM/FM trust problem wherein a business will always trust paper contracts and lawyers over Fucking Magic like this.

Edit: Good example, estate transfers and mortgages are a potentially quite good use-case for blockchain. Why is nobody using it? Because it's Fucking Magic.. nobody with a sensible risk profile is going to replace a "contracts and lawyers" process that works well-enough with Fucking Magic.

In cases of property transfers the lack of trust in blockchain is understandable because contracts and lawyers can annul your “fucking magic” due to local legislatures.

Yeah it's just a different way of managing a fund or investment company. Just that there is less regulatory oversight for the managing entity (bad for you), and a large part of the tokens is owned by them, so they can bring a lot of new tokens into the market.

The fact that it's a blockchain likely makes it attractive to some people, so maybe it was chosen for marketing/hype reasons. Would it have landed at the hn front page had it been a traditional investment company? Likely not.

Their claim in one section of the white pages is that blockchain provides reliable data serialisation, so keeping track of how many KWh you saved, for example, becomes trustworthy. By this logic though, all financial services and human data aggregators should be running on blockchain instead of a regular old database.

Well, arguably a lot more financial services at least. It just can't happen yet because blockchains don't scale enough.

A while back I read Matt Taibbi's book The Divide. Chapter 8 was about collection on delinquent credit card debt, and it was horrifying. According to Taibbi, "the bulk of the credit card collection business is conducted without any supporting documentation showing up or being seen by human eyes at any part of the process....in the overwhelmed modern court system, simply attesting to having the right documentation works just as well as really having it."

According to one judge, "On a regular basis this court encounters defendants being sued on the same debt by more than one creditor alleging it is the assignee of the original credit card obligation." It's also common for lenders to claim delinquency despite the loan actually being paid.

In theory, defendants can challenge all this but even if they could afford lawyers, they often don't even know they're getting sued. When they don't show up there's a default judgement against them and their wages get garnished.

If we had a really scalable blockchain to run all this, including the loan payments and loan sales, then courts could automatically check this stuff. We have the tech now to maintain sufficient privacy for borrowers.

Of course we wouldn't need a blockchain if courts were doing their job, but a pure software solution is likely cheaper than spending a lot more tax money to examine paper documents.

> they often don't even know they're getting sued.

What do you mean by that? Do you not get a mail that you should show up in court? Or do you have to read the newspaper public announcements?

The lender is required to make an effort to contact the borrower (as in "you've been served") but since it's in their interest to make a very cursory effort, that's what they do. Some people get the notice but a lot don't. Notices going to old addresses are common. Generally lenders pay a third party and iirc some of those were caught making no effort at all.

What you described just seems like a form of financing. Companies would presumably invest in energy saving and get some future savings which they can use to repay the financing. Companies can (and many do) already tap existing credit lines to invest in projects that save them energy (costs).

I'm reminded of Matt Levine's comments on crypto:

> The blockchain-y reinvention of everything in the financial world -- money, contracts, companies -- is fascinating and impressive and, viewed from a certain angle, adorable. But sometimes it could stand to learn from what has gone before. After all, the elements of finance -- money, contracts, companies -- have already been invented. Perhaps their historical development might hold some lessons for their re-inventors.

A price already exists on energy and companies have an incentive to reduce their energy consumption if only to save money. Maybe you don't agree with the price, or maybe you don't agree with the cost of financing, but those two levers you can more directly control and certainly don't require blockchain

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-17/blockc...

Why would anyone buy a car when they can walk?

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