Comment by Tangokat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tangokat | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree. Decentralization makes it possible to cut out the middle man, Sotheby is no longer needed to do art deals, you can buy directly via smart contract. Will some people buy via Sotheby's still because they provide value in curating items? Sure but they will have much more competition than they do now.

It also makes new things possible, for instance the original artist could get a cut of every resale of his art. People can own parts of art, music etc. Artists can go directly to their fans.

Another example is Defi which also cuts out the middleman. I want to send you 100 usd. I have euro, right now I need to go to my bank app and they will convert for a pretty big fee , they will also take 5 days to send it to you if it's international and god help me if there are holidays involved. With defi I send instantly and I will be able to choose what kind of value I send and you will be able to choose what kind of value you want to receive. I don't even need to know. I could send you euros and you receive in usd, it passes through a defi smart contract on the way without any of us knowing. If I'm a farmer and I have corn futures I could probably pay in that and you would still just get usd. Again cuts out the middleman.

Does it help that it's also censorship resistant and trustless? Yes. The ease of use is not on par with legacy for my mum.. yet. But that was also the case in 1995 with the internet.

> Sotheby is no longer needed to do art deals, you can buy directly via smart contract.

Sotheby's was never about the actual transaction, there has historically been little technical barrier in this area - the real barrier has been grift, fakes, and limited market pools. Crypto doesn't solve any of these things, so they will remain the real barrier.

> for instance the original artist could get a cut of every resale of his art. People can own parts of art, music etc. Artists can go directly to their fans.

There is no technical barrier to any of these things now, other than the difficulty of setting up contracts. You can speculate that making the contracts easier to set up will result in lots more of it; but that is a pretty strong assumption that this is the "real" barrier. Like the fine art case, it may well not be. I suspect that in some areas it will result in some interesting things that are low enough value (at least per transaction) that nobody bothered to figure out an agreement on them, particularly across borders. But this has a huge risk of being shut down for being at minimum tax-evasion adjacent, even if useful.

> I could send you euros and you receive in usd, it passes through a defi smart contract on the way without any of us knowing.

This is easily done now by traditional financial transactions, the only problem is the FX risk and transaction fees may be a) higher than you want and b) unpredictable.

Neither of those things are "solved" by using defi, you are basically hoping that the fees are/remain smaller, and possibly handwaving about the FX risk on some future with the underlying is useful to both parties.

All these products are amazing technical feats, but they all aim to do one thing: cutting the middleman

The middleman is a social necessity, not solely a technical one. Retail doesn't want the responsibility. Is that simple, so enter the middleman there to absorb risk.

A protocol can't be a middleman. A middleman should be capable of being sued and be the fall guy if something goes wrong. Mostly it should be there to give peace of mind to the customer.

A protocol can't give peace of mind to the customer given that such code can't be read by 99.99999999999% of the population.

The middleman needs to exist to give peace of mind to the customer, and as I said it can't be a protocol. So it can only be a company with a brand, spending millions in Ads to earn the trust of the consumer so that he'd feel confident to put his money in it and in turn can sleep tight at night, knowing that his money are with an institution which is somehow trustworthy.

Nobody in the crypto world ever makes a market study or a revenue projection, or even a survey among the population and users.

People go and build stuff. Projecting themselves into the retail user. The only problem is that the crypto founder is not representative of the retail user, not even one bit. The crypto founder wants the responsibility, wants to kick the the final penalty in the World Cup final or be with the ball in your hands and 2 mins to win the SuperBowl. That is not the mindset of the retail user.

"We ship the products we'd want to buy" as Steve Jobs said in a keynote...only he used it as catchphrase to get the applauses and sell Apple to the world and to Wall Street.

People in crytpo , they do it for real. You never do it for real. You end up with your butt on the ground and nothing to show for financially.

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