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Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

I think there's also a substantial subset of cases that are simple/common/clear enough to have managed through an automated contract, and being able to cut out the cost of depending on the legal system would be game-changing for many people/projects/etc.

So it seems like a good complement, not a replacement.

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Yep cause the cost of people who can put together a smart contract without major bugs is peanuts :)

Fair point :) I was admittedly thinking of more DIY scenarios, but it isn't really fair to only consider how it impacts programmers.

OTOH—without knowing many concrete details myself—seems like there would be plenty of room for reuse of contracts? Maybe even something like a storefront where you can grab one that matches your scenario

I think you prob can raise a 10 mil seed round with this idea

As open source successes start to accumulate, the costs will go down. Reuse is incentivized as development on the cryptocurrency as opposed to a perpetually monetized rent extraction by regulators or "professionals."

As open source successes start to accumulate, the costs will go down.

That hasn't happened in any other area of open source. Linux is supported by billion dollar companies with hundreds-of-millions in revenue. Container software is supported by tech giants. Browsers are the same. Web frameworks are either from corporations or they're built by people who are sponsored to build them. Most successful open source projects have revenue streams from outside the project paying people to work on them. I'd even suggest that might be a requirement for a successful project. As the project grows and gains popularity the costs of running it go up massively.

In the case of all of those projects the usefulness and utility of the projects also goes up, so people are able to make money with them that pays for the developers, and that could happen for web3 tech. I'm not suggesting web3 won't go the same way, just that economies of scale don't rrally work for software development. The more popular a software project gets the more it costs to run, forever.

I don't think they are talking about the cost of running an open source project. They are talking about the cost of creating and deploying a robust application. In that sense the cost has absolutely gone down. It's trivial to create a web application today in a way that would have been incredibly costly 20 years ago.

You don't have to pull a Paul Graham and invent a the concept of a web application for the first time. You can piggyback on decades of development and open source software and frameworks and libraries. One developer and create and deploy an application in a weekend that would take a team of engineers months to build 2000.

Yes, this exactly. Billion dollar companies contribute to open source because the model is a net economic driver. I can tap into decades long and billions of dollars of man hours of effort to offer systems admin consultation and earn a living deploying and managing open source software for people, or incorporate that into almost any business, or participate in hackathons that riff on the bleeding edge of ai or security or art. The only barrier to entry is ability and willingness to learn, and things like moocs and YouTube and Khan Academy have expanded the "open source" ethos into almost every real world endeavor.

Crypto is a nascent space that similarly enables people to bypass all the gatekeeping and institutional cruft in finance. It just turns out that a lot of the gatekeeping in finance is structurally important and intentional, so it may be a couple decades before any particular cryptocurrency is comparably robust and secure as well trusted fiat currencies like the usd or euro. A trustless and mature financial system that doesn't have the pitfalls of credit bureaus and arbitrary government policy chaos, that opens up microloans and honest banking for literally anyone, that gives opportunity to invest and trade and participate even at low levels of wealth - those are socially good things, in my view.

But a smart contract is reusable.. (that applies to paper contracts though as well!)

Can you give a practical example?

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