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Comment by EGreg

I know what’s going to happen. I will explain what crypto is for and then it will get downvoted just because it says anything positive about crypto.

The point is to NOT have a single place with access to all the money, votes, etc. Every participant should be acting as themselves, and there should be no way to do things on behalf of others without their consent.

The point of smart contracts is to have code you can actually trust. Your bank or openAI can change their website, APIs and even their models tomorrow. That’s not great for trust. Trust is what enables things to scale.

The same way you trust other internet protocols to just “route around problems” and not have one single point of failure, that is the substrate for Web3.

Imagine a Web2 website such as a student-teacher marketplace NOT handling millions of dollars, accepting money from students and paying them out to teachers. Imagine it being simply an interface while the actual transactions are approved by the students themselves, and instead of the central site signing payouts with some keys, the teachers get paid through smart contracts and code on the blockchain. The site can still take 10% commission from everything, it would be above board, and it can never change it without the consent of the people. The business logic is in the smart contract.

(Since this comment has the keywords “crypto” and “web3”, I know what will happen in advance already.)

parent EGreg 1 day ago

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