Middlemen Market: Decentralized Systems Application As a Part of a Greater Automation Trend
In her passionate TED speech, Rachel Botsman explains what is the overall impact of blockchain technology on the global society. The recap of the video is “Less trust to institutions and more trust to strangers.” The talk showcases several corporate ethics violations as a cause to trust institutions less. And yes, cheating and lying by big corporations for their own profit is a legit cause to trust institutions less. However, this is only a surface level of the problem. Here we will go for a deeper look into the problem of institutional trust, and we will proceed to the problems with institutions that manage trust itself. Spoiler alert: they have one job and they fail at it miserably.
Ideas can make people cooperate on a large scale for some time. Traditions and family bonds make people cooperate for a long time but they are neither scalable nor flexible. The market economy is the only known thing that makes people cooperate on a large scale over long periods of time. One thing you need to do commerce is to have the product and the market for it. The other thing you need to do commerce is some level of trust. You need to know that contracts your subcontractors will do their part of the deal. Or they will be penalized for it. And the penalize part is where middlemen of trust come into play.
What usually happens when you violate the contract? Usually, there are some sanctions foreseen by the contract you can impose by your mutual agreement. Let’s suppose you can’t reach that one. Next, there are some sanctions foreseen by court intervention. You can sue your partners for agreement violations. This is where trust middlemen come into play. The court will gather evidence, engage experts to verify them, listen to cases of lawyers from both sides, and after examining all the data it will make an enforceable decision.
So far so good. But what is the price to pay for this system to be a thing? In a perfect world, there are taxes. In a real world, any competitive business also needs to factor in growing expenses for legal department arms race. Also, this system is abused by patent trolls. Also for many of the second world countries, the court system is corrupted. Life is pretty miserable when where everyone having more money also has a “win any court against you” button.
See the pattern? Looks like humans are… only humans after all. Therefore, systems that consist of humans are fault prone. There is an event called “automation” that is aimed to reduce human involvement in various systems. If only we could automate this trust management business…
Oh, wait… Probably we can. At least we can start with automating fact checking. Today you can simply upload any agreement into the distributed platform. And it will be there. Uneditable. Forever. Then we can add signatures and sign it by unique signatures tied to global KYC system to verify that this is what people actually agreed upon. Signed and sealed and accessible from everywhere. Forever.
But wait, distributed platform is much more than globally accessible uneditable paper. For example, you can just paste some scripts into your agreement that will specify markings on the supplied goods and then track actual movement of those goods through the supply chain repeatedly while deducting fines for time violations.
Another production-related example could be integrating product tracking system with electronic warranty agreements where the end user can buy an extended license straight from the manufacturer and manufacturer can systematically track all the service statistics in real time. Also these smart agreements are directly integrated with your company cryptocurrency wallets (or bank API, if they provide those).
A bonus is the fact that distributed ledger does not limit you to use text format only for your agreement. You can attach pictures, video, audio, web pages, and other files. The good thing is this sci-fi looking distributed platform already exists and you can actually use it to store any important evidence. While courts do not have any laws that candidly recognize encrypted distributed database entries as evidence yet, most countries do have laws that involve technical expertise to examine any tech-dependent evidence.
Silent Notary as a platform is going through a major upgrade on the backend which will allow it to work faster and with lower prices in the nearest future. The end goal is everything that needs to be secured and confirmed by multiple parties and legal authorities can be secured. With no more paywalls for facts.
The next stage of the Silent Notary platform development will be advanced combat drone research program to automatically handle the enforcement part. Just kidding, not yet. The next step for the Silent Notary platform would be getting more legal recognition as a reliable source of fact-checking data and the emergence of a new class of code lawyers. One small step for the Silent Notary platform, one huge leap for the legal industry one huge blast to the legal paywalls.
