Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I'm aware enough to know that it's not the computing platform that I want. Some reasons that come to mind include:

- UX of interacting with/running code. This isn't users going to a website or downloading an app from an app store. Until it is, it's a non-starter.

- Unsolved side-effects/data input. While "blockchains" are good at reducing the amount of trust needed in a system, for smart contracts to interact with the real world, they still need trust for data input/output. This all seems like it's in very early development.

- Inflexibility of contracts. "Paper" contracts, T&Cs, etc, have an advantage that they work 99% of the time, but that when you hit an edge case that no one has figured out before you can email someone and come to a resolution, or at worst, go to court to have a (hopefully unbiased) third party decide. This is often better for both parties, but is not an option with smart contracts.

- Development risks. Last time I checked smart contracts were written in a language that seemed to be inspired by a combination of C and Javascript. I'm not sure there's a worse way to write code that is so critical. Software engineering is decades ahead of this, safety-critical software engineering is many more decades ahead of that, and contract law is centuries ahead.

> - UX of interacting with/running code. This isn't users going to a website or downloading an app from an app store. Until it is, it's a non-starter.

I don't know which projects you've used, but in my experience, the DeFi projects I've used have much better UX than any bank I've ever had.

Most of them just have a simple "Connect wallet" button you click and you're in, no need for a password, whatsoever [1]. There are some easy to use wallets like MetaMask, just have to set it up once.

1: For example, https://oasis.app/borrow.

So I click "connect a wallet", and I'm given a list of 7 options, none of which a typical user will have heard of, let alone understand what a wallet is.

Compared to going to my bank's website and clicking "get a quote for a loan", filling in some personal details, and getting an email?

I understand why this feels exciting to tech-minded people but this essentially proves my point.

Maker already has thousands of vaults, so clearly people do know what it is.

I've never had an online loan application work, always had to go to their branch or call them which is a lot more work than installing one browser extension called MetaMask.

A lot of these complaints remind me of the time when all the newspapers were writing about how internet is never gonna succeed because x, y, z[1].

There was a time where email was a "complex" thing, you can find out videos of news anchors trying to understand the "@" [2].

1: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg

This is a good point. In the early days of the web these things were only accessible to the few people who really understood them, like where DeFi is at right now.

Over time we got companies like AOL, Yahoo, eventually Facebook and Twitter. This is how most people use the web, what these companies offer(ed) is safety, accessibility, consistency, centralisation.

On the early web people knew it was unsafe to just hand over your card details, it took us developments like HTTPS and 3D Secure to make that safe. Right now DeFi is in a similar place, it's a wild-west of technology that has been fraught with hacks and scandals where many have lost a lot of money.

To truly take off it needs to develop that trust, and to develop it in a way that is safe and accessible to all.

I know you can do it safely now, but you need to know what things like hardware wallets are (which are a terrible UX), and even then we've seen hardware wallets being used as an attack vector recently.

I think this "Connect wallet" or "sign in with Ethereum" feature is a killer use case. It's a solution for SSO with public/private cryptography without giving your identity away to Facebook or Google or Paypal. I love it and can't wait for more websites to start using that as an identity/auth solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com