
Show HN: Aragon – Everything you need to run your company on Ethereum - luisivan
https://aragon.one
======
Jd
My 'cryptoequity' project was on the Hacker News front page a couple years ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7992667](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
> 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_lishin
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.

~~~
monkmartinez
> there's no underlying system that can tell me to fuck off and that I'm not
> getting paid.

You are right. This is why these things will not go anywhere. Ultimately they
need some kind of "back up"... For example, the system we currently have flows
like so: Nation state Military > Federal Police > Local Police > Physical
Intimidation via face to face meeting. At every step, stop when lawyers and/or
politicians get involved.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Well, you could have trusted third-party arbiters who would evaluate whether
or not to release the funds on delivery of the good or service. But that
brings on a whole new level of reputation-economy things you have to think
about.

~~~
monkmartinez
And how deep should that go? Pretty soon you will need arbitration for the
arbiters.

Has no one addressed the basic need of a justice system with these crypto
currencies?

~~~
throwaway29292
How about some image processing/object recognition by standardized AI
interfaces?

~~~
vkou
In other words, Eth and Aragon would work great, as soon as someone figures
out how to build a strong AI that can arbitrate and enforce contracts?

We already have an inscrutable, unaccountable, super-intelligent system that
can do that - the courts, the police...

------
izqui
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-...](https://medium.com/aragondec/introducing-aragon-unstoppable-
companies-58c1fd2d00ce#.i4z2dku09)

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.

~~~
seagreen
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](http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts/smart_contracts.html))

~~~
DennisP
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.

~~~
monkmartinez
Are you paid in Eth or some other form of currency?

~~~
DennisP
I'm paid a salary in fiat but the company I work for prefers payment in ETH,
with Bitcoin its second choice, and our clients are generally happy with that.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
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/](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
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.)

------
alexmingoia
Is [https://aragon.one](https://aragon.one) itself using Aragon? If not, why?

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

 _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._

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?

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
joosters
The DAO didn't need a physical office for it to be 'hacked' and drained.

And a car sharing scheme would need physical cars, making it pretty easy to
take down the system or haul the car owners to court if the service is
breaking laws.

~~~
anigbrowl
Prototypes fail but clearly people haven't given up on the basic
crypto/blockchain idea. A product or service that reliably delivers value
(even if imperfectly) will hang around. Look at the draconian penalties for
dealing cocaine, or the fairly draconian social sanctions of being caught in
possession of it, and yet the trade thrives despite decades of aggressive
interdiction. It's going to be politically much more difficult to indict
someone for running a gardening or vehicle rental service than a drug kingpin;
it's _possible_ of course, but I don't remember a whole lot of public outrage
over Kim Dotcom's supposedly nefarious activities.

~~~
vkou
Cocaine thrives because it is easy to conceal, easy to manufacture, has sky-
high profit margins, no legal competition, and because you get paid in
untraceable, unrecordable, launderable cash.

Stopping crypto-mixing is much easier then stopping money laundering.

~~~
anigbrowl
I'm sure it looks that way from the outside.

------
dlevi
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.

------
empath75
So what happens when someone finds a flaw in the contract and empties you out?

~~~
dleslie
Evidently, you hard fork the chain.

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

~~~
izqui
"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.

~~~
brilliantcode
so if your account gets emptied by hackers, it's justified because this is
just how decentralization works? Who is claiming this is "how the world works
now" and who asked for a solution? It seems to me Ethereum and other products
built on it solves problems imagined by the creators and balk when people poke
holes at it, without responding with a modicum of rationality but a lot of
self fulfilling prophecy.

Why would anyone expose themselves to more risks by using Aragon?

Why decentralize and create more problems when _everybody has been using
centralized systems without issues over the past few centuries_?

What problem is it that you are solving with Aragon? I don't see one.

Better yet, are you running Aragon to run your company? This question has come
up multiple times in the comments with no response. It's pretty telling.

~~~
soverance
Oh yeah, the number of questions in this thread without answers should tell
you everything you need to know about Aragon.

Any founder with a legit business who shows his project to Hacker News and
gets ~40 some odd people to comment on it would almost certainly want to keep
up that conversation.

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

Says so much with so little.

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

~~~
JorgeGT
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...

~~~
izqui
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...](http://www.coindesk.com/santander-vies-become-first-bank-issue-
digital-cash-blockchain/)

~~~
monkmartinez
What would the stable coin look like? I mean, we already have 700+[1] "coins."
we are way passed the ridiculous stage on that front.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies)

~~~
izqui
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

~~~
joosters
A _real-world_ warranty, which means you can't rely on it. You might own as
many EthUSD tokens as you want but you can never be sure that someone will buy
them from you at the 'fixed' price.

------
theamk
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!

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

Using a hardware wallet like Ledger rules that scenario out.

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

~~~
izqui
Exactly.

~~~
brilliantcode
So if Facebook ran on Aragon, and the shares got hijacked, tough shit?
Zuckerberg can't prove himself? Some guy in Yekaterinburg is the new CEO?

~~~
vkou
If history is any indication, you collude with the miners and hard-fork.

They have incentive to do that, because their work becomes worthless if ETH
were to lose value because that kind of theft would destroy user confidence in
the cryptocurrency.

I think the rest of the world would call that state of affairs a 'bubble'.

------
Fej
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.

------
camdenlock
Oh dear...

------
vitiell0
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?

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

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

1\. semantic-ui.com

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

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

------
anigbrowl
invite_limit_reached when I try to sign up :-/

