Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

by luisivan • 9 years ago

191 117 9 years ago

camdenlock• 9 years ago

Oh dear...

izqui12• 9 years ago

This is Jorge, Tech Lead at Aragon, a platform for creating companies on top of the Ethereum blockchain (DACs). Here is our launch post and mission statement: https://medium.com/aragondec/introducing-aragon-unstoppable-...

We are still early, but we are now in Alpha stage. We have published a small sneak peek of what we are building on aragon.one so you can try out how managing an Aragon company will be like.

Our ambition is for Aragon to be the backbone of a new generation of companies that will thrive in the new decentralized economy. We have focused on building a modular system, in the frontend and in the smart contracts, so modified versions for specific company types/industries could be build (pe. Aragon for Hedgefunds, Aragon for Non-Profits or Aragon for Open Source projects).

Aragon is a fully decentralized app that only needs having a connection to a Ethereum node in order for the core functionallity to work. We will be packaging it and distributing in a Electron binary for ease of use with non-iniciated users. We have integrated Metamask in Electron, so the app can be standalone (more on this soon).

Even though every screenshot in the website and the demo is live code running against the EVM (via TestRPC) and the alpha is working, we are not open sourcing the contracts for a couple of weeks (some cleaning and refactoring needs to be done before they are ready to be public). All the frontend code will be open source too, but we don't have a specific timeline for this. We are open source first and open source only, our core technology needs to be open source so it can be under the scrutiny needed for Aragon to be a secure technology.

Alex3917• 9 years ago

Conceptually I like the idea of running our company on this. But do you have any sort of insurance in case something goes horribly wrong?

I'd probably be willing to use this for a side project, but I feel like the prospect of saving even a substantial amount of legal fees isn't enough to risk everything on a new technology that would be a full-time job to actually understand.

That's not to say it's not a good idea, because it is a good idea, but there's a really big lift in terms of getting mainstream adoption.

izqui12• 9 years ago

I completely agree, insurance and proper bug bounty mechanisms are being worked on.

seagreen5• 9 years ago

What language are the contracts written in? Do you have a specification of that language?

EDIT: Nevermind, I see in an another comment that you're using Solidity. Thanks for the answer!

Now I have a new question. What do you think about the claim that, "Solidity, while being an interesting proof of concept, is dangerously under-contained and very difficult to analyze statically." (http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html)

izqui12• 9 years ago

Solidity http://solidity.readthedocs.io

izqui12• 9 years ago

I think that Solidity is quickly getting ready for prime time and in 2017 we will see tons of very big and high stake projects getting deployed.

That being said, there are already projects like http://rouleth.com that has been managing an over $100k bankroll with no issues for 8 months now.

To sum up, if the needed security measures are taken, you should be good. And we won't be encouraging anyone to run a company with Aragon in production for the next months until proper security audits have been done.

semiel3• 9 years ago

Solidity is not an ideal language, but I also think that the ~deep concern~ everyone has about it is overblown. C is a pretty problematic language too, but plenty of reliable software is built in it. Engineering and testing practices are more important than bikeshedding the language itself.

DennisP3• 9 years ago

Disclaimer: I write and audit Solidity for a living.

The max-callstack issue isn't a problem anymore due to a change in the EVM.

TheDAO was hit with a reentrant call. It's pretty easy to avoid that class of bugs by either (1) putting any external calls (including ether transfers) after all state changes, or (2) using address.send instead of address.call.value. Also, TheDAO was a very convoluted contract; better coding practices help a lot. Any contract that's at all hard to understand is a huge red flag for me.

Solidity may not be a perfect language but it's rapidly improving, statically typed, and has a set of best practices which are fairly well known at this point. The current alternatives aren't nearly as well tested or reviewed, and don't have clear advantages anyway.

There are various experimental projects for more advanced functional-style languages but they're not ready yet. There's also someone at the Foundation working full-time on formal proof systems.

monkmartinez8• 9 years ago

The launch post seems to say that Ethereum|Aragon can solve the nation state problem, taxes and a whole host of other "problems" associated with running a business.

How?

How does Aragon eliminate the IRS or DIAN if you are doing business in America or Colombia, respectively?

How does it eliminate regulations on interstate and international commerce?

What companies would actually use this to run their verses say Quickbooks, right now?

What companies have been built on Ethereum so far and how have the principals done with regard to taxes and tariffs?

aaron-lebo2• 9 years ago

It also includes:

You can replace every intermediary with a more efficient and fair decentralized solution.

How?

Decentralized solutions by their nature are less efficient than centralized solutions.

One of the most basic needs in humans’ lives is to transact. Create products, provide services, sell them to others. Add value to their lives. The market.

It’s the core of everything we do, from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep. The market system is how we live.

What does this mean? It sounds like something you'd hear on Silicon Valley. Very rah-rah but where's the substance?

I feel like this is a cool technical solution that is not realizing that the real issue is social and bureaucratic. The way they are pitching themselves doesn't give me faith that they have a solid plan. Hopefully that's not unfair.

alexmingoia2• 9 years ago

Are you dogfooding Aragon? Do you get paid and manage your shares through it?

ggoerlich• 9 years ago

I don't get the "shareholder" scenario. How can this work with any legal and/or financial/banking regulations?

JorgeGT3• 9 years ago

Or the "Adding a new employee to your payroll is as easy as creating a recurring payment" scenario. Good luck having the Spanish Social Security Institute accept the mandatory monthly payments (cotizaciones) in ETH...

izqui12• 9 years ago

Bad assumption there, Aragon companies will be able to handle tokenized fiat (USD, EUR, etc). Santander is working on a stable coin project to tokenize EUR and USD http://www.coindesk.com/santander-vies-become-first-bank-iss...

empath75• 9 years ago

So what happens when someone finds a flaw in the contract and empties you out?

izqui12• 9 years ago

That's why initiatives such as https://openzeppelin.org are needed.

We build on top of them and all our contracts will be throughly audited before going into production

kej• 9 years ago

Regardless of how audited the code is, the DAO fiasco showed that the Ethereum miners will modify the "immutable" blockchain if it reaches an unpopular result, even when the bug is in a contract and not Ethereum itself.

dleslie• 9 years ago

Evidently, you hard fork the chain.

Ethereum proved that automated systems that serve human needs will eventually incur human intervention.

izqui12• 9 years ago

"automated systems that serve human needs will eventually incur human intervention" this is just wrong.

The world is moving towards more automated systems, the fact that there was one mistake at a given point in time doesn't mean anything.

By mistake I mean putting so much money on an unproved experiment.

theamk• 9 years ago

I know this is old news, but I still have to say this:

So if someone installs malware on your laptop, they get to own your shares forever? Living dangerously, man!

izqui12• 9 years ago

That's why the needed security measures need to be in place.

Using a hardware wallet like Ledger rules that scenario out.

monkmartinez8• 9 years ago

Until is gets stolen and you can't prove you own anything, or?

joosters6• 9 years ago

You can't trust hardware wallets either - people have been handing out free hardware wallets at conferences that steal the user's coins.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/caution-scammers-can-steal-yo...

vitiell0• 9 years ago

When I try to enter my email for the mailing list I am getting the error: invite_limit_reached

I'd like to just keep up with the project. Is this intentional or is there another way to join the mailing list?

izqui12• 9 years ago

I'm just aware that we reached the limit. Talking to Slack now to get it waived

Jd• 9 years ago

My 'cryptoequity' project was on the Hacker News front page a couple years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992667), in which many commentators noted that many high value applications were probably illegal.

As enthusiastic as I remain about the overall premise of equity replacements issued on cryptographically secure ledgers (including Etheruem, which I started with by running the educational channel Ethercasts), I don't see anything in this presentation that indicates that the massive challenges regarding nation-state regulation have been solved.

Even were one to go on the premise that one can effectively run this in a sandbox away from standard nation-state regulation, one has the more general problem of enforceability of contracts, etc. If I hire you via a crypto-contract but then you don't deliver the associated goods, what recourse do I have?

This and related effects caused ~2 years of delays in my own implementation.

I'll note I remain optimistic and positive about all related efforts in this field.

clavalle• 9 years ago

one has the more general problem of enforceability of contracts, etc. If I hire you via a crypto-contract but then you don't deliver the associated goods, what recourse do I have?

I thought the point of crypto-contracts was to make enforcement as automatic as possible...if that is not fully true, are there any neutral verifications services that can hold things in escrow?

pavel_lishin4• 9 years ago

A crypto-contract can't evaluate the work you've delivered. If we enter into some arbitrary crypto-contract for me to build you a chair in exchange for 20 currencies, and I bring you a stump I hacked out of the woods, there's no underlying system that can tell me to fuck off and that I'm not getting paid.

wyager• 9 years ago

If I hire you via a crypto-contract but then you don't deliver the associated goods, what recourse do I have?

Isn't this sort of a "solved" question, in the sense that we know there's only so much a computer can do? The practical answers are, of course, reputation systems and incentivization systems like escrow. Both of those are areas of active research.

elastic_church• 9 years ago

You just do exactly what ethereum did. Pay off a securities regulator in the smallest state of Switzerland to say it isn't a security while simultaneously getting an opinion letter in the US saying the same thing.

Sovereign sanctioning and alot of capital

SEC hasn't challenged it yet though but I mean, you can be rich and bring your project to the world.

alexmingoia2• 9 years ago

Is https://aragon.one itself using Aragon? If not, why?

brilliantcode3• 9 years ago

Peculiar how author dodges this question, the answer is presumably no.

It's so disruptive even the creators choose to use the old "outdated" way it claims to be solving.

If you don't eat your own dog food it means you don't have confidence in it. So why push the garbage on to somebody else who will take all the risks?

How the heck does this make frontpage?

syrrim• 9 years ago

The current product is only considered by the creators to be alpha. They don't expect anyone else to found their business on it, and they aren't yet making their business rely on it.

Even if it does become more stable in the future, they haven't made the case that this is well suited for all businesses. It is designed to enable cooperation between stakeholders; a company with one major stakeholder has little need for it.

primitivesuave• 9 years ago

Is there a way to pay for domain, DNS, and hosting costs with Ethereum? If so, one could build a wide-range of SaaS products that accept payment in Ethereum, and would be free of taxation and government regulation. While the SEC understandably exists to prevent defrauding of investors, this dashboard gives an investor perfect clarity into a company's financial strength and liabilities, and allows for an informed decision to be made without any official paperwork.

What would be really interesting is if some day you could buy a self-driving car with Ethereum. With an Uber-like app that accepts payment in Ethereum, and blockchain investments to rapidly scale the business up and reinvest profits, one could see a self-driving car company dominate the market in a far shorter time than it took Uber to do so.

It's even possible that some day we see a unicorn startup with a solo developer.

aaron-lebo2• 9 years ago

Namecoin exists, but governments are never gonna just be like "hey, don't pay taxes, no problem".

Why can't a regular company do that? Blockchian payments are really the very least of your problems if you are trying to create a profitable self-driving car company.

What benefit does it offer other than being cool?

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Yeah but what if a DAO doesn't have a physical office that can be shut down? It's very difficult to stop the spread of something people want to use, and will only become more so.

vidarh3• 9 years ago

While the SEC understandably exists to prevent defrauding of investors, this dashboard gives an investor perfect clarity into a company's financial strength and liabilities, and allows for an informed decision to be made without any official paperwork.

No, it gives insight into what has been done in Ethereum using the accounts tied to this "company". If investors are led to believe that this gives perfect clarity, that makes defrauding investors trivially easy by simply keeping things outside of what gets recorded. Keeping multiple books is the oldest trick in the book.

joosters6• 9 years ago

and would be free of taxation and government regulation

Laws do not magically vanish when something goes into a blockchain.

orthecreedence• 9 years ago

Right. You can do all this stuff now, but with cash. If you don't want to report it, you don't have to. But you're still breaking the law and subject to serious penalty if the right people find out.

Also, all it takes is one lawsuit from an angry customer to pull back the veil on the ethereum libertopia, free of taxation and regulation, you've created.

DennisP3• 9 years ago

That'd be feasible, it just needs hosting companies willing to take payment in ether.

One the other hand, the Ethereum Name Service should be going live before long, and within the next year or so it should also have Swarm (distributed data storage) and Whisper (secure messaging) live as well, both integrated into Ethereum. The ultimate goal is that you wan't need web hosting.

fudged712• 9 years ago

It's even possible that some day we see a unicorn startup with a solo developer.

already possible. this allows you to create a ZERO person startup. you can be a contractor to a software algo.

efields• 9 years ago

"It may take a while to load – beware of the bugs and glitches. Chrome-only for now"

Says so much with so little.

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

invite_limit_reached when I try to sign up :-/

naragon• 9 years ago

Coolest thing I've seen today, if only because my last name is Aragon.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 9 years ago

I think Ethereum undermined their whole reason for existence when they did a fork in response to a valid contract because enough people did not like the results.

The fact that they called it a hack when it explicitly followed the Ethereum guidelines calls into doubt the sincerity of the people behind Ethereum.

http://www.coindesk.com/understanding-dao-hack-journalists/

If people want to actually have malleable contracts in the case of fraud, the courts provide a much more accountable process that has had centuries of fine tuning.

ReverseCold• 9 years ago

This is why ethereum classic exists, but it's also shown that smart contacts are generally unreliable.

Random plug for non Turing complete smart contact systems like Decred.

(I don't own any decred, nor am I part of the team, I just idle in IRC.)

che_shirecat2• 9 years ago

why does your "press" link to a public dropbox folder for branding material? this is all so amateur

dyu-• 9 years ago

Looks like they're using unmodified semantic ui[1] based from their screenshot.

1. semantic-ui.com

Fej• 9 years ago

To repeat a comment I heard elsewhere -

Just as Bitcoin lovers are learning the hard way why we have banking regulations, so are Ethereum followers learning the hard way why we have courts.

dlevi• 9 years ago

I can understand the disbelief over the "maximalist" approach that suggests that regulations, government intervention, taxes, etc. will be circumvented by decentralized companies running on blockchains. Yet I believe that this efforts should be encouraged as they are exploring the kind of wild, uncharted territory in which the most exciting innovations can unexpectedly arise.

I also believe that some of the tools these guys are building can be very useful for conventional companies too. There's a whole lot of bureaucracy and inefficiency in running a company.

See eShares and his elegant and simple solution for cap management. I believe there are many other areas in which similar improvements can be made, and software needed to run a blockchain company could also be used to improve procedures at conventional companies.

Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum

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