I understand that contract law and notaries are a thing, but people’s signatures are easily forged and a huge amount of the legal system is currently dedicated to resolving conflicts with this. On the flip side building a smart contract to divvy up control of an administrative function or control of funds in a bank account between a threshold of people is a completely different thing that and doesn’t involve scribbles on paper whose only recourse for forging them is the legal system and lengthy litigation. For one, what happens when you want to do business with someone internationally? Can you rely on the courts to back you up at that point? Low level international fraud is rarely prosecuted because it requires things like extradition. If I want to share control of a thing with a business partner in even somewhere like the UK the only recourse I have is the courts. OR I can use a multisig contract and balance the power in such a way where we either both consent to a change (and cryptographically attest to that consent) or it simply doesn’t happen.

Decentralized finance products like uniswap and compound are not the same as micro loans, and micro loans have massive issues with trust, fraud, and solvency. Being able to swap or lend assets in a completely trustless way is something new, and enables new and novel technology like flash loans to exist (which make for more efficient markets). Plus I can go read the actual holdings of these protocols and build whatever machinery I want to respond to changes. Both protocols have a governance process with a timelock so no changes are made without the market having time to react, which overcomes a lot of the risk of malicious proposals (if I somehow pass a proposal that says “pay me all the money in the contract” then everyone will pull their money from the platform before it executes).

As for MPC I’m taking more about cryptographic MPC than something like SETI. A HUGE problem with managing cryptographic keys, be they root dns keys (13 of which control essentially the entire internet) or keys for SSL certificates is that they must exist somewhere in memory to be used. If they’re in memory they can be stolen and no one can actually tell if they’ve been stolen or not until it’s too late. Right now we have ok solutions to some of this through HSMs but then how do you also do backups properly? The MPC research I’m talking about specifically offsets these risks by never having the key exist in one place, and instead it being similar to a multisig where participants come together to create this material. An added benefit depending on how you set this up is that it only requires 1 party to be honest for the whole system to remain sound. ZCash did their entire setup for their protocol this way (https://z.cash/technology/paramgen/). Coinbase also just rolled out support for doing this at scale so that they can have users participate in these crypto protocols without having to manage their own keys (https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-unveils-web3-mobile-...).

So yeah I can see how if you’re a person who has done 0 research into this things sound similar on the surface, but you’d probably also be in the camp of “we already have the post office, what’s the point of email” back in the 90s.