I think Ethereum (or something like it) will have a greater effect on many more lives than the Apollo missions did. If successful, it will reshape society by giving every individual reduced economic transaction costs that once required the economies of scale of a megacorporation to achieve.
Take the humble grocery store. The grocery store is a byproduct of economies of scale. Producers sell to grocery stores because it's easier to sell to them in bulk than to find each individual end customer to sell to. Customers buy from grocery stores because it's easier to get everything they want in one store than trying to find each producer to buy from.
Ethereum makes it trivial to connect producers and consumers. It could make the grocery store obsolete. Using an Instacart-style interface, customers could shop from every producer on the planet and have their purchases appear on their doorstep. No intermediary is necessary for this: consumers will pay producers directly, and pay the delivery people and storage centers along the paths from their goods to their homes. Software will do this for them.
Competing in this market is as easy as putting your goods up for sale and building up your reputation—not with a brand marketing campaign, but by selling your goods and services for lower prices until enough people rate them highly enough for you to demand higher prices. More competition and fewer middlemen will lead to lower prices and better products. Trade will be so easy that more trade will happen, and since every trade makes both sides more wealthy, mankind will be more wealthy.
This is why I'm excited about Ethereum. It's easy to dismiss if you don't understand what can be built with it. I encourage you to learn more about what it is and imagine new things that can be built with it.
To clarify, Ethereum isn't a marketplace or a reputation system. It's just a good platform for building those things.
Ordering from Amazon or Alibaba means paying them for the privilege. Systems that connect producers directly to consumers will have lower costs because there's no middleman that needs to skim profits. If such systems become popular, it will be a transfer of wealth from the Amazons of the world to everyone else. I find that desirable.
In general, Ethereum gives us powerful tools to coordinate human interactions. That means there will be more human interactions, and you'll be able to interact with people you don't have much personal history with. You will buy your USB drives directly from the factory in Shenzhen with a good reputation score and low prices. You'll get your loan directly from the person who wants to earn returns on their savings.
>>Systems that connect producers directly to consumers will have lower costs because there's no middleman that needs to skim profits.
Will it? Amazon and the likes operate on notoriously slim margins whilst buying at wholesale prices, and getting shipments in bulk.
Whereas me buying 1 widget from Shenzhen, that will be retail price, plus shipment for 1 single item overseas, that will cost way more than Amazon is paying per bulk-shiped item. I don't see how all that could add up being cheaper than buying it at Amazon or Walmart or whatever.
Wholesale prices exist because it's hard to find customers. Selling in bulk to a single customer is a good deal. However, when it's effortless to connect producers with customers, everyone will get wholesale prices.
You won't pay to ship one single item. The entire batch from the factory that's heading for your country will go out together on one boat with lots of other stuff. Instead of going to an Amazon warehouse when it gets here, it'll just go to you, along with all the other goods from the port headed to your area. Decentralizing shipping will make it more efficient, too.
Another option is that a manufacturer who expects overseas customers can ship the goods to convenient locations for their customers to get faster shipping times. Amazon uses part of their markup to pay for that today. Customers will pay for it directly in the future. Customers will pay for everything directly.
Anyone with a warehouse will be able to make money by participating in the decentralized retail system, but today, it's impossible for those people to compete with Amazon and Walmart. Competition will drive down profit margins.
Umm... Amazon and Alibaba ship actual things, and how they improve the situation is by economies of scale such that the profit they make is less than the inefficiencies they eliminate.
Even then many people would rather go to the mall and pay for local retail space in order to be able to inspect the goods before purchase.
I fail to see how ethereum will make the distribution of goods anymore efficient. 'middle man' is just hand wavy economic ignorance.
Well, the difference is that currently you can only build reputation IN AMAZON or IN ALIBABA, we have no reliable way to objectively generate reputation in the same decentralized way that you might, for instance, have a reputation in your home town... ethereum changes that.
You could say "It doesn't matter if my reputation is dependent on Amazon's database, it still works!" and you'd have a point. This is in fact the big challenge for ethereum (and technologies like it) in that they allow small improvements in many use cases, but there's no obvious singular "deal changer", and admittedly there may never be.
Take the humble grocery store. The grocery store is a byproduct of economies of scale. Producers sell to grocery stores because it's easier to sell to them in bulk than to find each individual end customer to sell to. Customers buy from grocery stores because it's easier to get everything they want in one store than trying to find each producer to buy from.
Ethereum makes it trivial to connect producers and consumers. It could make the grocery store obsolete. Using an Instacart-style interface, customers could shop from every producer on the planet and have their purchases appear on their doorstep. No intermediary is necessary for this: consumers will pay producers directly, and pay the delivery people and storage centers along the paths from their goods to their homes. Software will do this for them.
Competing in this market is as easy as putting your goods up for sale and building up your reputation—not with a brand marketing campaign, but by selling your goods and services for lower prices until enough people rate them highly enough for you to demand higher prices. More competition and fewer middlemen will lead to lower prices and better products. Trade will be so easy that more trade will happen, and since every trade makes both sides more wealthy, mankind will be more wealthy.
This is why I'm excited about Ethereum. It's easy to dismiss if you don't understand what can be built with it. I encourage you to learn more about what it is and imagine new things that can be built with it.