5 ms·

I mean, there are funds who are putting billions of dollars into defi strategies. Yields at the moment are crushed, but during the hayday you could make insane

by smabie 5y ago

I mean, there are funds who are putting billions of dollars into defi strategies. Yields at the moment are crushed, but during the hayday you could make insane money. Almost all crypto trading firms have some sort of defi yield farming presence, and many tradfi firms were thinking about entering the space. Whether they still will and if yields will recover is still an open question. There are definitely some dapps that are pretty solid imo: uniswap, aave, maker, curve, and alchemix to name a few. Whether it's all a scam is a good question, but from my perspective it doesn't really matter. The goal is to make money by being smarter than everyone else. I don't think I'm making the world a better place or really helping anyone besides myself/firm, but that's okay. Some people think finance is perverse because it attracts tons of top talent and utilizes their skills for a dubious purpose. While this may be true, it's also true of many other industries as well: most notably, big tech. Ultimately, people rarely make employment decisions by thinking of how many people they can help.

ALittleLight 5y ago
I just googled each of the apps you mentioned. They all seem to be things to make money off of cryptocurrency. That's the only thing the decentralized apps seem to be able to do, lending, staking, swapping, new tokens, etc. However, if you think cryptocurrency is useless, and I pretty much do, then creating new forms of it also seems pretty useless. It all seems very zero sum. No value is getting created. It's just musical chairs with money, people putting money in and hoping to pull more money out. Problem being, since no value is created, it won't be possible for everyone to take out more money than they've put in. For every dollar gained there is one lost. As far as doing something like for a job - I wouldn't do it. There's a saying like "Better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but a live lion is better still and usually easier." In other words, I think if you have the mental equipment to make money in crypto you could probably also make money in an industry that isn't a ponzi scheme depriving the gullible of their savings and the benefit of choosing to do that is that you wouldn't put your own money at risk by interacting with shady exchanges and characters.
- anon9001 5y ago
  > It all seems very zero sum. No value is getting created. I think you might be underestimating the amount of resources that the traditional system uses to manage borrowing, lending, insurance, establishing ownership, transferring large sums, settling disputes, etc. The adoption of cryptocurrency and smart contracts would replace a lot of the financial industry with tiny smart bits of code. That is the value being created. Considering that traditional finance has a long history of predatory practices, anything that decreases their influence is a good thing to me.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    It's possible I'm missing something, because the reality of cryptocurrency as I understand it seems bizarre. To my knowledge all of the borrowing/lending/ownership stuff is about making speculative bets. i.e. It is of the form "You can lend some crypto and get some return so other people can borrow some crypto and take some positions short or long on the rising/declining prices of different currencies or currency pairs. This kind of thing isn't really valuable lending or borrowing in my view. It's just part of the musical chairs gambling game that is the larger cryptocurrency ecosystem. It's also not possible (that I know of) for cryptocurrency to supplant our current lending/borrowing system. If I want to borrow 100k to refit the kitchen in my restaurant, can I do that with cryptocurrency? I haven't seen the defi solutions for business loans in other words, just the defi solutions for "I want to 100x the risk/reward when I buy bitcoin calls expiring next week."
    - arbol 5y ago
      This kind of lending is probably the precursor to normal business loans. It's proving the concept on a global scale.
      - ALittleLight 5y ago
        I don't think it's proving the concept. The hard parts about lending are figuring out what is a good risk, what the rates should be, handling repossession, negotiating terms, dealing with laws, all that stuff. Cryptocurrency lending isn't doing any of the hard part of lending and it also doesn't seem to have any advantage over the existing system for doing the hard stuff. Meaning: in the cryptocurrency future, how will it be easier for a restaurant to use their business as collateral to take cash to do upgrades?
fragmede 5y ago
You may not be making employment decisions based on the number of people you help, but projecting into other people that other don't either doesn't actually absolve you of the hurt you cause others. It may help you sleep at night but you're lying to yourself if you really believe that. Most jobs lie somewhere in the spectrum between school teacher vs murderer for hire/military and you have to determine where any given job sits along that spectrum, and where in that spectrum you're comfortable sitting. That the job's value to humanity is coming up means you understand it's questionable. DeFi circumvents money laundering laws, almost by design (if not by design, running proper KYC is simply extra expense that a businesses don't want to pay for), so the work literally helps fund terrorism (eg Iran, North Korea). You can disagree with the US government's stance on the matter, but don't pretend that enabling those regimes is the same as implementing ad tech at a FANG.
ac29 5y ago
> I mean, there are funds who are putting billions of dollars into defi strategies. Can you name any of them? I'm sure there are some hedge funds and other large investors dabbling in the defi space, but billions of dollars is a pretty large play.
- smabie 5y ago
  alameda

by smabie 5y ago

ALittleLight 5y ago

I just googled each of the apps you mentioned. They all seem to be things to make money off of cryptocurrency. That's the only thing the decentralized apps seem to be able to do, lending, staking, swapping, new tokens, etc. However, if you think cryptocurrency is useless, and I pretty much do, then creating new forms of it also seems pretty useless. It all seems very zero sum. No value is getting created. It's just musical chairs with money, people putting money in and hoping to pull more money out. Problem being, since no value is created, it won't be possible for everyone to take out more money than they've put in. For every dollar gained there is one lost. As far as doing something like for a job - I wouldn't do it. There's a saying like "Better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but a live lion is better still and usually easier." In other words, I think if you have the mental equipment to make money in crypto you could probably also make money in an industry that isn't a ponzi scheme depriving the gullible of their savings and the benefit of choosing to do that is that you wouldn't put your own money at risk by interacting with shady exchanges and characters.

anon9001 5y ago
> It all seems very zero sum. No value is getting created. I think you might be underestimating the amount of resources that the traditional system uses to manage borrowing, lending, insurance, establishing ownership, transferring large sums, settling disputes, etc. The adoption of cryptocurrency and smart contracts would replace a lot of the financial industry with tiny smart bits of code. That is the value being created. Considering that traditional finance has a long history of predatory practices, anything that decreases their influence is a good thing to me.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  It's possible I'm missing something, because the reality of cryptocurrency as I understand it seems bizarre. To my knowledge all of the borrowing/lending/ownership stuff is about making speculative bets. i.e. It is of the form "You can lend some crypto and get some return so other people can borrow some crypto and take some positions short or long on the rising/declining prices of different currencies or currency pairs. This kind of thing isn't really valuable lending or borrowing in my view. It's just part of the musical chairs gambling game that is the larger cryptocurrency ecosystem. It's also not possible (that I know of) for cryptocurrency to supplant our current lending/borrowing system. If I want to borrow 100k to refit the kitchen in my restaurant, can I do that with cryptocurrency? I haven't seen the defi solutions for business loans in other words, just the defi solutions for "I want to 100x the risk/reward when I buy bitcoin calls expiring next week."
  - arbol 5y ago
    This kind of lending is probably the precursor to normal business loans. It's proving the concept on a global scale.
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      I don't think it's proving the concept. The hard parts about lending are figuring out what is a good risk, what the rates should be, handling repossession, negotiating terms, dealing with laws, all that stuff. Cryptocurrency lending isn't doing any of the hard part of lending and it also doesn't seem to have any advantage over the existing system for doing the hard stuff. Meaning: in the cryptocurrency future, how will it be easier for a restaurant to use their business as collateral to take cash to do upgrades?

fragmede 5y ago

You may not be making employment decisions based on the number of people you help, but projecting into other people that other don't either doesn't actually absolve you of the hurt you cause others. It may help you sleep at night but you're lying to yourself if you really believe that. Most jobs lie somewhere in the spectrum between school teacher vs murderer for hire/military and you have to determine where any given job sits along that spectrum, and where in that spectrum you're comfortable sitting. That the job's value to humanity is coming up means you understand it's questionable. DeFi circumvents money laundering laws, almost by design (if not by design, running proper KYC is simply extra expense that a businesses don't want to pay for), so the work literally helps fund terrorism (eg Iran, North Korea). You can disagree with the US government's stance on the matter, but don't pretend that enabling those regimes is the same as implementing ad tech at a FANG.

ac29 5y ago

> I mean, there are funds who are putting billions of dollars into defi strategies. Can you name any of them? I'm sure there are some hedge funds and other large investors dabbling in the defi space, but billions of dollars is a pretty large play.

smabie 5y ago
alameda