The comparison of SBF to JP Morgan is a fantastic example that people are still too bullish on crypto.
Firstly, SBF is no where near as important to crypto as JPM was to banking institutions. Secondly, crypto is a tiny tiny tiny asset class compared to the actual banks in 1907, Bitcoin's "market cap" is in the same order of magnitude as Apple's cash on hand, and the outflow of capital from crypto is massive for crypto but a drop in the ocean for real asset classes. Thirdly, even if, in some bizarro world SBF managed to stabilize the crypto companies, who actually cares? 1907 was about real peoples lives and life-savings. Let's assume that all these wobbling crypto companies survive. Will we look back on it like 1907? No - because it genuinely doesn't matter.
This whole comparison sits on a pre-crash premise that the crypto space actually represented something of value. That it was some important thing.
This only assumes it stops falling. Sub $5k will mean much more failures and losses. I think that is where it's headed. Bargain hunting for crypto today is like bargain hunting for beanie babies in 2002.
To be fair, crypto currencies _are_ more useful than some pretty flowers. You can actually use it to e.g. buy stuff (though most of that is drugs) and to transfer money (though most of that is evading taxes). The use cases discovered so far might not be the most socially beneficial, but crypto currencies and blockchains in general do have some inherent value that's above $0. Where that value actually lies will only become apparent once the people trying to get rich hodling will have become disillusioned, though.
Isn’t the criticism of this use case that since the exchange of value is not native to crypto itself, its worth as a medium of exchange is sensitive to governments allowing it to persist as a conduit for illegal transactions. Is it really impossible for a government crackdown to make crypto just as hard to exchange illegally as, say, regular currency?
The crypto boom was founded on gambling. The natural next step was to build DeFi but it didn't catch on fast enough and eclipse it's degenerate gambling history. DeFi still depends on CeFi for it's value. In fact let's agree not to call it DeFi anymore since it's a misnomer. Let's just call it cryptotech.
I think there's room for some amazing cryptotech to emerge from the rubble. But it won't look like anything we've seen in the last decade. Guys like SBF are super savvy about the markets, but there needs to be a mass appeal application for cryptotech to be truly successful.
>I think there's room for some amazing cryptotech to emerge from the rubble.
I don't. There is no purpose to "crypto tech" besides gambling on the price of some unregulated token, it is completely useless otherwise. This is the whole reason why mining/staking works the way it does, the participants are paid in the same token they're processing so they get incentivized to make "number go up". If this wasn't the case, there would be some way to pay them in whatever stable currency you wanted to pay them in instead of the token, but no one wants it because then it would just be the same as a boring old accounting firm.
Addendum: The entire idea of DeFi will never work because you cannot actually have basic things needed for a functioning economy like "property" and "credit" when the system works that way. Every "asset" in DeFi is just funny money stacked on top of other funny money. There is no real value to any of it.
may be the "finance" portion is leading you astray.
Torrents work fine today, as a peer to peer tech. I think there's value in peer to peer, and the killer app for such a crypto chain is not yet found today. Finance just happens to be the first application of the blockchain tech (and as you can obviously see, it's a failure).
The same reasoning can be made for the internet - initially, the internet was used as a "document" viewer. But after the crash of 2000, and slowly as the tech improved (computers and browsers got faster), the web has grown to become an application platform (much to my dismay of course).
The original inventors of the internet never intended it to be an application platform. I would argue that the block chain tech is going to go thru a similar phase.
I am looking at this from the tech viewpoint, I'm a systems architect. Blockchain is garbage tech, useful mostly for unregulated gambling (because there isn't a central point you can squeeze). For practically all legitimate use cases it is utterly useless. And don't just trust me - where are all the cool blockchain apps almost 15 years later? Beside the Web 3 bull** marketing hype, there is nothing. Even the IBMs & Microsofts who tried to make money selling shovels in a goldrush are winding down their blockchain operations. The music is about to stop (the crypto gambling perhaps not so soon as it's, well, addictive)
> I'm a systems architect. Blockchain is garbage tech
The goal is to build a permissionless and censorship-resistent financial network. This has been going extremely well. People referencing their engineering credentials and arguing that the "tech is garbage" always have lots of opinions on the usefulness of such a permissionless and censorship-resistent financial network (not a tech question), but are notably silent as to which technical decisions where incorrect, and what the correct ones are. The latter is key, because unless there is a better way to build for the desired goal, there is no tech-deficiency here.
And to put the timeline into context: Note that AMMs like Uniswap, a key infrastructure innovation in the space, are about 4 years old - before this, it was basically impossible to exchange two tokens in a decentralized way. Other key pieces like cross-chain communication systems and rollups are still being built.
> The goal is to build a permissionless and censorship-resistent financial network.
How is this even close to true. There are multiple exchanges right now that have locked up people’s money and don’t allow them to access it.
Cryptocurrency is banned in China and is basically inactive there. How did it evade censorship?
To the extent it’s “censorship proof” in some areas right now is because the censoring entities simply don’t give a shit about it.
Governments that have tried to stop it have found it beyond easy to do so. There are no stories of governments that have tried to control crypto and have failed to do so.
For the obvious reason that crypto is much harder for someone living under an authoritarian regime to get into than just holding US dollars.
I can physically buy US dollars from tourists visiting my country. How do I get Bitcoin? And how do I maintain that Bitcoin. Never mind actually using it…I can give someone else USD without them having to have done any work…but to receive crypto for me, that individual needs to have gone through the same illegal process to setup a crypto account that I have. USD requires only 1 side to have gone through a much easier process to acquire it. Whereas crypto requires both sides to go through it. And it also requires protecting a digital key and internet access to certain sites while your internet is being monitored. I can stick USD under my mattress and carry it in my pocket to someone else’s apartment and then they can stick it under their mattress without even the most repressive govt noticing.
None of your points are technical critiques. Sufficiently restrictive governments have had little trouble enforcing bans against end to end encryption or enforcing internet restrictions for the vast majority of the population either. Computer code will never protect you from a bullet to the head. The lesson here is that technological solutions are not a replacement for politics and real-world power struggles. They can however be a tool.
> How is this even close to true. There are multiple exchanges right now that have locked up people’s money and don’t allow them to access it.
There is nothing wrong with the existence of custodied services, but - give your money to someone else and you are relying on them (and the legal system) to get it back. So what?
> Cryptocurrency is banned in China and is basically inactive there. How did it evade censorship?
> To the extent it’s “censorship proof” in some areas right now is because the censoring entities simply don’t give a shit about it.
It is guaranteed that there are Chinese citizens holding and transacting in crypto everyday. To confiscate these assets or to block these transactions poses certain challenges to authorities. This is what the decidedly non-garbage tech ensures.
It is also challenging to find individuals who have USD under their mattress, which is why cash is extremely useful and civil libertarians should fight for its survival.
> USD requires only 1 side to have gone through a much easier process to acquire it. Whereas crypto requires both sides to go through it.
Note that this is not correct. Wallet-creation is not a physical action; a wallet is merely a sufficiently random number you pick for yourself, in your head if necessary.
How is it censorship-reistant if we already have some "blacklisted" or dirty coins in circulation. That doesn't seem very non-fungible or non-censored...
What makes finance a failure here? Blockchains are still facilitating billions of dollars in volume per day across financial applications - DeFi - even with the drawdown. The projects collapsing are not using transparent blockchains or smart contracts, they are using centralized promises and opaque mechanisms, basically CeFi.
And how much of this volume does something useful? Volume for sake of volume or market cap for sake of market cap isn't practically very useful. Finance exist to facilitate actual commerce. That is trading physical goods, services and immaterial goods. Just having volume in financial applications for sake of those applications is not something you can eat...
Tell this to the stock market? Or any other form of finance that isn’t strictly focused on buying an apple from your local grocer?
You can move money across the world, take loans or lend assets, place investments, manage funds, deposit into escrow, do peer to peer exchange of assets across a range of stability and fungibility, donate immediately and anonymously to nonprofits, setup auctions and crowdfunds. These are useful financial tools, and still working fine in DeFi even after prices crash. You can also do many of these things in tradfi and CeFi in some countries, but without the “De” part, decentralization.
It's funny to see the Economist try to view crypto through a traditional finance lens. The companies rescued by SBF are idiotic, promising to provide stable returns using extremely risky investment strategies. They are the bottom feeders of crypto, as well as being one of the most boring things about it. The Economist seems to want to make crypto reporting part of their purview- why don't they look at some of the interesting developments such as AMMs, algorithmic stablecoins, DAOs, etc?
AMMs are pretty cool, but like much of crypto today just centered around trading one coin for another. Sure that's useful, but that' assuming that these coins should be worth something and are worth holding in their own right.
Algorithmic stablecoins are doomed to fail and not particularly interesting. They're all based on the notion that you can create something out of nothing. It's the cryptocurrency equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Usually there's a floater coin that's minted and burned based on the supply and demand of the stable coin. But again, nothing answers the question why should this (floater) token be worth anything? If the token goes to 0, it all falls apart, or the more likely case that the price drops enough the there is no amount you can mint to stabilize the stable coin. SBF said as much [0].
DAOs are too complicated and rife for abuse and a constant target for attacks, so I'm not optimistic on.
I think what SBF is doing is interesting as he's buying up failing businesses for the users and trust. There's definitely going to be a consolidation going on and I think its for the best.
> Sure that's useful, but that' assuming that these coins should be worth something and are worth holding in their own right
Take the fiat-backed version of these tokens (not Tether, but ones that are backed by somewhat reputable companies) and you can have a distributed Foreign Exchange who can be reasonably profitable just by being a liquidity provider. Early last year I was getting 2% per month on USDC/DAI and about 1% per month on USDC/EURS. Even today one can get a lot more than you'd get on a savings account.
> Early last year I was getting 2% per month on USDC/DAI and about 1% per month on USDC/EURS. Even today one can get a lot more than you'd get on a savings account.
Ask yourself how risky this investment is, and why existing financial services aren't arbitraging it away. 1% a month is ~12% per year, which is comparable to CCC+ corporate bonds.
It's not so much that it's risky, it's that they'd have to spend a lot of money on the compliance position to tell them it's not and ... wait yeah, the bonds are a better idea in every way.
Question for you, though: how would "existing financial services" arbitrage it away? By entering the crypto market and copying Uniswap's contracts and just use smaller fees?
Then why not park the money in existing financial instruments which have a larger risk profile than savings accounts? CCC bonds offer >14.7% yearly returns. Argentina's 10 year bonds have ~50% yearly return.
> Question for you, though: how would "existing financial services" arbitrage it away?
If you think the annual returns are priced appropriately due to risk of default, then they can't. I only brought this up because you compared it the returns on a savings account.
Otherwise, they could just offer a 5% savings account, deposit the money into the crypto market you're talking about, and make an easy 6% return.
> Otherwise, they could just offer a 5% savings account, deposit the money into the crypto market you're talking about, and make an easy 6% return.
No, you can not. If you go to learn how Uniswap (the AMM system being discussed) works, you'll see that liquidity providers revenue comes from the swap fees. There is no compound interest, or any compounding effect for that matter.
If more people went on to become liquidity providers, the profitability of the liquidity pool would go down unless there was corresponding increase in the swap activity. There is no arbitrage there.
> If more people went on to become liquidity providers, the profitability of the liquidity pool would go down unless there was corresponding increase in the swap activity. There is no arbitrage there.
Ok, let me rephrase... there is no "sustained" arbitrage opportunity there.
My point is that anyone that went on to offer 5% on the hopes of making more than that for any prolonged time would be making the exact same mistakes as BlockFi/Celsius/all others did.
There's no such thing as a sustained arbitrage opportunity. The whole point of arbitrage opportunities is that they are self-limiting.
For example, let's say there's a delta in terms of Bitcoin pricing in Korea vs the US - due to banking requirements. Let's call this the "Kimchi premium."
Arbitrageurs find a way to buy at the US price, sell at the Korean price, and keep the difference. Their buying in a low-cost market and selling into a high-cost market ("capturing the premium") brings down the price discrepancy. You can only keep doing this as long as the structural inefficiency exists and also the number of participants remains low. The more participants, the more volume, the lower the premium.
I understand what arbitrage is. I was arbitraging Bitcoin between Brazilian and American exchanges in 2012 already.
My point in saying that there is no "arbitrage" is that you won't make any money if you offer 5% to people and expect to make more than that. Could you perhaps do with a little less pedantry and understand the overall message, or are you going to continue with needless pontification? It's late where I am and I would like to go to sleep.
You’re using words that you don’t understand the meaning of.
Anyways, the person you’re responding to isn’t being pedantic. They’re describing a complete mechanism for how a bank could arbitrage the money.
If they could get 11% returns from AMMs with the same risk profile as a savings account, then they could essentially make free money by setting up savings accounts for other people, where they could offer them 5% returns, and then reinvest that money their clients deposited into the AMMs and receive 11% back.
Of which they would only need to pass on 5% to the clients who deposited the money into the savings account, keeping 6% of the returns without having to commit a single dollar of their own.
And you are trying to argue claims that I never made, such as:
> get 11% returns from AMMs with the same risk profile as a savings account
Where did I say that risk of being an LP is the same as putting the money on a savings account? I didn't.
You are making all this exposition and trying to lecture me based on an assumption that I never made and that I know to be false. IOW, this is at best a strawman and at worst it's disingenuous. In either case it's fucking annoying.
Read again. All I said was that even today being an LP in a stabletoken is beating a savings account.
- Did I say it was without risks? No.
- Would I say that this is relatively low risk, compared with other "investments" in crypto? Yes.
- Compared with money in a bank? No.
- Do I think it is worth it? As part of your strategies, yes.
- Would I tell people to take money from their savings and do this? No, of course not.
- Why not? Because not only it has risks, but also because if more people did it the (and if the transaction volume at the exchanges stayed the same) the ROI would go down.
- Is that the same as "arbitrage"? Not exactly. Liquidity providers make money even if all they are doing is to buy and sell tokens that keep a peg to the USD. The issue here is that flooding the pool with more cash is diluting the profitability.
- Could some whale come, put a bunch of liquidity in a pool and keep it only while the profitability is higher than the savings account? Shouldn't that count as a "arbitrage opportunity"? No, because there are costs to on-and-off ramp, there are risks associated with crypto and if you want to do that kind of arb, you'd be better off my looking into crypto money markets - which also have its own risk/reward profile.
What else do you need to be spelled out so that you can stop with the stupid strawmen?
> Early last year I was getting 2% per month on USDC/DAI and about 1% per month on USDC/EURS. Even today one can get a lot more than you'd get on a savings account.
I don't understand why you compared USDC's return to a savings account's if you didn't mean that USDC is a better investment than a savings account.
> - Compared with money in a bank? No.
Yes you did, above.
> - Did I say it was without risks? No.
> - Would I tell people to take money from their savings and do this? No, of course not.
Then it makes no sense to compare USDC to a savings account. The risks are much higher.
> - Could some whale come, put a bunch of liquidity in a pool and keep it only while the profitability is higher than the savings account? Shouldn't that count as a "arbitrage opportunity"? No, because there are costs to on-and-off ramp, there are risks associated with crypto and if you want to do that kind of arb, you'd be better off my looking into crypto money markets - which also have its own risk/reward profile.
But all arbitrage is risky, that's not against the definition and neither are on/off-ramp fees. Even if you're "better off" doing something else by your criteria, the opportunity is still there.
Edit: not to be too pedantic but:
> - Is that the same as "arbitrage"? Not exactly. Liquidity providers make money even if all they are doing is to buy and sell tokens that keep a peg to the USD. The issue here is that flooding the pool with more cash is diluting the profitability.
You're getting dollars somewhere and selling them where you will get more money for it. The opportunity goes lower as more people use it. Still sounds like an arbitrage to me, or something that's functionally the same.
> I don't understand why you compared USDC's return a savings account
First, not just "USDC". I was describing the process of being a liquidity provider, which involves a token pair.
Second, the fact that I compared with a savings account does not mean that I am saying that the risks are the same. I used savings account because I wanted to illustrate that this is something that can be done holding only "stabletokens", i.e, without speculating on the value of the token itself. I could've used money markets or fx funds, the idea would be the same.
> Not to be pedantic (...) The opportunity goes lower as more people use it. Still sounds like arbitrage to me.
Imagine you have an ice cream stand and you start making good money because you find a nice spot by the beach. Some days you are selling close to 100% of your stock, some days you even need to go get more at the supplier. Some of your competitors find out and move their trucks next to you. Nobody changed their prices, and the ice cream being sold by all of you are all of equivalent quality. Now, the street as a whole is still a "good" spot, the customers are still spending the same amount of money as before, but you are not making as much money because now you are splitting the customer base with the other guys.
Is that "arbitrage"? I certainly wouldn't call it that. There was at first some information asymmetry, but calling every asymmetry an "arbitrage opportunity" seems like a stretch to me.
The arbitrage is the ability to buy ice cream where it's cheap (the store) and sell it where it's expensive (the beach). The margin compress as more folks arrive to sell because your fixed costs (labor, the van, cogs) remain fixed while your sales volume drops.
Definition is: "the simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset."
So in this case you're buying a commodity (ice cream) at the store and selling it at the beach. You are taking advantage of differing prices for the same asset in different markets.
If buying at X and selling at X + ε is "arbitrage", every retailer is merely "arb-ing".
Even looking at the definition you gave I don't think it pass the smell test, the scenario does not require the buying and selling to be simultaneous... not in the ice cream analogy, and much less in the real uniswap mechanism.
All arbitrage leads to the elimination of the arbitrage. That’s the whole point of arbitrage. It’s never sustained, because if it was, it would be the financial equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, simply generating value out of nothing.
1%-2% per month doesn't pass the smell test for something stable. You're taking on some risk, it's just hidden from you. And thats the worst kind of risk to take on. Just look at the extremes. The big risk here is impermanent loss which is inevitable unless the relative price remains stable. Or they could both go down and relative to fiat you'd be down as well
The peg could be broken as we've seen with a number of stable coins so far this year. I've explained in previous comments why algo-stablcoins are doomed to fail. The traditional stable coins require a lot of trust and I'm not sure how they fall in the capital structure of the company. Even if it were backed 1:1 with fiat, if someone like Coinbase goes into bankruptcy, is the pool of money for their stable coins protected?
> if someone like Coinbase goes into bankruptcy, is the pool of money for their stable coins protected?
Theoretically, yes. Circle's reserves are separated from Coinbase. So one could be worried about their assets if they were being held by Coinbase, but if you are holding USDC on your own Circle should still be able to redeem USDC for dollars.
These mightier institutions were trying to defend a peg while dealing with fractional reserve and/or a deficit in the trading sheet.
A stabletoken like USDC is not any of that. It is (or should be) backed 1:1 by dollars, and the institution holding USDs should be profiting only for the service provided, not by re-investing the money.
> It is (or should be) backed 1:1 by dollars, and the institution holding USDs should be profiting only for the service provided, not by re-investing the money.
Should be, perhaps. But it does not appear to be. Tether's statements indicate that they are very much in the fractional reserve game, and while Circle has removed the asset breakdown from their attestations, the last one I found that had it indicated that they were also playing the fractional reserve game.
Given that the two largest stablecoins have admitted to playing the fractional reserve game, are you willing to admit that the peg turn out to only be as solid as, say, the GBP/ESM peg was?
If you have any attestation from USDC saying that they are not holding enough USD or commercial paper to back their reserves, you can make a lot of money by a combination of (a) legal action against them (which is easier to do than compared with Tether) and (b) shorting it, as there are a lot of institutional investors who would be interested in breaking them.
I said USDC has said that is using fractional reserves. I did not say that it is insolvent.
(That said, I do believe that USDC and USDT are likely to be insolvent, primarily on the basis that assets equaling 100% of liabilities to three significant figures is suspiciously precise. More likely for USDT, as their attestation also notes that they're using non-standard accounting practices, although USDC gets a ding for not providing any breakdowns.)
> (a) legal action against them (which is easier to do than compared with Tether)
What standing has anyone to sue USDC right now? You need to have suffered damages, and so long as the peg has maintained, damages have not yet occurred.
> (b) shorting it, as there are a lot of institutional investors who would be interested in breaking them.
How do you short them? You'd need to acquire likely >10 billion of USDC to sell without providing 10 billion of liquid USD to Circle or any of its confederates that they could use against you.
> I said USDC has said that is using fractional reserves. I did not say that it is insolvent.
It doesn't matter. USDC promises 1:1 backing of dollars for cash or "cash-like instruments". If they are not able to not attest this and they minted more USDC than they should, they are breaching this promise.
The asset classes they have previously admitted to investing in are similar asset classes to those that money market funds have invested in, and historically, that has not proven sufficient to always maintain a 1:1 backing. And also, I believe, not inconsistent with a description of "cash-like instruments" (at least insofar as any legal liability could result).
Of course, the more you compare stablecoins to money market funds, the more you wonder why anyone should prefer the former over the latter: stablecoins appear to be a less regulated, more opaque version of money market funds, with more meager rewards and a richer repertoire of liars and scam artists.
Are you sure you are talking about Circle (USDC) and not Tether (USDT)? Let's not confuse one for the other, because I already said right at the top that Tether is not to be trusted.
Real (traditional) successful market makers are rather more sophisticated than anything that could possibly run on the Ethereum blockchain. The fact that a market maker is a decentralized automatic magical thing that is supported by cryptography does not mean that it has a chance of competing with a good algorithm that runs on an actual computer (or FPGA or ASIC!) if the cryptocurrency market ever becomes legitimate to the point where modern market makers fully participate.
You are missing the point. Those providing liquidity are not making money because of their sophisticated trading strategies. They make money by being the exchange.
What is “the exchange”? They are making money be being an exchange and the major market maker on it. But the fees are insane by traditional finance standards, and the barrier to entry of creating a new exchange is pretty low.
The barrier to create a new exchange is almost zero. The code from Uniswap is open source, you can clone and be running a competitor in a day.
The challenge would be in providing liquidity at levels that could compete with Uniswap's. You can go buy your userbase like Sushiswap did, but you'll see that LPs already learned their lesson that what matters is the transaction volume and these governance tokens being given as an incentive are worthless, so you need to buy both makers and traders.
If you are willing to keep a lot of capital around for a long time and taking the risk of impermanent loss, eventually you will be able to take users from Uniswap. But who would do that?
There was nothing to be "taken". Liquidity providers on Uniswap are market makers. They are (automatically) buying and selling tokens, and receiving a fee for their service.
Anyone can create a liquidity pool of any pair, as they see fit. It does not require any "prior" input. There is no staking, no dividend or interest of any type.
The profit comes solely from the fees, and the profitability of the pool does not depend on how many people "get in" or "get out", it depends solely on how many people are willing to swap token A for token B. The more people transacting, the more fees are generated.
You started this thread with some completely wise-sounding quip, but each of your responses are showing that you have absolutely no idea of how things actually work on decentralized exchanges, and that all you have are blank statements and preconceived notions about crypto.
Users of a token swap pay a fee to have their tokens swapped. This fee gets distributed among the people who are providing liquidity proportional to how much liquidity they provide compared to everyone else.
They are paying a transaction fee because they've deemed that token swap as being the most convenient or cheapest way to make the exchange.
But could we engineer one that has a 99.99999% chance not to fail after 1 year? Similarly encryption wind AES-256 is doomed to fail, but we have made the chance of failure miniscule.
> AES-256 is doomed to fail, but we have made the chance of failure miniscule
That doesn't make sense. AES makes the cost and time length of a successful attack too expensive to be worth attempting. It's very successful in that regard and might stay that way forever.
> But could we engineer one that has a 99.99999% chance not to fail after 1 year?
> That's my point. Can we make the cost and time lengthe of a successful attack to be too expensive.
What's the use of a peg that is likely to break after one year though? Symmetric ciphers are basically a solved problem until a computing revolution, this doesn't seem to be nearly as easy.
[edit] Apologies, I had written more, but I guess it didn't get posted.
Pegs simply do not hold. They're like pinatas full of money. Even well-supported pegs can pay off huge if you have enough capital to break open the pinata. This is how Soros made his billions - he broke the peg of the British pound.
It's extremely difficult to create ersatz dollars, it's especially difficult to do that out of marketable securities, and especially difficult to do that out of highly volatile marketable securities.
Please back up your reasoning. Do you think it would be possible to make one that had a 1% chance to last at least a day? Surely if you scale back the requirements eventually it would be possible to meet.
Just because something in virtual doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. Why do by people pay for Netflix just to get worthless numbers streamed to them.
I mean everyone has their idea of what is 'interesting' in crypto, but the counterpoint to your argument is all of those things can be positioned as being just as scammy as yield farming:
AMMs = Only work in a world where prevailing prices aren't set by traditional centralized order books. As long as those exist, AMMs will always be 'behind the curve' and lose value to arbitrageurs who buy from central books and sell to AMMs (even if bulls call it 'impermanent loss' it's a core feature of the system).
Algorithmic Stable coins = Only work in a world where the market perceives the paired asset as truly 'risk-free' (as evidenced by the Terra/Luna debacle). To date, the only 'risk-free' assets come with a multi-trillion dollar investment in an army, so unclear if there's really anything interesting there.
DAOs = Frequently show themselves as insecure, oligopolist, retail un-friendly organizations [0][1][2]
In short, be careful what you wish for, because at least by focusing on the SBF-cult, they're not doing the serious journalism needed to prove how atechnological most crypto projects are.
Those things are definitely interesting from a technical point of view, but they solve problems that are uniquely created by crypto, and are not really needed outside of it.
For example AMMs are not needed, just use an order book. Stablecoins? Just use currency. DAOs? A corporation.
>Those things are definitely interesting from a technical point of view, but they solve problems that are uniquely created by crypto, and are not really needed outside of it.
Well, I mean, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Lots of new tech brings new problems and new solutions that wouldn't apply at all to old tech. We had very little need for super precision honed turbines in 1900. We sure are happy to have them now though.
I look forward to the crypto crash as much as any "paper hands hater". But I can't dislike it for being new or novel.
I implemented an AMM in my multiplayer game (nothing to do with cryptocurrencies) for players to trade one resource for another. They can always buy/sell into the AMM even at low activity as long as there's liquidity. It's also a fun mechanic for players where they can invest their surplus and get a cut of every trade.
Fun fact, AMMs were considered well before cryptocurrency.
" The most popular automated market maker used in Internet prediction markets is
Hanson’s logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR), an automated market maker with
particularly desirable properties [Hanson 2003, 2007]. The LMSR is used by a number of companies including Inkling Markets, Consensus Point, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and the large-scale non-commercial Gates Hillman Prediction Market at Carnegie Mellon [Othman and Sandholm 2010a]."
From https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/liquidity-sensitive%20autom...
Refuted means you can conclusive prove something. You can only say these attempts at algorithmic stablecoins failed but it doesn’t mean they are destined to always fail. The devil is in the details and honestly Terra was run incompetently and for greed rather than as a true professional endeavor.
> The devil is in the details and honestly Terra was run incompetently and for greed rather than as a true professional endeavor.
If the market can't discern honest players from the criminals, then how will an honest attempt at these coins ever succeed? The problem is that we don't know that they're criminals until they've gone under, and there's no due diligence or oversight to verify that they're legit because that would be antithetical to the entire system.
It would be like continuing to drop a little money in every single altcoin that hits r/cryptomoonshots because at least one of those people has to be honest, right?
If being trustless is central to the technology, then we have no idea if what we're putting our money into is legit or not and that's a fundamental problem with this stuff. The system rewards bad behavior, plain and simple. As long as that's true, I don't see how honest people gain enough influence to actually achieve the vision that the community realizes.
If the market can't discern honest players from the criminals, then how will an honest attempt at these coins ever succeed?
Yeah, this is a huge problem for crypto in general.
The problem is that we don't know that they're criminals until they've gone under, and there's no due diligence or oversight to verify that they're legit
At least one third party analyzed Terra's algorithm and predicted the collapse around 6 months before it happened.
I mean, people were screaming that the Terra ecosystem was going to collapse since forever. It's just that different people invested in it anyway. There's nothing impossible about verifying the legitimacy of any endeavour, people just don't do it.
Honest people will do honest work and succeed or fail on their own terms, the fact that there are a hundred scams running adjacent to the honest projects is unfortunate and very disruptive but doesn't actually fundamentally block honest work.
People have been screaming about that for every part of crypto.
How is the non-crypto-expert supposed to tell that the Terra and DOGE hate is real but the BTC and ETH hate isn't? Or that the ETH hate also is, and it's only the BTC hate that you should ignore? Or any of a number of different permutations?
Isn't the adoption of the honest work blocked by this inability to differentiate without lots of hours of research?
Much of crypto, such as NFTs, Ethereum and Bitcoin, is based on consensual reality that these tokens have value because there are no underlying assets. As long as people believe they are a store of value they essentially are. Until at some point people lose faith and then they do not hold value.
In fact stable coins in theory are one of the least scammy parts because they have a real value as long as there are not outright scams (of which many of them are.)
There is a Yuancoin already btw. And there probably should also be an official US and Euro digital coin as well. But I do not think these alternatives will go to zero, rather they will act like ETFs, as they sort of do now. If they are collateralized properly, they should be fine.
Sounds like a no true Scotsman fallacy. Even has Luna started losing peg, lots of people thought there was no way they would go entirely down because it was one of the biggest name in crypto and supported in the industry by so many. It was very mainstream solution and among the top 10 crypto in market cap.
The history of currency and pegs are well documented in the world of finance, for decades. If anything the demonstration that an algorithmic stablecoin is possible is something that must be proven, because every signs are pointing toward the fact that it's not.
I guess it is a Scotsman like scenario. The issue is that algorithmic lending isn’t uniform nor fully explored yet so it is hard to say that it is proved that it can not work.
I would argue that it is akin to saying that because you found 5 Scotland and none of them is tall then it proves all Scotsman’s are short. It is not a true proof that all Scotland are short but rather an observation that all Scotland you’ve seen so far are short. These are different things. Maybe all Scotsman are short but it isn’t yet a hard proof just a conjecture. That is all.
The reason they failed seems rather general. They are based on assets that can go down in value fast when there is a run to get out of the stablecoin and not enough traders to handle the volume. Essentially, the stablecoin needs to be fully backed by traders who need to be prepared to back most of the market cap by trading at scale.
An "algorithmic" stablecoin allows anyone to do that trade, but it doesn't make any particular guarantee that these traders will be there when they're needed. And I don't see how that can be automated unless the algorithm already has the assets, as with an overcollateralized margin loan?
So, while innovation is hard to rule out, it seems like you need a good explanation for why this time it's different.
It goes without saying that algorithmic stablecoins have to be overcollateralized. The remaining debate is about the precise mechanism for contracting supply. https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/05/25/stable.html
There are still some notable people in crypto who want to see the concept succeed. I imagine we'll see at least a few more try (and probably blow up) before they get regulated out of existence.
The concept is pretty interesting if there were real assets behind the coin. Problem is you would need a good counterparty… which means you need a good custodian… which means you might as well just use the counterparty and custodian.
The only real benefit of the coin in this case would be programming derivatives without further intermediate custodians and counter parties. This could be useful for some back office finance activities outside of scams.
The incentives are such that if you can figure it out you can basically create money out of nothing. So there will always be people that are looking for it to succeed. It's alchemy. It all breaks down if the floater goes to zero or a price such that you can't mint enough to stabilize the coin. And on a long enough time span this is bound to happen.
The stable coin can never go above its target value, but it can go below. So you're essentially holding value and then getting wiped out every N years or so. So it's doomed to fail
I ask two questions to see if passes the smell test:
1. Does this work if the floater is worth 0?
2. Is there some kind of natural cap? In other words, can I print an infinite amount of dollars?
None of the implementations works without some value being attributable to the floating token(s). Similarly, I never hear of any natural caps. For instance, you can create a stable coin with a market cap of $100 and just mint N tokens of the floater for M where M*N = 100. But why can't you mint more and sell at a slightly lower price? Is there some natural limit? If so, can't the price of the floater go down to such a level to not be able to support the market cap?
AMMs - are a shitty way to work around blockchain limitations. They would have never gotten any steam if transactions were fast and cheap enough to run an order book.
algorithmic stablecoins - great way to lose all your money
DAOs - Just direct democracy but without constitutional protects and switching from one human = one vote to one $ = one vote. Interesting in terms of seeing how a libertarian hyper-capitalism future would play out but not something I'd like to see in real life.
>DAOs - Just direct democracy but without constitutional protects and switching from one human = one vote to one $ = one vote. Interesting in terms of seeing how a libertarian hyper-capitalism future would play out but not something I'd like to see in real life.
Especially where the DAO decides to renege on previous commitments and/or expropriate the assets of a participant.
"It's funny to see the Economist try to view crypto through a traditional finance lens."
I suppose that by "traditional finance" you mean something like economies based on fiat currencies and the like, where the value of something is based on what is agreed by market forces. That something can be a piece of plasticised paper with holograms and windowed cut outs and a symbolic value called "£10" or as I would say: ten quid. It might also mean an economy based on gold reserves (mmmmm pretty) or chickens (barter - at least they are a thing and handy if you are hungry) or something in between. Mud/earth had stupendous value in the film "Waterworld".
So, your crypto thingies bring exactly what to the party? It chews through power thanks to mining. Yes, I gather there are other forms of crypto coin that might address this but they have little value yet. The big hitters - Bitcoin etc now consume a lot of power to "mine" but mine what exactly? You can't eat the bloody things but then you can't eat a squid (nickname for GBP - pound - quid - squid) but you can eat a squid (sea living decapod).
Crypto coins seem to me to be a properly rubbish "fuck you" modern thing. You expend resources to generate a "value". That value is scaled to other values via a "market". That's how capitalism works and so all is good. However, what exactly have you generated? It's not a useful thing. You have expended multiple KWh on a calculation. I can't eat a calculation, so I think you have slid in via a side door into my market economy and subverted it.
I'm not quite sure what my final, formal argument against the current forms of crypto currencies is going to take yet but it looks more and more wrong to me.
I'd love to see your (@woah) arguments in reverse of mine. For example what on earth are those "interesting developments"? I'm not a luddite and I run an IT company.
Convince me that you bring value and not simply generate profit.
I don't quite understand how we're 10 years into crypto and people still aren't sure the value that a trillion dollar industry generates, I wonder why there's so much confusion around this?
It seems like there's a small niche of people who like finance and tech who get it, but if you're not in that group you will (for example) use hCaptcha without even realising it's on Ethereum and will never see the value even when it's right in front of you.
Maybe people like using it for cross border payments or getting money out of extremely unstable currencies, or anything to playing a game of godsunchained.com or any of immutable.com's properties (including those damn NFT's), maybe you can get a better interest rate lending a stablecoin on app.aave.com instead of in a trad finance savings account, watch some theta.tv, or just like the whole crypto ecosystem in general? the communities, the telegram group chats, the chart watching, the idea of WAGMI, the idea of directly having a say in a project and talking to the CEO via telegram instead of via an online form where you put in your preferences and then a share holder meeting happens months later etcetc
There are a lot of people who see it as a get rich quick scheme in the same way WallStreetBets users use the stock market to try and get rich quick, but ultimately the continued improvements in Ethereum and Bitcoin which push for a faster, cheaper, better digital currency systems are moving it forward and bring something of value to the table, because in reality if it brought nothing no one would be talking about Crypto, it'd just be worthless Disney Dollars like I was told Bitcoin was back when I first looked into it 10 years ago.
r/wallstreetbets is famous for descriptions of losing money. Yes, there have been some accidents involving apes actually making money and the recent GME thing.
Your Disney Dollars analogy is outstanding! If you bought BT https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/ in say Jan 2020 and flogged it in mid Nov 2021 then you would see quite a payback. However, look at the value curve and note how chaotic it is. You cannot meaningfully attempt to predict how crypto will perform so it is nearly gambling. You might win or not.
Generally you won't win.
I have no skin in this game but is it still possible to short these beasts? If it is then I suggest wacking a few ponies on it, if you have some to spare.
Firstly, SBF is no where near as important to crypto as JPM was to banking institutions. Secondly, crypto is a tiny tiny tiny asset class compared to the actual banks in 1907, Bitcoin's "market cap" is in the same order of magnitude as Apple's cash on hand, and the outflow of capital from crypto is massive for crypto but a drop in the ocean for real asset classes. Thirdly, even if, in some bizarro world SBF managed to stabilize the crypto companies, who actually cares? 1907 was about real peoples lives and life-savings. Let's assume that all these wobbling crypto companies survive. Will we look back on it like 1907? No - because it genuinely doesn't matter.
This whole comparison sits on a pre-crash premise that the crypto space actually represented something of value. That it was some important thing.
I think there's room for some amazing cryptotech to emerge from the rubble. But it won't look like anything we've seen in the last decade. Guys like SBF are super savvy about the markets, but there needs to be a mass appeal application for cryptotech to be truly successful.
I don't. There is no purpose to "crypto tech" besides gambling on the price of some unregulated token, it is completely useless otherwise. This is the whole reason why mining/staking works the way it does, the participants are paid in the same token they're processing so they get incentivized to make "number go up". If this wasn't the case, there would be some way to pay them in whatever stable currency you wanted to pay them in instead of the token, but no one wants it because then it would just be the same as a boring old accounting firm.
Addendum: The entire idea of DeFi will never work because you cannot actually have basic things needed for a functioning economy like "property" and "credit" when the system works that way. Every "asset" in DeFi is just funny money stacked on top of other funny money. There is no real value to any of it.
Torrents work fine today, as a peer to peer tech. I think there's value in peer to peer, and the killer app for such a crypto chain is not yet found today. Finance just happens to be the first application of the blockchain tech (and as you can obviously see, it's a failure).
The same reasoning can be made for the internet - initially, the internet was used as a "document" viewer. But after the crash of 2000, and slowly as the tech improved (computers and browsers got faster), the web has grown to become an application platform (much to my dismay of course).
The original inventors of the internet never intended it to be an application platform. I would argue that the block chain tech is going to go thru a similar phase.
The goal is to build a permissionless and censorship-resistent financial network. This has been going extremely well. People referencing their engineering credentials and arguing that the "tech is garbage" always have lots of opinions on the usefulness of such a permissionless and censorship-resistent financial network (not a tech question), but are notably silent as to which technical decisions where incorrect, and what the correct ones are. The latter is key, because unless there is a better way to build for the desired goal, there is no tech-deficiency here.
And to put the timeline into context: Note that AMMs like Uniswap, a key infrastructure innovation in the space, are about 4 years old - before this, it was basically impossible to exchange two tokens in a decentralized way. Other key pieces like cross-chain communication systems and rollups are still being built.
How is this even close to true. There are multiple exchanges right now that have locked up people’s money and don’t allow them to access it.
Cryptocurrency is banned in China and is basically inactive there. How did it evade censorship?
To the extent it’s “censorship proof” in some areas right now is because the censoring entities simply don’t give a shit about it.
Governments that have tried to stop it have found it beyond easy to do so. There are no stories of governments that have tried to control crypto and have failed to do so.
For the obvious reason that crypto is much harder for someone living under an authoritarian regime to get into than just holding US dollars.
I can physically buy US dollars from tourists visiting my country. How do I get Bitcoin? And how do I maintain that Bitcoin. Never mind actually using it…I can give someone else USD without them having to have done any work…but to receive crypto for me, that individual needs to have gone through the same illegal process to setup a crypto account that I have. USD requires only 1 side to have gone through a much easier process to acquire it. Whereas crypto requires both sides to go through it. And it also requires protecting a digital key and internet access to certain sites while your internet is being monitored. I can stick USD under my mattress and carry it in my pocket to someone else’s apartment and then they can stick it under their mattress without even the most repressive govt noticing.
The same cannot be said for crypto.
> How is this even close to true. There are multiple exchanges right now that have locked up people’s money and don’t allow them to access it.
There is nothing wrong with the existence of custodied services, but - give your money to someone else and you are relying on them (and the legal system) to get it back. So what?
> Cryptocurrency is banned in China and is basically inactive there. How did it evade censorship? > To the extent it’s “censorship proof” in some areas right now is because the censoring entities simply don’t give a shit about it.
It is guaranteed that there are Chinese citizens holding and transacting in crypto everyday. To confiscate these assets or to block these transactions poses certain challenges to authorities. This is what the decidedly non-garbage tech ensures.
It is also challenging to find individuals who have USD under their mattress, which is why cash is extremely useful and civil libertarians should fight for its survival.
> USD requires only 1 side to have gone through a much easier process to acquire it. Whereas crypto requires both sides to go through it.
Note that this is not correct. Wallet-creation is not a physical action; a wallet is merely a sufficiently random number you pick for yourself, in your head if necessary.
David Rosenthal argues it better here:
https://blog.dshr.org/2022/06/you-cant-have-one-without-othe...
You can move money across the world, take loans or lend assets, place investments, manage funds, deposit into escrow, do peer to peer exchange of assets across a range of stability and fungibility, donate immediately and anonymously to nonprofits, setup auctions and crowdfunds. These are useful financial tools, and still working fine in DeFi even after prices crash. You can also do many of these things in tradfi and CeFi in some countries, but without the “De” part, decentralization.
I am curious - have you tried DeFi?
Algorithmic stablecoins are doomed to fail and not particularly interesting. They're all based on the notion that you can create something out of nothing. It's the cryptocurrency equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. Usually there's a floater coin that's minted and burned based on the supply and demand of the stable coin. But again, nothing answers the question why should this (floater) token be worth anything? If the token goes to 0, it all falls apart, or the more likely case that the price drops enough the there is no amount you can mint to stabilize the stable coin. SBF said as much [0].
DAOs are too complicated and rife for abuse and a constant target for attacks, so I'm not optimistic on.
I think what SBF is doing is interesting as he's buying up failing businesses for the users and trust. There's definitely going to be a consolidation going on and I think its for the best.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...
Take the fiat-backed version of these tokens (not Tether, but ones that are backed by somewhat reputable companies) and you can have a distributed Foreign Exchange who can be reasonably profitable just by being a liquidity provider. Early last year I was getting 2% per month on USDC/DAI and about 1% per month on USDC/EURS. Even today one can get a lot more than you'd get on a savings account.
Ask yourself how risky this investment is, and why existing financial services aren't arbitraging it away. 1% a month is ~12% per year, which is comparable to CCC+ corporate bonds.
Question for you, though: how would "existing financial services" arbitrage it away? By entering the crypto market and copying Uniswap's contracts and just use smaller fees?
Then why not park the money in existing financial instruments which have a larger risk profile than savings accounts? CCC bonds offer >14.7% yearly returns. Argentina's 10 year bonds have ~50% yearly return.
> Question for you, though: how would "existing financial services" arbitrage it away?
If you think the annual returns are priced appropriately due to risk of default, then they can't. I only brought this up because you compared it the returns on a savings account.
Otherwise, they could just offer a 5% savings account, deposit the money into the crypto market you're talking about, and make an easy 6% return.
No, you can not. If you go to learn how Uniswap (the AMM system being discussed) works, you'll see that liquidity providers revenue comes from the swap fees. There is no compound interest, or any compounding effect for that matter.
If more people went on to become liquidity providers, the profitability of the liquidity pool would go down unless there was corresponding increase in the swap activity. There is no arbitrage there.
That's the definition of arbitrage.
My point is that anyone that went on to offer 5% on the hopes of making more than that for any prolonged time would be making the exact same mistakes as BlockFi/Celsius/all others did.
For example, let's say there's a delta in terms of Bitcoin pricing in Korea vs the US - due to banking requirements. Let's call this the "Kimchi premium."
Arbitrageurs find a way to buy at the US price, sell at the Korean price, and keep the difference. Their buying in a low-cost market and selling into a high-cost market ("capturing the premium") brings down the price discrepancy. You can only keep doing this as long as the structural inefficiency exists and also the number of participants remains low. The more participants, the more volume, the lower the premium.
This btw is how SBF made all his money.
My point in saying that there is no "arbitrage" is that you won't make any money if you offer 5% to people and expect to make more than that. Could you perhaps do with a little less pedantry and understand the overall message, or are you going to continue with needless pontification? It's late where I am and I would like to go to sleep.
Anyways, the person you’re responding to isn’t being pedantic. They’re describing a complete mechanism for how a bank could arbitrage the money.
If they could get 11% returns from AMMs with the same risk profile as a savings account, then they could essentially make free money by setting up savings accounts for other people, where they could offer them 5% returns, and then reinvest that money their clients deposited into the AMMs and receive 11% back.
Of which they would only need to pass on 5% to the clients who deposited the money into the savings account, keeping 6% of the returns without having to commit a single dollar of their own.
So why hasn’t any bank done this yet?
> get 11% returns from AMMs with the same risk profile as a savings account
Where did I say that risk of being an LP is the same as putting the money on a savings account? I didn't.
You are making all this exposition and trying to lecture me based on an assumption that I never made and that I know to be false. IOW, this is at best a strawman and at worst it's disingenuous. In either case it's fucking annoying.
Read again. All I said was that even today being an LP in a stabletoken is beating a savings account.
- Did I say it was without risks? No.
- Would I say that this is relatively low risk, compared with other "investments" in crypto? Yes.
- Compared with money in a bank? No.
- Do I think it is worth it? As part of your strategies, yes.
- Would I tell people to take money from their savings and do this? No, of course not.
- Why not? Because not only it has risks, but also because if more people did it the (and if the transaction volume at the exchanges stayed the same) the ROI would go down.
- Is that the same as "arbitrage"? Not exactly. Liquidity providers make money even if all they are doing is to buy and sell tokens that keep a peg to the USD. The issue here is that flooding the pool with more cash is diluting the profitability.
- Could some whale come, put a bunch of liquidity in a pool and keep it only while the profitability is higher than the savings account? Shouldn't that count as a "arbitrage opportunity"? No, because there are costs to on-and-off ramp, there are risks associated with crypto and if you want to do that kind of arb, you'd be better off my looking into crypto money markets - which also have its own risk/reward profile.
What else do you need to be spelled out so that you can stop with the stupid strawmen?
> Early last year I was getting 2% per month on USDC/DAI and about 1% per month on USDC/EURS. Even today one can get a lot more than you'd get on a savings account.
I don't understand why you compared USDC's return to a savings account's if you didn't mean that USDC is a better investment than a savings account.
> - Compared with money in a bank? No.
Yes you did, above.
> - Did I say it was without risks? No.
> - Would I tell people to take money from their savings and do this? No, of course not.
Then it makes no sense to compare USDC to a savings account. The risks are much higher.
> - Could some whale come, put a bunch of liquidity in a pool and keep it only while the profitability is higher than the savings account? Shouldn't that count as a "arbitrage opportunity"? No, because there are costs to on-and-off ramp, there are risks associated with crypto and if you want to do that kind of arb, you'd be better off my looking into crypto money markets - which also have its own risk/reward profile.
But all arbitrage is risky, that's not against the definition and neither are on/off-ramp fees. Even if you're "better off" doing something else by your criteria, the opportunity is still there.
Edit: not to be too pedantic but:
> - Is that the same as "arbitrage"? Not exactly. Liquidity providers make money even if all they are doing is to buy and sell tokens that keep a peg to the USD. The issue here is that flooding the pool with more cash is diluting the profitability.
You're getting dollars somewhere and selling them where you will get more money for it. The opportunity goes lower as more people use it. Still sounds like an arbitrage to me, or something that's functionally the same.
First, not just "USDC". I was describing the process of being a liquidity provider, which involves a token pair.
Second, the fact that I compared with a savings account does not mean that I am saying that the risks are the same. I used savings account because I wanted to illustrate that this is something that can be done holding only "stabletokens", i.e, without speculating on the value of the token itself. I could've used money markets or fx funds, the idea would be the same.
> Not to be pedantic (...) The opportunity goes lower as more people use it. Still sounds like arbitrage to me.
Imagine you have an ice cream stand and you start making good money because you find a nice spot by the beach. Some days you are selling close to 100% of your stock, some days you even need to go get more at the supplier. Some of your competitors find out and move their trucks next to you. Nobody changed their prices, and the ice cream being sold by all of you are all of equivalent quality. Now, the street as a whole is still a "good" spot, the customers are still spending the same amount of money as before, but you are not making as much money because now you are splitting the customer base with the other guys.
Is that "arbitrage"? I certainly wouldn't call it that. There was at first some information asymmetry, but calling every asymmetry an "arbitrage opportunity" seems like a stretch to me.
Definition is: "the simultaneous buying and selling of securities, currency, or commodities in different markets or in derivative forms in order to take advantage of differing prices for the same asset."
So in this case you're buying a commodity (ice cream) at the store and selling it at the beach. You are taking advantage of differing prices for the same asset in different markets.
So yeah, still arb, imo.
Even looking at the definition you gave I don't think it pass the smell test, the scenario does not require the buying and selling to be simultaneous... not in the ice cream analogy, and much less in the real uniswap mechanism.
> The big risk here is impermanent loss.
How would you get impermanent loss on a pair of tokens that are both pegged to the dollar?
Theoretically, yes. Circle's reserves are separated from Coinbase. So one could be worried about their assets if they were being held by Coinbase, but if you are holding USDC on your own Circle should still be able to redeem USDC for dollars.
Mightier institutions than crypto coins have been brought to their knees trying to defend a peg.
A stabletoken like USDC is not any of that. It is (or should be) backed 1:1 by dollars, and the institution holding USDs should be profiting only for the service provided, not by re-investing the money.
Should be, perhaps. But it does not appear to be. Tether's statements indicate that they are very much in the fractional reserve game, and while Circle has removed the asset breakdown from their attestations, the last one I found that had it indicated that they were also playing the fractional reserve game.
Given that the two largest stablecoins have admitted to playing the fractional reserve game, are you willing to admit that the peg turn out to only be as solid as, say, the GBP/ESM peg was?
(That said, I do believe that USDC and USDT are likely to be insolvent, primarily on the basis that assets equaling 100% of liabilities to three significant figures is suspiciously precise. More likely for USDT, as their attestation also notes that they're using non-standard accounting practices, although USDC gets a ding for not providing any breakdowns.)
> (a) legal action against them (which is easier to do than compared with Tether)
What standing has anyone to sue USDC right now? You need to have suffered damages, and so long as the peg has maintained, damages have not yet occurred.
> (b) shorting it, as there are a lot of institutional investors who would be interested in breaking them.
How do you short them? You'd need to acquire likely >10 billion of USDC to sell without providing 10 billion of liquid USD to Circle or any of its confederates that they could use against you.
It doesn't matter. USDC promises 1:1 backing of dollars for cash or "cash-like instruments". If they are not able to not attest this and they minted more USDC than they should, they are breaching this promise.
Of course, the more you compare stablecoins to money market funds, the more you wonder why anyone should prefer the former over the latter: stablecoins appear to be a less regulated, more opaque version of money market funds, with more meager rewards and a richer repertoire of liars and scam artists.
A "peg" for a cryptocurrency or token is a promise, not a guarantee.
The challenge would be in providing liquidity at levels that could compete with Uniswap's. You can go buy your userbase like Sushiswap did, but you'll see that LPs already learned their lesson that what matters is the transaction volume and these governance tokens being given as an incentive are worthless, so you need to buy both makers and traders.
If you are willing to keep a lot of capital around for a long time and taking the risk of impermanent loss, eventually you will be able to take users from Uniswap. But who would do that?
The only question is who gets there first.
If you are going to attempt taking a dump at me, at least have some idea of what we are talking about.
Sorry if I was unclear, you might be in this camp too.
Anyone can create a liquidity pool of any pair, as they see fit. It does not require any "prior" input. There is no staking, no dividend or interest of any type.
The profit comes solely from the fees, and the profitability of the pool does not depend on how many people "get in" or "get out", it depends solely on how many people are willing to swap token A for token B. The more people transacting, the more fees are generated.
You started this thread with some completely wise-sounding quip, but each of your responses are showing that you have absolutely no idea of how things actually work on decentralized exchanges, and that all you have are blank statements and preconceived notions about crypto.
They are paying a transaction fee because they've deemed that token swap as being the most convenient or cheapest way to make the exchange.
But could we engineer one that has a 99.99999% chance not to fail after 1 year? Similarly encryption wind AES-256 is doomed to fail, but we have made the chance of failure miniscule.
That doesn't make sense. AES makes the cost and time length of a successful attack too expensive to be worth attempting. It's very successful in that regard and might stay that way forever.
> But could we engineer one that has a 99.99999% chance not to fail after 1 year?
Do you see a way of doing that?
That's my point. Can we make the cost and time lengthe of a successful attack to be too expensive.
>Do you see a way of doing that?
Having more diverse collateral as part of the algorithm. Using rebasing to help recover the peg.
What's the use of a peg that is likely to break after one year though? Symmetric ciphers are basically a solved problem until a computing revolution, this doesn't seem to be nearly as easy.
[edit] Apologies, I had written more, but I guess it didn't get posted.
Pegs simply do not hold. They're like pinatas full of money. Even well-supported pegs can pay off huge if you have enough capital to break open the pinata. This is how Soros made his billions - he broke the peg of the British pound.
It's extremely difficult to create ersatz dollars, it's especially difficult to do that out of marketable securities, and especially difficult to do that out of highly volatile marketable securities.
Just because something in virtual doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. Why do by people pay for Netflix just to get worthless numbers streamed to them.
AMMs = Only work in a world where prevailing prices aren't set by traditional centralized order books. As long as those exist, AMMs will always be 'behind the curve' and lose value to arbitrageurs who buy from central books and sell to AMMs (even if bulls call it 'impermanent loss' it's a core feature of the system).
Algorithmic Stable coins = Only work in a world where the market perceives the paired asset as truly 'risk-free' (as evidenced by the Terra/Luna debacle). To date, the only 'risk-free' assets come with a multi-trillion dollar investment in an army, so unclear if there's really anything interesting there.
DAOs = Frequently show themselves as insecure, oligopolist, retail un-friendly organizations [0][1][2]
In short, be careful what you wish for, because at least by focusing on the SBF-cult, they're not doing the serious journalism needed to prove how atechnological most crypto projects are.
[0] https://twitter.com/thedaomaker/status/1425817683635802119 [1] https://cryptoslate.com/solend-pays-users-to-vote-on-proposa... [2]https://unblock.net/crash-of-the-high-yield-daos/
For example AMMs are not needed, just use an order book. Stablecoins? Just use currency. DAOs? A corporation.
Well, I mean, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Lots of new tech brings new problems and new solutions that wouldn't apply at all to old tech. We had very little need for super precision honed turbines in 1900. We sure are happy to have them now though.
I look forward to the crypto crash as much as any "paper hands hater". But I can't dislike it for being new or novel.
" The most popular automated market maker used in Internet prediction markets is Hanson’s logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR), an automated market maker with particularly desirable properties [Hanson 2003, 2007]. The LMSR is used by a number of companies including Inkling Markets, Consensus Point, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and the large-scale non-commercial Gates Hillman Prediction Market at Carnegie Mellon [Othman and Sandholm 2010a]." From https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/liquidity-sensitive%20autom...
If the market can't discern honest players from the criminals, then how will an honest attempt at these coins ever succeed? The problem is that we don't know that they're criminals until they've gone under, and there's no due diligence or oversight to verify that they're legit because that would be antithetical to the entire system.
It would be like continuing to drop a little money in every single altcoin that hits r/cryptomoonshots because at least one of those people has to be honest, right?
If being trustless is central to the technology, then we have no idea if what we're putting our money into is legit or not and that's a fundamental problem with this stuff. The system rewards bad behavior, plain and simple. As long as that's true, I don't see how honest people gain enough influence to actually achieve the vision that the community realizes.
Yeah, this is a huge problem for crypto in general.
The problem is that we don't know that they're criminals until they've gone under, and there's no due diligence or oversight to verify that they're legit
At least one third party analyzed Terra's algorithm and predicted the collapse around 6 months before it happened.
Honest people will do honest work and succeed or fail on their own terms, the fact that there are a hundred scams running adjacent to the honest projects is unfortunate and very disruptive but doesn't actually fundamentally block honest work.
How is the non-crypto-expert supposed to tell that the Terra and DOGE hate is real but the BTC and ETH hate isn't? Or that the ETH hate also is, and it's only the BTC hate that you should ignore? Or any of a number of different permutations?
Isn't the adoption of the honest work blocked by this inability to differentiate without lots of hours of research?
In fact stable coins in theory are one of the least scammy parts because they have a real value as long as there are not outright scams (of which many of them are.)
People expect the honest projects to give the same rate of return as frauds which is impossible.
The history of currency and pegs are well documented in the world of finance, for decades. If anything the demonstration that an algorithmic stablecoin is possible is something that must be proven, because every signs are pointing toward the fact that it's not.
I would argue that it is akin to saying that because you found 5 Scotland and none of them is tall then it proves all Scotsman’s are short. It is not a true proof that all Scotland are short but rather an observation that all Scotland you’ve seen so far are short. These are different things. Maybe all Scotsman are short but it isn’t yet a hard proof just a conjecture. That is all.
An "algorithmic" stablecoin allows anyone to do that trade, but it doesn't make any particular guarantee that these traders will be there when they're needed. And I don't see how that can be automated unless the algorithm already has the assets, as with an overcollateralized margin loan?
So, while innovation is hard to rule out, it seems like you need a good explanation for why this time it's different.
The only real benefit of the coin in this case would be programming derivatives without further intermediate custodians and counter parties. This could be useful for some back office finance activities outside of scams.
The stable coin can never go above its target value, but it can go below. So you're essentially holding value and then getting wiped out every N years or so. So it's doomed to fail
1. Does this work if the floater is worth 0?
2. Is there some kind of natural cap? In other words, can I print an infinite amount of dollars?
None of the implementations works without some value being attributable to the floating token(s). Similarly, I never hear of any natural caps. For instance, you can create a stable coin with a market cap of $100 and just mint N tokens of the floater for M where M*N = 100. But why can't you mint more and sell at a slightly lower price? Is there some natural limit? If so, can't the price of the floater go down to such a level to not be able to support the market cap?
algorithmic stablecoins - great way to lose all your money
DAOs - Just direct democracy but without constitutional protects and switching from one human = one vote to one $ = one vote. Interesting in terms of seeing how a libertarian hyper-capitalism future would play out but not something I'd like to see in real life.
Especially where the DAO decides to renege on previous commitments and/or expropriate the assets of a participant.
e.g.
https://realms.today/dao/7sf3tcWm58vhtkJMwuw2P3T6UBX7UE5VKxP...
https://twitter.com/itstimconnors/status/1536734104422522881
I suppose that by "traditional finance" you mean something like economies based on fiat currencies and the like, where the value of something is based on what is agreed by market forces. That something can be a piece of plasticised paper with holograms and windowed cut outs and a symbolic value called "£10" or as I would say: ten quid. It might also mean an economy based on gold reserves (mmmmm pretty) or chickens (barter - at least they are a thing and handy if you are hungry) or something in between. Mud/earth had stupendous value in the film "Waterworld".
So, your crypto thingies bring exactly what to the party? It chews through power thanks to mining. Yes, I gather there are other forms of crypto coin that might address this but they have little value yet. The big hitters - Bitcoin etc now consume a lot of power to "mine" but mine what exactly? You can't eat the bloody things but then you can't eat a squid (nickname for GBP - pound - quid - squid) but you can eat a squid (sea living decapod).
Crypto coins seem to me to be a properly rubbish "fuck you" modern thing. You expend resources to generate a "value". That value is scaled to other values via a "market". That's how capitalism works and so all is good. However, what exactly have you generated? It's not a useful thing. You have expended multiple KWh on a calculation. I can't eat a calculation, so I think you have slid in via a side door into my market economy and subverted it.
I'm not quite sure what my final, formal argument against the current forms of crypto currencies is going to take yet but it looks more and more wrong to me.
I'd love to see your (@woah) arguments in reverse of mine. For example what on earth are those "interesting developments"? I'm not a luddite and I run an IT company.
Convince me that you bring value and not simply generate profit.
It seems like there's a small niche of people who like finance and tech who get it, but if you're not in that group you will (for example) use hCaptcha without even realising it's on Ethereum and will never see the value even when it's right in front of you.
Maybe people like using it for cross border payments or getting money out of extremely unstable currencies, or anything to playing a game of godsunchained.com or any of immutable.com's properties (including those damn NFT's), maybe you can get a better interest rate lending a stablecoin on app.aave.com instead of in a trad finance savings account, watch some theta.tv, or just like the whole crypto ecosystem in general? the communities, the telegram group chats, the chart watching, the idea of WAGMI, the idea of directly having a say in a project and talking to the CEO via telegram instead of via an online form where you put in your preferences and then a share holder meeting happens months later etcetc
There are a lot of people who see it as a get rich quick scheme in the same way WallStreetBets users use the stock market to try and get rich quick, but ultimately the continued improvements in Ethereum and Bitcoin which push for a faster, cheaper, better digital currency systems are moving it forward and bring something of value to the table, because in reality if it brought nothing no one would be talking about Crypto, it'd just be worthless Disney Dollars like I was told Bitcoin was back when I first looked into it 10 years ago.
Your Disney Dollars analogy is outstanding! If you bought BT https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/ in say Jan 2020 and flogged it in mid Nov 2021 then you would see quite a payback. However, look at the value curve and note how chaotic it is. You cannot meaningfully attempt to predict how crypto will perform so it is nearly gambling. You might win or not.
Generally you won't win.
I have no skin in this game but is it still possible to short these beasts? If it is then I suggest wacking a few ponies on it, if you have some to spare.
Most of the mark to market happening in crypto is because of transactions between different cryptos.
If it had to be converted to real dollars, the market cap would plummet rapidly.
What am I thinking... it's 2022... crapto