[ANN][slock.it][Company] IoT meets blockchain

I have a question though...

If the point is to 'get rid of the middleman' in the services such as AirBnb, etc. then isn't Slock a new middleman? It's just a decentralized one, but at the end of the day, it's still a middle entity.

The only advantage to this is if we lose trust in centralized entities. But there's still going to be a fee for transactions, otherwise no one would bother investing into these slocks. My point is, for many of the applications like renting and selling, we already have a lot of trust in the centralized providers. The place where people lack trust is in the banks and financial institutions, but even there, most people who have the problem are conspiracy theorists. I keep most of my money in the bank. It's bitcoin and cryptocurrency that are in fact much more dangerous. If you don't store it properly you can get hacked, stolen, etc. But with a bank, that's all taken care of. I live in the US, so unless you're a loony nut who thinks the world is going to collapse, your money is fairly safe in a bank, under $250k.

So really why do we want to get rid of AirBnb? Is a decentralized system really better? And will it actually cost less?

Nonetheless, I will be investing in this for short term profit. I'm sure it will moon, but most people don't really care about the real world application.

I think of it this way. When Email appeared people probably were asking the same question: Why do we need this, we already have a letter box and postman-everything works just fine...I guess it's all about speed and cost of contract creation and execution+security and automatic disputes settlements etc.Accountants ,lawyers and bankers would become obsolete in a such system .Although it will take many years if at all because of such system complexity to get there but I would love it Grin

And on the subject of keeping your assets in a Bank, well simply you don't own them because they are not in your custody and you rely on trust and promises that you will be covered under £250k or any other amount they promise. However in a real live promises can and are broken... and when that happens people want to turn a clock back and take some actions unfortunately it is not possible. And to find out how banks "take care" of your money you just need too look at the history-they do care until they have "problems" and when that happens-you are the one who is paying for it .By the way banks also are hacked and personal information and money are stolen on everyday basis and on the massive scale. Just guess what would happen in a real SHTF scenario...
So there is a lot of room for system improvement and block chain technologies doing exactly this.

This answer doesn't address coinbiz' issues. Why would we need a decentralised middleman? In the end, we have a middleman again. By the way, with a decentralised one, there's no support desk whatsoever. And there are plenty of things that can go wrong with 'smart' contracts.

As for 'owning' stuff, that's all just custody until we are gone. And keeping funds solely decentralised raises the same issue as above. Who is going to mediate disputes? No sir, everything is not all that utopic, it seems.

Oh, by the way coinbiz, this is from the DAO participation terms.
..."represent and warrant that you are not exchanging cryptocurrencies for The DAO tokens for the purpose of speculative investment;"

Guess you can't join. Wink

I agree with many of your points just consumer laws are already in place-can't see how it can be different from any other businesses we do online. I think block chain evolves and will keep doing so.Sadly right people or the right money can hijack and centralise any decentralised system-hope in time it will develop resistance.