izqui

Great job putting this together.

It is always my goto resource when ppl ask about Ethereum.

It is a responsibility of the individual to follow the laws of her jurisdiction. It is a global project, so we won't be working with every local regulatory body.

Aragon is creating a framework (as an open source project) for running Blockchain companies. We don't provide legal advice nor services, we don't take any responsibility for a hypothetic bad usage of our software.

"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.

Exactly.

A stable coin is a crypto asset that is backed by a real value.

If you own 1 EthUSD, there is a warranty that someone will give you 1 USD for that token

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

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

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.

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

Using a hardware wallet like Ledger rules that scenario out.

Solidity http://solidity.readthedocs.io

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...

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

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.

Today, I can only paraphrase George's harsh bulling destructive feedback he gave us on our startup:

George, "that wouldn't work" :)

RPX settles with trolls when it is the most cost effective thing to do.

I think your logic is failing there, the fact that something is legal doesn't make it ethical straightaway.

You can do unethical things using legal loopholes without it being necessarily illegal.

I agree change is not coming in the political front. Lobbying power defending the patent status quo is enormous, and reviewing Patent Law isn't in any political agendas.

Big tech companies take advantage of the system. Microsoft has made billions of dollars out of licensing Android related patents, Apple applied for a paper bag patent recently and Google has "patent parties" when (as I have been told by Google friends) they encourage engineers to work with attorneys in filing patents on anything they worked on that could be patentable.

The curious thing is that patent trolls exist at all because lawyers are so expensive. The reason almost no company can afford to fight patent trolls is because the legal costs are so expensive.

On a related note, I also find it incredible how people can make a living out of these kind of businesses and sleep well at night...

We had the pleasure to interview our advisor Lee Cheng on his experience fighting trolls.

If you have any questions or comments let us know and we will put them his way!

If you are interested in the technical implementation of it, I did a very basic version of a Blockchain in Go a while ago.

https://github.com/izqui/blockchain

Couldn't agree more, so informative

Thank you, we have worked really hard on making it as informative as possible and not letting pure asthetic get in the way

Exactly. Some patent trolls wait near the end of the lifetime of their patent to start asserting them.

That is something we have definitely thought about, but when making the numbers with the actual probability of being sued (more like 1% each year if you are a mid-sized VC funded startup) and the average lawsuit cost of going to court against the troll ($3M over 2 years, in case the case goes to the end), it is very dangerous to setup without a proper actuarial model, charging $500/month to some companies might be too risky.

What we are focused on right now is on diminishing patent portfolios so the lawsuit probability goes down. We have a lot of things in the pipeline that will make it easier for companies to be protected using Unpatent, that don't necessarily involve backing individual campaigns.

I completely agree with you, but there is way too much lobbying power protecting the status quo in the patent arena.

Not even a letter to Congress signed by very important SV players did anything... [1]

At Unpatent we believe that big changes can be made using technology when legislation is clearly falling behind.

[1] http://www.unitedforpatentreform.com

Apple is one of the companies that fill more stupid (obvious) patents in the world...

They have a freaking patent on converting different data types, patent US7886264B1 [1]

Even though Apple has never acted as a patent troll, it doesn't mean their patent portfolio isn't potentially harmful and it could be used as such some time soon to maximize profits.

It wouldn't be the first time a once very successful company makes good profits by charging licensing fees on things way far away of their product line. I'm looking at you Microsoft... [2]

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7886264B1 [2]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2015/11/01/microsoft-...

Thanks Billy!

I really enjoyed reading this. Good job!

At multiple times while watching the video, I thought it was a joke.

This is crazy cool. Thanks for the talk