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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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)

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.

It doesn't matter how much auditing is done, if you're building on a shaky foundation mistakes will eventually slip through. Solidity is definitely a shaky foundation.

I really admire projects like yours for their daring, but that needs to be backed up with hard engineering work. I would hate to see smart contracts go down the path of the "Internet of things" -- finally succeeding only to cause more harm than good due to compounding security vulnerabilities.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Using a hardware wallet like Ledger rules that scenario out.

I agree that having full control over your identity has risks as well as benefits, though. I expect that we'll eventually see security providers arise that have user-friendly account recovery tools. Due to the plug-and-play architecture of blockchains, that sort of thing will work automatically without any need for organizations like Aragon to integrate with them.