from Hacker News

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

by luisivan on 2/10/17, 4:47 PM with 117 comments

  • by Jd on 2/10/17, 6:49 PM

    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.

  • by izqui on 2/10/17, 5:40 PM

    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.

  • by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 2/10/17, 11:42 PM

    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.

  • by alexmingoia on 2/10/17, 7:10 PM

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

  • by primitivesuave on 2/10/17, 7:33 PM

    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.

  • by dlevi on 2/11/17, 9:26 AM

    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.

  • by empath75 on 2/10/17, 5:52 PM

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

  • by efields on 2/10/17, 8:28 PM

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

    Says so much with so little.

  • by ggoerlich on 2/10/17, 5:45 PM

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

  • by theamk on 2/10/17, 5:54 PM

    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!

  • by Fej on 2/11/17, 7:08 AM

    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.

  • by camdenlock on 2/10/17, 5:32 PM

    Oh dear...

  • by vitiell0 on 2/10/17, 6:14 PM

    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?

  • by dyu- on 2/11/17, 6:29 AM

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

    1. semantic-ui.com

  • by naragon on 2/10/17, 11:26 PM

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

  • by che_shirecat on 2/11/17, 3:18 AM

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

  • by anigbrowl on 2/10/17, 8:36 PM

    invite_limit_reached when I try to sign up :-/