The part of Kickstarter you're describing isn't worth any significant fraction of these $500m. If it were, Indiegogo, Gofundme and all others in the space would need to be well on the unicorn track.
A saying goes "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything". That's where this value of $500m comes in. It's in the brand reputation the company has built. In the traffic they generate by people browsing their site and discovering projects they might back. In the UI they've set up, and most of all, it's in the trust that they actually do some amount of quality checking. In the thought that projects on Kickstarter stand a better chance of executing than projects on competitor's sites.
You can get someone to write the necessary code for "if funded send to x, else return funds" on any freelance site for a four-digit amount, whether you want it in Solidity or PHP. That's the easy part. The hard part then is building a better platform, policing the projects on there, ensuring quality and attracting backers.
> Can you do so in a way that I as a funder don't need to trust you the intermediary?
No, and you can't with smart contracts either (the intermediary being the creator of the contract), unless funders are restricted to people with the skill to analyze the contract code. As proven by the DAO.
And even if you could, you've replaced only a small-and-useless-in-isolation piece of Kickstarter by doing so.
It moves the trust to the code rather than the entity. Code analysis does not need to be done by all, either.
I'm not saying it's the entirety of kickstarter but I think you're being overly dismissive of the concept. It could work well for things like bug or feature bounties, or other similar situations where having a company to sit in the middle and hold cash requires building up too much reputation than it is worth. Running costs become just the transaction & code running costs on whatever network you're using too.
> It moves the trust to the code rather than the entity. Code analysis does not need to be done by all, either.
For everyone who doesn't do it on their own, they either have to trust the originator or trust someone who has done it, so for most users you aren't eliminating the need for a trusted third party.
> For everyone who doesn't do it on their own, they either have to trust the originator or trust someone who has done it, so for most users you aren't eliminating the need for a trusted third party.
Which is a different trust model.
There are a few major things:
1. Not everyone has to trust the originator
2. It's possible for me to trust a third party which is different from the one asking for my money
3. It's possible for me to trust a combination of many third parties, given that any one reliable third party that cries foul would be enough
So there's a huge difference between "trust me and give me your money" and "trust that not all the third parties that checked the code are co-conspirators".
> That was the upthread claim.
Yes, but I'm not making that claim, and I think your statement saying this piece is "useless in isolation" is overly dismissive.
A saying goes "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything". That's where this value of $500m comes in. It's in the brand reputation the company has built. In the traffic they generate by people browsing their site and discovering projects they might back. In the UI they've set up, and most of all, it's in the trust that they actually do some amount of quality checking. In the thought that projects on Kickstarter stand a better chance of executing than projects on competitor's sites.
You can get someone to write the necessary code for "if funded send to x, else return funds" on any freelance site for a four-digit amount, whether you want it in Solidity or PHP. That's the easy part. The hard part then is building a better platform, policing the projects on there, ensuring quality and attracting backers.