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Comment by Grimm1 | Hacker News Reader

> I will grant you "simple", and maybe even "common"... but only because most people don't really understand decentralization and many of the ones who do don't care about it.

So assuming that this is mainly an issue of people not understanding versus understanding and not caring (though you said there’s some of that) how is the Ethereum community going to get the word out so that this becomes a mainstream success versus mainly for speculation as it is now?

A common issue and one that I personally feel crypto in general suffers from is that neat tech isnt a a criteria on which most people flock to use something so what are the reasons end users need to know to be like ah yup I will drop my regular finance interactions for this or heavily augment them with this?

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It helps to consider the context of finance as glue that helps make the real economy move by reducing fraud. Deciding to use a crypto solution is like deciding to use double-entry accounting: it creates a quick and reliable record of transactions in a certain context, this context being one of consent. Putting consent mechanisms on-chain gives many of the benefits of a trusted third party without designation of an actual fallable, corruptable person or institution. That allows the surrounding regulatory framework to be streamlined and take on more and smaller cases with a lower footprint. But there is a chicken and egg scenario there since the norms have to shift towards these solutions before they gain all the desired efficiencies.

That said, I was paid in crypto the other day through a DAO. I was told how to submit a proposal to be paid, and then the funds were released through a vote within hours. It was transparent and the only hiccup was in needing a 70 cent bond fee to submit the proposal - it wasn't "controlled" in the usual sense of assigning a person to handle funds. So I already see some benefit in organizational structure.

Hmm yeah that is certainly interesting in the sense that it was easier to receive payment than it otherwise may have been in current financial systems. Easier to trace and such too I imagine if it was needed.

To your point about transparency and trust for general transactions, I can see how that will be useful but don't you lose the ability that most trusted entities have now which is to roll back the transaction or correct a situation if fraud has occurred, given what I understand to be the finality of a contract? That said, I'm personally not really worried about making a transaction over say VISA's network but I am concerned about the end party I'm interacting with and I feel like crypto in general doesn't do well to address that, which I almost feel like is the real issue. I don't think I understand why people feel like it's an issue if they have to transact over a bigger central authority, perhaps I'm just too far removed from the group of people not served by classical finance.

I question your premise. If you analyze "by weight instead of by volume" then I maintain that all of the important projects you hear about--think of the decentralized exchanges or lending platforms, such as Uniswap--do not have back doors in their contracts for centralized code updates: when Uniswap wants to build a new version, they release a totally new system that happens to share a name.

That there are a large number of silly projects most people haven't heard of, or random tutorials on the web for getting started in crypto, that involve building contracts with backdoors is no different from any technology... most stuff isn't scalable or even slightly secure, even if the products from the biggest companies and used by the most people tend to be: like think how many websites have ubiquitous SQL or HTML injection attacks... only "by volume" (looking at the total number of such websites, irrespective of how much use they get) as "by weight" (looking at the websites you use during the course of a day by how much you use them) I bet almost none of them do.

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