[Arm-netbook] Ethics, eco-conscious, and treating your backers with respect

[Jonathan Frederickson]

>  dude: it's the first time in human history where third parties are
> neither required for contracts to be ATOMICALLY binding.  i'm not sure
> if you grasp the full significance of that.
>
>  prior to blockchain and hashgraph and so on the only way to guarantee
> that a contract was honoured is to (a) trust each party in the
> contract and (b) if there is a dispute trust a THIRD PARTY.
>
>  entire power structures have built up over millenia based around that
> and THIS IS THE FIRST TIME THE POWER TO NEGOTIATE CONTRACTS IS TRULY
> DECENTRALISED.

Well, sort of. The actual exchange of currency doesn't involve a third
party, and in the case of e.g. Ethereum there's a lot of interesting
stuff you can do within the network. But for most real-world contracts
you need information from outside the network about whether one party
actually fulfilled its obligations, and then you're back to the messy
realities of human trust.