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Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist.
> You could wire together a group of houses or neighborhoods with generators and batteries and make the electric company redundant by establishing contracts which buy and sell electricity between participants at rates which adjust in response to demand, forecast, and each battery’s reserves.
Who is this you, why would this group of houses trust you and not their established providers. And how will this group of houses verify that your contract even works (forget about "works correctly", start with just "works").
> Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist.
No it can't. These are not contracts. These are programs written in esotheric programming languages that work only as long as there's a connection to the things they "manage". They are unenforceable, have significant issues with versioning and bugs (once deployed, its deployed forever), have no bearing on the physical world etc.
how would you handle spoofing? e.g. whatever data source you use to figure out how much energy I'm generating, I just put fake data into it?
I guess you don't need to worry about that if you trust your neighbours. but then you could just use a traditional database if you all trust each other.
The only party requiring trust us the one managing the database.
Wirks pretty well in the real world.
If you tell us that a technology seems to preclude love, or creativity, or good health... sure, that warrants examination and possibly intervention. But illicit behavior? In an environment where some perfectly sociable and laudable behavior is illicit? Who cares?!
It's been crystal clear since the first whiffs of what has come to be called the Streisand effect that the internet does not tolerate censorship, including by states.
What good is served by prioritizing consideration of the throes of deprecation of the shitty legacy institutions from which the internet is finally freeing us?
(I'm not trying to cheerlead crypto here per se; I think currency is broadly stupid and subject to eventual deprecation for all the same reasons that fiat currency is leaving first).
This comes up in every discussion, every single time, without qualification or explanation, as if we all understand by default the importance of first adjudicating the legality or illegality (presumably in accordance with each of the tens of thousands of states which claim authority to make this designation) of a use case of a technology before we can celebrate the effort and achievement of the authors.
And I'm concerned that this is demoralizing and counter-productive.