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There is no such thing as a stablecoin, it's a made up term to try to lend legitimacy to new crypto scams. And I say this as someone who just bought some Ethere
by aerovistae 5y ago
There is no such thing as a stablecoin, it's a made up term to try to lend legitimacy to new crypto scams. And I say this as someone who just bought some Ethereum in the hopes of making a profit :)
- twox2 5y agoAll terms are made up by your definition.
- aerovistae 5y agoSure, that's true although it's just semantics. I'll be unreasonably specific then: the term stablecoin was made up with harmful intentions to deceive and mislead in order to make a profit off others' losses.
- twox2 5y agoI'm not sure I agree, but it will be hard to convince you if you're coming from a place where you think crypto is scammy/deceptive to begin with. Let me assume you're willing to suspend your disbelief: I do agree that some stablecoins are scammy in nature, but others serve an important purpose and that purpose is to allow individuals and enterprises to navigate doing business in crypto despite crypto's high volatility. Where is the deception in that?
- NationalPark 5y agoIsn't the whole value of your ethereum based on people using it for these kinds of scam projects?
- aerovistae 5y agoAbsolutely.
- cutler 5y agoMaybe the world just needs less people trying to get something for nothing. If the scammers operating these currencies teach the greedy traders a lesson we'll all be better off.
- brettermeier 5y agoWORD!
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoAgreed. I'd like to figure out how to build a cryptocurrency that is useful for conducting actual business but toxic to investors. An economy that lacked parasitic middle men would be a good thing for the status quo to have to compete with.
- saalweachter 5y agoEvery day the largest wallet is confiscated, divided into ten equal portions, and each piece is randomly awarded, lottery-style, with every transaction from the previous day serving as a lottery ticket.
- bombcar 5y agoIronically that's not far from what SafeMoon purported to be. But people would "invest" in it as a form of a lottery.
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoI dunno, it's not about wealth concentration, be rich, that's fine. It's about whether your wealth was gathered by contributing useful work, or by parasitizing it. I imagine a proof of work system where there's a community work queue, and "mining" is completing tasks in the queue, borderlands-style (though hopefully without the violence). The mined tokens can be resolved to nft's which stay attached to the wallet of the user who requested that the work be done. There's also a web of trust and a UBI component (Circles-UBI style) to disinventivise sybil accounts. If the work-originator deems the work unsatisfactory, they can invalidate the tokens that were mined from its "completion" and recoup a fraction of what they paid to have it done. So doing business with somebody who has a reputation of doing shoddy work, or of failing to respect good work, is risky because your tokens might evaporate. An would-be investor in this token would have to decide whose tokens to buy, which requires much more research. You could also have some system to disinventivise hoarding, like a token half-life. Or you know, something like that.
- thebean11 5y agoMakerDAO is not a scam, and the dollar peg survived the last crypto crash so it's pretty "stable".
- neals 5y agoThey had to create USDC to keep it pegged during the crash before that, though. So actually it's USDC that's stable, that makes Maker stable.
- thebean11 5y agoWho is "they"? Maker has nothing to do with USDC. USDC is a Coinbase product.
- sonicggg 5y agoYour seem uninformed. Dai is backed by USDC.
- flixic 5y agoLast I heard, Dai was backed over-collateralized crypto, like ETH. Even Coinbase says so: > Unlike centralized stablecoins, DAI isn't backed by US dollars in a bank account. Instead, it’s backed by collateral on the Maker platform. https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/cryptocurrency-trading-pairs/dai-faq https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/cr...
- rodiger 5y agoYou should take a look at the breakdown... USDC is such a large portion of Dai backing (62%) that it's deemed an existential risk. They're working on reducing the reliance though with more stablecoins and more collateral classes. https://share.streamlit.io/tadzz/maker_dai_collateralization_2/main/dai_collateral_app.py https://share.streamlit.io/tadzz/maker_dai_collateralization...
- 5y ago
- __MatrixMan__ 5y agoCurrency pegging isn't a new thing. For instance, the ratio of Belizian dollars to US dollars is defined as 2:1. That peg could certainly fail, and you could certainly argue that there's something not quite right about the practice, but it was made up to legitimize tokens long before crypto.
- exdsq 5y agoIf I create a USD-stablecoin with a supply of $1 backed by my $1 in US bonds, is that legit?
- Scoundreller 5y agoBut nobody in crypto would willingly trade their crypto for something backed by fiat and therefore inflating. Right?
- incrudible 5y agoWrong. Unlike bank deposits or treasury notes, stable coins have interest yields to outweigh inflation.
- Scoundreller 5y agoI guess as far as counterparties go, people trust a bank or the fed more.
- incrudible 5y agoThere is no counterparty risk in a smart contract involving only digital assets. There is systemic risk, however.
- everfree 5y agoThis is uninformed. What do you call USDC, which is directly redeemable for US Dollars by anyone with a Coinbase account? Every USDC is backed by one USD of deposits in a US-based bank. USDC is a stablecoin, and there are plenty of others out there.
- keymone 5y agoredeemable until it's not.
- TameAntelope 5y agoBut given the monthly audits conducted, "it's not" is not very likely to happen at all. The auditor would have to be actively lying or misrepresenting for USDC and Gemini both for something like that to happen. Much more likely a smart contract somewhere fails than USDC/Gemini (the only two I know that do full audits to ensure 1:1 dollar backing, ignoring USDT). There just isn't much risk there, hence there not being much (any) profit trading stablecoin.
- keymone 5y agowhat happens if gemini goes belly up like mtgox? are the assets backing the peg isolated from bankruptcy event?
- spiralx 5y agoThere are no monthly audits. They have "attestations" which are not the same thing.
- loeg 5y ago> But given the monthly audits conducted, "it's not" is not very likely to happen at all. The auditor would have to be actively lying or misrepresenting for USDC and Gemini both for something like that to happen. USDC has regular attestations, not audits. It's an important distinction.
- 5y ago
- Joeri 5y agoMaybe stablecoins are just digital currencies with binary exchange rates. It seems to me that when you declare a digital coin exactly tracks the value of the dollar, you basically are not allowing its dollar exchange rate to have any values except 1 and 0. It makes sense that when the value of this coin couldn’t possibly remain at 1 it by necessity had to toggle over to 0.