Comment by thisiswrong | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thisiswrong | Hacker News Reader

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> How would you even express babysitting or lawnmower-borrowing as a program?

What if all you needed to do was sent x btc to 13cyfKGfbyyuyiJVLj8S1QZ34x281X1neh which would trigger a lawnmower algorithm [1] to scan all available wifi connected lawnmowers, and send an idle one to mow your lawn - while compensating the anonymous owner for 'lending' you his machine.

The implications of distributed blockchains are so huge that it's very hard to predict how people are going to innovate on the edges. One thing is sure though - bitcoin (the invention) effectively renders centralized institutions obsolete. Banking, notaries, government, voting, legislation, data-storage...

[1] " Each Ethereum contract has its own internal scripting code, and the scripting code is activated every time a transaction is sent to it. The scripting language has access to the transaction’s value, sender and optional data fields [...] " http://cryptonomics.org/2014/02/01/ethereum-turing-complete-...

You go quite a bit too far. How does one verify that the lawn mower actually is a lawn mower and not something pretending to be a lawn mower? How do I prevent someone stealing the lawn mower while it's in transit (or doing its job)? Bitcoin may offer new solutions, but it doesn't directly do anything in meat space. When there are conflicts between people we need to somehow resolve them, and a systematized way of doing that is called government.

> When there are conflicts between people we need to somehow resolve them, and a systematized way of doing that is called government.

Certain governments seem to making, not resolving conflicts between people. And they purposefully make these said conflicts in order to generate profit for tiny segments of the population. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, [...Iran?].

I get your initial point, but the past century has shown that democracy needs to be direct and NOT delegated. Algorithms and distributed blockchains could very well facilitate the dawn of a more decentralized and democratic world.

I made no claim that everything we can call government is a good idea. Just saying that the notion that you have bitcoin so now you don't need government is missing at least a few steps (if any similar claim holds at all). We might be able to implement some parts of government atop technology (we already do, really), but that doesn't mean there's no government.

"I get your initial point, but the past century has shown that democracy needs to be direct and NOT delegated."

I'm not at all sure that direct democracy makes things better. Just look at the history of referenda in CA.

More generally, there is the tremendous problem that as an individual, I don't have the time to fully research every issue. The median position of a bunch of half-informed individuals plied with advertising is not something I have a lot of confidence in.

All of that said, I'm not convinced direct democracy is actually worse either - it does address the agency problems with representative democracy, which can be significant. Possibly some variant of liquid democracy could prove to be the best system.

> The median position of a bunch of half-informed individuals plied with advertising is not something I have a lot of confidence in.

And here lies the problem. In the US the 1% actively disinforms the 99% through media manipulation and bad education. Thus you can't have direct democracy when people can't think for themselves. The whole system is rotten.

In most European countries citizens are educated from a young age how to think rationally and how to interpret information. You still have subtle media manipulation like sky-news but nothing as blatant as fox-news&hollywood. Switzerland has a very good history of referenda - because the population isn't intentionally misinformed and under-educated.

Misinformation and undereducation makes things worse, to be sure, but that's not really what I was speaking of. My point was that becoming fully informed about anything is a lot of work. Becoming fully informed about everything is impossible.

"You still have subtle media manipulation like sky-news but nothing as blatant as fox-news&hollywood."

That's just silly. There's plenty of drivel in the UK. The Daily Mail easily gives Fox a run for its money, and The Sun is owned by the same guy who owns Fox News. My understanding is that the situation in other countries is roughly similar - some good journalism and a lot of crap - but I am less familiar. Switzerland's history of referenda is indeed comparatively good; I think there's a lot of factors that have contributed to its success.

Finally, even if you think the above factors are the only reason direct democracy works (or would work) beautifully in Europe and horribly in the US, what would you propose to fix them? I contend that "direct democracy" is not much of a remedy.

The lawn mower has a private key that is uses to sign messages with. There are several solutions to the problem of verifying whether or not it's a lawn mower.

One solution is to use a reputation system, you see others have borrowed that lawn mower and have given it a good rating, or the owner has a good rating.

Another solution is by certificate authority that guarantees that it at one point was a lawn mower. Of course someone might try to rebuild the lawnmower into a fake one by removing the engine and feeding it fake gps coordinates etc. Maybe this problem can be solved also, but it will be much more difficult, that's why I think reputation will be the main way at first, just like in ebay or alibaba.

Obviously you can not prevent someone from stealing the lawn mower, just like you can not prevent a drunk driver from crashing into Amazon's data centers. In this case however, the lawn mower will not report that it has completed its task and the renter will not pay, so the owner of the lawn mower takes all the cost.

In general such a cryptocontract would work like this: First money is put in escrow, then the lawn mower goes to its destination, mowes the lawn and then returns to its owner. The code for the lawn mower could be verified and maybe signed by a third party so it can be more trusted. When the lawn mower has returned to its owner, the money will be released from escrow.

If there is any kind of dispute, yeah sure, you might need dispute mediators. For example the lawn mower didn't do the job well enough, because of a software bug. Even cases like this could eventually be in the contracts though, so the contract might have a clause that says the owner is not responsible for poor lawn mowing caused by software bugs, and you have to decide if you are okay with that or not.

That idea is an automation which neither depends on Bitcoins nor entails any of the protections of a contract. How does the contract guarantee that a lawnmower was dispatched and successfully arrived, and did its job? What recourse does the client have if they don't feel that the job was well done, and how can the contract guarantee that protection? Those are contract questions.

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