On 11/02/2013 07:53 PM, Benjamin Cordes wrote:
> "I prefer to keep Bitcoin pure, simple and focused. Value transfer
> from A ? B. "
>
> Almost all meaningful economic transactions involve third parties.
> Governments and courts evolved for precisely this reason. Contracts
> are enforced by the law (and thereby the power of the state, as Mike
> pointed out). The question very much remains how Bitcoin improves at
> all on economic transactions. I think there is a lot of confusion
> about this, to put it mildly. Much of what is written is not very
> well intellectually grounded. Courts, democracies, governments
> evolved over roughly 1000 years.
>

Those very real concerns mentioned taken as granted and worthy, there's
an appeal to tradition embedded here.

We may still need third parties for certain things, but tradition isn't
a good place to look for reasons to have them. Instead, we have the
opportunity to re-imagine almost everything about how to do commerce,
and then go and actually implement that in code.

How much remains P2P and how much will require third parties --
especially centralized third parties -- for services like escrow,
clearing, exchange, bonding, securitization, arbitration, reputation and
so on remains to be seen. An, in my mind, the technologies that win on
this new frontier will be the ones that push as far toward the P2P end
of the scale as much as possible.

Peace,
Mike