so if your account gets emptied by hackers, it's justified because this is just how decentralization works? Who is claiming this is "how the world works now" and who asked for a solution? It seems to me Ethereum and other products built on it solves problems imagined by the creators and balk when people poke holes at it, without responding with a modicum of rationality but a lot of self fulfilling prophecy.
Why would anyone expose themselves to more risks by using Aragon?
Why decentralize and create more problems when everybody has been using centralized systems without issues over the past few centuries?
What problem is it that you are solving with Aragon? I don't see one.
Better yet, are you running Aragon to run your company? This question has come up multiple times in the comments with no response. It's pretty telling.
Oh yeah, the number of questions in this thread without answers should tell you everything you need to know about Aragon.
Any founder with a legit business who shows his project to Hacker News and gets ~40 some odd people to comment on it would almost certainly want to keep up that conversation.
I agree that having full control over your identity has risks as well as benefits, though. I expect that we'll eventually see security providers arise that have user-friendly account recovery tools. Due to the plug-and-play architecture of blockchains, that sort of thing will work automatically without any need for organizations like Aragon to integrate with them.
If history is any indication, you collude with the miners and hard-fork.
They have incentive to do that, because their work becomes worthless if ETH were to lose value because that kind of theft would destroy user confidence in the cryptocurrency.
I think the rest of the world would call that state of affairs a 'bubble'.
Your link talks about a conceptual project that isn't in any way running yet nor has been approved by the National Bank of Spain. How can Aragon companies comply with their INSS obligations today?
It is a responsibility of the individual to follow the laws of her jurisdiction. It is a global project, so we won't be working with every local regulatory body.
Aragon is creating a framework (as an open source project) for running Blockchain companies. We don't provide legal advice nor services, we don't take any responsibility for a hypothetic bad usage of our software.
Then I don't see why you choose to say "Death to paperwork. Avoid useless intermediaries" in your website if I still have to do all the required paperwork, same as before, plus now I need more useless intermediaries to convert ETH into fiat to pay the taxman, the bookkeeper...
People say 'stable coins' as if it's a simple matter to create them. There have already been several cryptocurrencies that were meant to be locked in value to a real-world currency or commodity. They all fail in the end, and any system relying on them will collapse when the values diverge.
You cannot perfectly link a real world item to a digital asset without losing the 'trust-free' nature of cryptocoins. You always end up having to trust someone. And once you do that, you've lost all of the advantages of the digital asset.
A stable coin is a token that, using some mechanism, is able to hold a stable value. The most prominent group trying to make this work using ethereum, I think, is http://makerdao.com/docs/.
A real-world warranty, which means you can't rely on it. You might own as many EthUSD tokens as you want but you can never be sure that someone will buy them from you at the 'fixed' price.
Regardless of how audited the code is, the DAO fiasco showed that the Ethereum miners will modify the "immutable" blockchain if it reaches an unpopular result, even when the bug is in a contract and not Ethereum itself.
We are still early, but we are now in Alpha stage. We have published a small sneak peek of what we are building on aragon.one so you can try out how managing an Aragon company will be like.
Our ambition is for Aragon to be the backbone of a new generation of companies that will thrive in the new decentralized economy. We have focused on building a modular system, in the frontend and in the smart contracts, so modified versions for specific company types/industries could be build (pe. Aragon for Hedgefunds, Aragon for Non-Profits or Aragon for Open Source projects).
Aragon is a fully decentralized app that only needs having a connection to a Ethereum node in order for the core functionallity to work. We will be packaging it and distributing in a Electron binary for ease of use with non-iniciated users. We have integrated Metamask in Electron, so the app can be standalone (more on this soon).
Even though every screenshot in the website and the demo is live code running against the EVM (via TestRPC) and the alpha is working, we are not open sourcing the contracts for a couple of weeks (some cleaning and refactoring needs to be done before they are ready to be public). All the frontend code will be open source too, but we don't have a specific timeline for this. We are open source first and open source only, our core technology needs to be open source so it can be under the scrutiny needed for Aragon to be a secure technology.
The launch post seems to say that Ethereum|Aragon can solve the nation state problem, taxes and a whole host of other "problems" associated with running a business.
How?
How does Aragon eliminate the IRS or DIAN if you are doing business in America or Colombia, respectively?
How does it eliminate regulations on interstate and international commerce?
What companies would actually use this to run their verses say Quickbooks, right now?
What companies have been built on Ethereum so far and how have the principals done with regard to taxes and tariffs?
You can replace every intermediary with a more efficient and fair decentralized solution.
How?
Decentralized solutions by their nature are less efficient than centralized solutions.
One of the most basic needs in humans’ lives is to transact. Create products, provide services, sell them to others. Add value to their lives. The market.
It’s the core of everything we do, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. The market system is how we live.
What does this mean? It sounds like something you'd hear on Silicon Valley. Very rah-rah but where's the substance?
I feel like this is a cool technical solution that is not realizing that the real issue is social and bureaucratic. The way they are pitching themselves doesn't give me faith that they have a solid plan. Hopefully that's not unfair.
What language are the contracts written in? Do you have a specification of that language?
EDIT: Nevermind, I see in an another comment that you're using Solidity. Thanks for the answer!
Now I have a new question. What do you think about the claim that, "Solidity, while being an interesting proof of concept, is dangerously under-contained and very difficult to analyze statically." (http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html)
Disclaimer: I write and audit Solidity for a living.
The max-callstack issue isn't a problem anymore due to a change in the EVM.
TheDAO was hit with a reentrant call. It's pretty easy to avoid that class of bugs by either (1) putting any external calls (including ether transfers) after all state changes, or (2) using address.send instead of address.call.value. Also, TheDAO was a very convoluted contract; better coding practices help a lot. Any contract that's at all hard to understand is a huge red flag for me.
Solidity may not be a perfect language but it's rapidly improving, statically typed, and has a set of best practices which are fairly well known at this point. The current alternatives aren't nearly as well tested or reviewed, and don't have clear advantages anyway.
There are various experimental projects for more advanced functional-style languages but they're not ready yet. There's also someone at the Foundation working full-time on formal proof systems.
I'm paid a salary in fiat but the company I work for prefers payment in ETH, with Bitcoin its second choice, and our clients are generally happy with that.
I think that Solidity is quickly getting ready for prime time and in 2017 we will see tons of very big and high stake projects getting deployed.
That being said, there are already projects like http://rouleth.com that has been managing an over $100k bankroll with no issues for 8 months now.
To sum up, if the needed security measures are taken, you should be good. And we won't be encouraging anyone to run a company with Aragon in production for the next months until proper security audits have been done.
Please consider trying to get off of Solidity at some point.
It doesn't matter how much auditing is done, if you're building on a shaky foundation mistakes will eventually slip through. Solidity is definitely a shaky foundation.
I really admire projects like yours for their daring, but that needs to be backed up with hard engineering work. I would hate to see smart contracts go down the path of the "Internet of things" -- finally succeeding only to cause more harm than good due to compounding security vulnerabilities.
Solidity is not an ideal language, but I also think that the ~deep concern~ everyone has about it is overblown. C is a pretty problematic language too, but plenty of reliable software is built in it. Engineering and testing practices are more important than bikeshedding the language itself.
A flagship Solidity product has already been pwned for $50 million dollars, leading to a hard fork of Etherium. This is not fake "~deep concern~", this is a real problem.
It was a badly designed app written by a couple of over-eager developers who didn't have any security plan in place. If you blamed the language every time a website got hacked, there wouldn't be any languages left.
Conceptually I like the idea of running our company on this. But do you have any sort of insurance in case something goes horribly wrong?
I'd probably be willing to use this for a side project, but I feel like the prospect of saving even a substantial amount of legal fees isn't enough to risk everything on a new technology that would be a full-time job to actually understand.
That's not to say it's not a good idea, because it is a good idea, but there's a really big lift in terms of getting mainstream adoption.
I agree change is not coming in the political front. Lobbying power defending the patent status quo is enormous, and reviewing Patent Law isn't in any political agendas.
Big tech companies take advantage of the system. Microsoft has made billions of dollars out of licensing Android related patents, Apple applied for a paper bag patent recently and Google has "patent parties" when (as I have been told by Google friends) they encourage engineers to work with attorneys in filing patents on anything they worked on that could be patentable.
The curious thing is that patent trolls exist at all because lawyers are so expensive. The reason almost no company can afford to fight patent trolls is because the legal costs are so expensive.
On a related note, I also find it incredible how people can make a living out of these kind of businesses and sleep well at night...
Seems like a business opportunity to me. If you can get people who are being sued by these people to buy patent troll insurance and pool the resources you could out resource the Patient Troll and make a profit.
If I remember, that's one of the things Cheng has done. He tries to find companies currently facing threats from the same troll and share costs to drive the price of a suit under the (summed) price of settlement.
There's no real way for the defenders to make a profit, since getting damages out of the troll is basically impossible. And unfortunately, that means that even with pooled resources, trolls are purely a drag on the economy. But at least this way, they tend to lose and stop being a drag for the next guy.
there is actually no way to get money from them. Most of them know what they are doing. They will setup an empty corporation thats only assets is the patent and then hire themselves as legal counsel for the corporation who gets paid 100% of the proceeds from any lawsuit so the company never has any money. If they lose a lawsuit their patent will be invalidated and have 0 assets so there is nothing to take from them if you try to collect damages in a counter suit, they will just declare bankruptcy and fold the corporation and make a new one
If the only reason the company exists is to file frivolous or bad faith lawsuits a judge can hold the corporate officers personally liable. Increasingly there are anti patent troll laws being passed that allow a patent holder to receive statutory damages.
Losing more frequently than willing could shift the economics away from trolling. Even better would be court sanctions and/or having to pay defendants fees.
Absolutely, and we might be starting to see that - I'm just mad that it's still purely negative for the defenders.
Of course, it's hard because paying the opponent's fees opens up other kinds of abuse. If you get sued by Coca Cola, you can't just judge what lawyer you can afford, you have to realize that even a small decision against you could come with the million dollars in costs they paid to take the thing to court. I don't really know a good answer to "litigation is expensive, and that produces abuse".
Sanctions or frequent invalidation of patents would be great, though. One other thing I would love to see is a change to the choice-of-venue rules - this would be less of a problem if we weren't seeing every case fought in East Texas where summary judgement is impossible to get.
There's got to be something like that possible. If nothing else Newegg has been reaping some rewards from very publicly fighting these cases and gaining good will.
If the government can't put together competent reforms, maybe they could put up some money to reward people who get bad patents struck down? Hell, maybe some percentage of infringement winnings could be directed into a reward pool for patent strikedowns.
It'd decrease the overall value of patents, but I'm pretty ok with that.
If /s means sarcasm and you are correct, then GP is intending the opposite of what they say. That unsignalled irony will be missed by 95% of readers, and is probably ill-advised. I certainly didn't pick up on it, and I'm usually decent at that.
Depends on your sense of morals, I am sure there are many NSA employees who sleep well at night.
Many people follow what I call Godfather's I ethics. Vito Corleone cares about his family and friends and will do rather mean things to those who threaten the well being of those around him.
Tribalism has stayed with us over the millennia and is unlikely to go away any time soon.
It is always my goto resource when ppl ask about Ethereum.