Why web3 distributed libraries will change the world
mirror.xyz
mirror.xyz
The article suggests that you could use a “web3” library to lend out a car. Later, it describes how lending is secured:
> So let’s imagine Lisa wants to lend Bob her $10 item.
> What if Lisa could send Bob a smart contract that asks Bob to deposit $15 in the contract?
> This means that Bob would never be incentivized to steal the item, because he would lose more than the item is worth.
So if I want to borrow someone’s car I’d presumably have to send them money exceeding the value of the car itself? If I want to rent someone’s spare room I’d have to place a deposit worth more than the room and every item within it?
This stuff is so confusing to me because it seems to be solving the wrong problem. The difficult problem with lending someone something isn’t knowing that I’ll get it back: if they steal it I can call the police. Or I can get insurance, like Airbnb offers hosts. Or, hell, take the same principle and just get rid of the smart contract part: want to rent my car? Give me $20,000 for a few days. A startup offering that service would fall flat on its face but because crypto is involved somehow the idea is valid.
The difficult part is the actual meatspace stuff like coordinating meeting with the person to hand it over. The article promises that I can “upload your items to Junto and let them make money for you while you sleep” but my expensive kitchenware item isn’t going to ship itself over to someone else’s kitchen.
(also: maybe a minor aside in the grand scheme of things but describing this as a library feels particularly cringeworthy: libraries are free at the point of delivery and are a great societal good. What’s described here is “Airbnb for stuff”)
So it's more like, to borrow my car, you have to post 1.5x the value in an escrow account, I have to post 0.5x into the same account. If-and-only-if we both press the 'happily concluded' button, we each get the money back. If it goes south, our only recourse to (a) destroy the value in the escrow account (which either of us can do unilaterally at any time), or (b) use the leverage provided by (a) to negotiate an amicable solution outside the contract.
Which doesn't sound any less wild, or provide any more of a solution for actually dealing with the meatspace problem. In fact it adds a meatspace problem, since you can't actually be made whole by the escrowed amount, you have to go negotiate with someone that is trying to screw you (or who broke your camera, or trashed your house, or whatever) to arrange an out-of-band resolution.
But what is new about "web3" that wasn't part of the original Ethereum idea?
I don’t think this is the case here, smart contracts actually provide a very valuable service for this use case!
The important thing to note is that these rental agreements usually cost a lot of money and logistics that are being made much more convenient using ethereum
Re: Your example about the car — you would likely never lend out a car to someone you have 0 trust in. But you might keep some deposit just in case something happens, just like a regular rental service would. Automating that for people is very useful in my opinion!
Logistical issues will get better over time, but this suffers from the same logistics problem as Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, etc. and these services are extremely popular
Re: describing it as a library vs Airbnb — I think a library is a useful description of this. We are trying to be closer to a protocol service for people to create a library with their friends and lend things out to people. I don’t see the issue with using “library” vs “Airbnb for stuff”
If you were to really dispassionately analyze the transaction, lending something to a friend or acquaintance is predicated on there being enough social capital at risk in the relationship (or shared network) to insure things go well, or that you're made whole if they don't, along with a general knowledge their ability to cover potential loss. IMO codifying that into a financial relationship signals that you don't trust that reservoir of social capital, and in doing so erodes it. "Oh, I guess he doesn't actually trust me that much, if he's asking me to post collateral to borrow his truck".
The real value is in having an index of people you trust and all the things they’re willing to lend to you
I think as people gain trust over time the network effects start to become really valuable
You (assuming you are the author of the service) challenge people to find a flaw in your game theory.
Here it is. The world if full of trolls.
You have a 1000 dollar camera and I want to borrow it. I put up 1100 bucks and you put up your camera and 100 bucks.
If I'm a troll and enjoy making internet people suffer and happen to actually want a camera.
Then I can get yours and for an extra 100 bucks cause you to personally lose your camera and 100 bucks.
Sounds like the dream scheme for affluent trolls to leverage 100 bucks into 1100 of pain.
"It’s important to note as well that each of the fields in the contract are totally open for customization. You can make the “Agreed upon 3rd party” the lender. Or you can change the collateral amounts based on trust levels. If you feel like there’s an asymmetry of risk, you can up the collateral on either side of the contract before signing. It’s all in your hands."
Like, I get it, I do: the Fed is out of control (ahem, my username) and inflation yada yada. But in no way is this better from a capital efficiency/economic utility/user experience perspective. I’d rather just book a hotel or airbnb where my credit card can play the role of escrow, or judge and jury (or an actual judge and jury if things really go sideways).
The issue with these trolls is that all that history exists publicly on the blockchain
So if someone is a troll you’ll see their transaction history of multiple blown up contracts and you’ll know to stay away
Not everyone is “rational” given the incentives, but you can choose who you play with based on how they’ve treated others
+ Communities can decide who they let into these groups, or boot people who are multiple offenders
So it’s not all anonymous trolls, there’s context around each person that allows you to filter who is a troll
And this is all a smart contract, so if there's a bug and I lose my quarter mil, tough luck.
This proposed system is worse in all ways compared to the current system of laws and insurance that facilitate affordable, mostly friction-free rentals.
Distributed systems are the future, but call me a "skeptic", for me blockchain stuff is not prerequisite for this change.
We don't need to introduce another layer of complexity and vector for abuse. We just need one big infrastructural change - to remove our dependency of big and centralized silos of cloud computing.
Do it and put on top of it <whatever marketing lingo you want>.:)
I'm a huge fan of offline-first collaborative apps, but I don't care at all about the crypto bullshit.
None if it makes any sense, nor does it have to as long as it convinces new marks that their ‘tokens’ are going to the moon because they are the future of x.
You and me both, Bruno. We're last on the consideration list though, always-online software and crypto integrations are the future whether we like it or not. There's money to be made there, why would they reject it?
Reading further, it seems like this is the crypto equivalent of a 3rd party service holding money in escrow while a rental agreement is carried out? Or in other words, this is crypto-enabled-rentals without the human 3rd party between owner and renter.
I doubt that any average people are ever going to use this. It's a neat thought experiment, but it's a tall order to even get your average neighbor to understand how it works. And like most crypto spaces, I predict it will be dominated by a small amount of superusers, and will be prone to bugs and hidden exploits (lots of those in the smart contract world) which will deter even tech-savvy people from trying it.
Cool idea, but I'm not holding my breath.
Or maybe GreenPeace only gets the money if Bob makes off with Lisa’s blender and they both get their money back if the blender gets returned, dunno?
If the contract is signed before Lisa hands over the $10 item, she has leverage over Bob because she’s on the hook for $5 and he’s on the hook for $15.
If Lisa hands over the item before the contract is signed, she might have just given Bob the item.
There needs to be a mechanism outside the contract to make this work… and if there’s such a mechanism, maybe it can handle the whole thing, so I’m not sure what the importance of the Junto contract itself is.
Unfortunately i don't think this removes all the friction of having to add your items, writing descriptions, photos, getting things picked up or shipped.
the author agrees there are inherent problems in this model like what happens when things break or come back damaged, how much wear is acceptable, etc. but the magic contract is the solution, and the nuke option seems like it would need to be used heavily to solve disputes.
a peer to peer rent-a-center sounds cool in theory but not sure how it holds up at scale.
In the case of "peer to peer" loaning it sounds to me like insurance and liability are kind of important. If I loan out a laptop to you, and you put malware on that laptop, and I take it back and loan it out to others who then get compromised somehow... how do I explain to authorities that it's not my fault? Or in maybe a more realistic sense let's say I want to be a Very Good Guy and loan out my car. You put up the "reasonable value" of my car + 10% as collateral and I loan it to you, and it gets impounded. Now we both are out a car and our collateral is locked up, and neither of us wants to nuke the contract but neither of us can agree on who should pay the towing company. How does that resolve itself?
A totally open library sounds like a fascinating concept, but Google or Apple are ultimately going to gatekeeper access to it.
Safari and chrome mobile browsers are not compatible with web3 or dapps.
I take it your definition of “not many people” to mean less than the number of users that use safari or chrome, so you win.
But the clever thing about web3 browsers is that they are crypto wallets so odds are if you own crypto, then you have have downloaded and use a web3 browser. Browsers like Brave and MetaMask have 10’s of millions of active users, it’s not exactly nothing for web browsers that didn’t exist a year ago.
Metamask is a browser extension, not a browser.
I think you lost credibility by being to clever at this point