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This DeFi stuff is playing with fire because the products being released have significantly outpaced the state of the art in building safe smart contracts. To
by Taek 6y ago
This DeFi stuff is playing with fire because the products being released have significantly outpaced the state of the art in building safe smart contracts.
To make an analogy, imagine that instead of DeFi, we were talking about skyscrapers. Imagine that thousands of engineers funded by millions of people who believed in them were building 25 kilometer tall towers using technology that they discovered in Isaac Arthur videos. And they were doing it today, before any of the technologies like active support structures had been properly matured. That's what's happening here. It's not that building towers is bad or unsafe, and it's not that the technology behind 25 km towers is fundamentally unworkable, but it IS the case that you shouldn't be doing it just yet given our current engineering knowledge.
Defi is insanely cool, insanely powerful, and it will dramatically change the landscape of society. But given the state of today's technology, if your product is anything fancier than Uniswap (sorry Maker, sorry Curve, sorry YAMs, sorry Augur, etc), it's not safe and it's ahead of its time. A lot of these projects are repeats of things like pets.com. Great idea, but it was too early (Amazon eventually fulfilled the vision though).
- shajznnckfke 6y agoI don’t disagree with your claim here, but aren’t existing systems even worse? The conventional electronic payments system is in many ways permissionless. Even if crypto doesn’t live up to all the promises it makes, it may still add value. If crypto is building poorly-engineered space elevators to get out payments to and from the sky, maybe the current system is throwing them in artillery and parachutes and hoping they land where you aim.
- xiphias2 6y agoI stayed with Bitcoin not because I don't see how cool Ethereum contracts are, but because it's all about getting at least 1 thing right, which is digital scarce money. Even that itself is an incredibly hard problem. Getting smart contracts to be secure will take much more time, so I'm staying an outside observer.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago> Defi is insanely cool, insanely powerful, and it will dramatically change the landscape of society. As a person who has been around this tech since 2011, can you explain what exactly it is you find so fascinating about this other than the seemingly absurd amounts of money some people have made so far? This all just seems like a reshased version of the DAO to me and I have ignored it entirely.
- sonicggg 6y agoWe're told this is a global economy, and yet think about things that are still overly complicated and expensive nowadays with financial operations. Things like wiring money to people abroad, buy securities in other countries, and all other operations in the hands of a few large financial institutions. Now we throw much of that bureaucracy away.
- max_ 6y agohttps://scilla-lang.org/ https://scilla-lang.org/