The Mirrortable

None of this makes any sense unless the international system of law confers some legitimacy on blockchain assets.<p>When a VC sends a wire transfer to a company after signing a set of financing documents, he knows that state, federal, and international courts will enforce the terms of this financing. If the entrepreneur&#x27;s company becomes successful and is acquired or pays dividends, the VC will be able to use the armed power of the state to get his rightful share if he is denied it. If the entrepreneur takes the cash and flees to Spain the Spanish police will arrest him and return him to the custody of the United States courts.<p>That&#x27;s what gives the VC the confidence to wire $100m and without that, it won&#x27;t happen.

Step 1: &quot;Send USDC from a wallet with your ENS address to the entity’s ENS address, and receive digital assets back into your wallet.&quot; What could possibly go wrong?<p>What guarantees that, having done an irrevocable funds transfer, you get something back? Or get back what you expected. Or that the investor is the person expected. This needs something like a two-phase commit - everybody agrees on the terms, and then all parties trigger the transaction locked to those terms. Any conflict and nothing happens.<p>There&#x27;s some handwaving about &quot;smart contracts&quot;, but those have trouble controlling anything that isn&#x27;t on the blockchain. Like actually doing something in the real world.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that this is impossible, but it looks like the proposal has some holes in it.<p>Also, in practice, if you send US$100 million in USDC to someone, which a VC might do, can the recipient actually convert it to dollars and get it into a bank account within a few hours? Or will they stall for a few days?

I would love if there was something like &quot;Coin bootstrapping&quot;.<p>Similar to how ICOs work. But with different expectations. The founder gets the whole initial supply. And then sells of enough of it every month to make a living. If they are lucky, the project becomes very valuable and they end up with a huge amount of coins left. But they might also use up all the coins and barely get by.<p>Does some project like this exist? Or do all founders throw the towel if they do not raise huge sums up front?

If the &quot;mirror&quot; isn&#x27;t definitive, I don&#x27;t see how this saves any work and it definitely adds a lot.<p>For example, to handle transfer restrictions and lockups, the founder &quot;can configure the smart contract for the mirrortable through the platform&#x27;s interface to implement various kinds of restrictions in the on-chain mirrorshares&quot;. So, in addition to working with the lawyers to add the restrictions to the legal docs, she also has to then create a smart contract duplicating this. And, if the angel tries to sell shares and the smart contract allows it, she can&#x27;t rely on this as it maybe a bug, so she still has to dig through the original docs she signed.<p>How does this help anyone?

If this is a thought experiment it’s an interesting enough read.<p>If this is meant to be practical it is some wicked cart-before-horse thinking. To put it bluntly, VCs wouldn’t want to use Monopoly money and chance cards to fund anything unless the USA and EU agreed that stealing Monopoly money was a more serious crime than absconding with a board game.

I&#x27;m surprised that Balaji is pitching the blockchain as the mirror not as the source of truth; I thought he was all in on the blockchain.