Old Li invited me to eat barbecue. He downed three bottles of beer, his eyes red. I focused on eating chicken wings while listening to his troubles: he partnered with a college buddy to do e-commerce, and just started making some money. But last month, that buddy took advantage of controlling the company's main account and absconded with three million, disappearing. Old Li went to find Uncle Hat with a few torn paper agreements; the process was long, and he had to pay the lawyer's fees upfront.
After hearing all this, I felt quite uneasy and asked him: “If all the funds had been on the sign chain in a multi-signature vault, with dividends automatically distributed by smart contracts, would this have happened?”
He was stunned.
I took out my phone to show him @SignOfficial . I said, the world already has tools that use code to constrain human nature. Your original agreements could have been signed with EthSign in the ecosystem, and the hash of the contract permanently recorded on the chain. This is called cryptographic evidence, which can never be altered.
But the most critical issue is managing money.
I opened the distribution interface of TokenTable and told him that profit distribution in a business partnership can completely be managed by code. By placing the fund pool on the chain and setting up a programmable distribution contract: at the end of each month, profits are automatically transferred proportionally into each person's self-managed wallet; if a large principal amount needs to be used, both parties must authorize it with multi-signature from their digital wallets.
In front of the cold, hard code, there are no betrayals for profit, only automatic execution. No one can unilaterally take away a penny.
Old Li smiled wryly: “If I had understood these things earlier, three million wouldn’t have gone down the drain.”
I felt quite emotional. We always build trust on fragile human nature. What Sign is doing is shifting the foundation of trust from "trusting people" to "trusting cryptography." It can guard against partner betrayal; Sign is doing the work of repairing the flaws in human nature, which is worth learning from, benefiting both individuals and society.