Comment by nahollander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nahollander | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

@kang -- while I don't disagree that there's no shortage of snake oil and hand-waving in the blockchain industry ("Blockchain for X! Huzzah!"), I do disagree with your point about whether there is an efficiency gain to be had from representing debt agreements on a blockchain. The primary benefits are:

1. An ability to trustlessly hold and release digital collateral on an entirely peer-to-peer basis. This entirely removes the necessity for a whole class of middlemen that seek rent for existing lending agreements. 2. An ability to trade one's ownership in a loan as a cryptographic token -- again, something that necessitates various paying agents / clearing houses / intermediaries in the traditional capital markets ecosystem.

Re: decentralization -- that's a fair point. Right now, Dharma is functionally a centralized code base controlled by a centralized set of contributors. In the future, however, we hope to transition to a decentralized governance model so that the protocol can serve as a piece of common, shared public infrastructure -- unfortunately, we don't have robust enough decentralized governance models quite yet in the crypto community.

#2 is actually useful.

Now just waiting for the smart contract that bundles a bunch of your tokens and sells structured tranche tokens :)

Both the points and your third point about a centralized system being able to decentralize itself - I am saying all of them are impossible (given current knowledge - unless you have secret protocols...).

For points 1 and 2, it's no secret :) See for yourself: https://whitepaper.dharma.io

For point ,: you're correct in that we (as in the crypto community in general) have yet to come up with good on-chain governance mechanisms, so its likely that robust decentralized governance systems are at least a few years away.

The 'underwriter' in dharma protocol is essentially current day middleman. You contradicted yourself by saying "trustlessly" in point 1 and then admitting to point 3. Point 2 is unenforceable without current legal system.

Debt agreements aren't required to be underwritten in every instance -- it's an entirely optional addition. If you want to see an example of a debt agreement in which there is no underwriter or middleman and collateral is trustlessly secured -- well, it's linked as OP :)

Oh this is interesting. In India, debt agreements have to be underwritten. Moreover, this right is a hard-to-get license that is granted by the central bank - Reserve Bank of India. Not sure what the regulations are in other countries.

Underwriting is a heavily regulated process in most countries with licensing requirements. You could claim that you do not underwrite yourself,so don't fall under regulatory purview. Interestingly your model will fall under the P2P regulations of India and China - where there are specific models where the marketplace does not underwrite, but risk is assumed by lender. Or - you have to make sure that the underwriters are regulated entities.

P.S. I run a lending startup in India. We primarily look at the Blockchain as a means to solve the credit history problem in India.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com