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Because of the existence of stablecoins, forking Ethereum is essentially infeasible. Only crypto assets, namely BTC, exist on the Bitcoin chain. Crypto assets c
by dcolkitt 5y ago
Because of the existence of stablecoins, forking Ethereum is essentially infeasible. Only crypto assets, namely BTC, exist on the Bitcoin chain. Crypto assets can be forked, but real assets cannot. Whatever chain USDT/USDC recognize automatically becomes the "true chain" regardless of how much hash power the miners throw behind the fork.
- doomroot 5y agoDoesn’t that seriously centralize the network overtime?
- vvpan 5y agoIt does. But the majority of people who follow Ethereum closely view non-algorithmic stablecoins as generally an evil. Ideology means little to most people yet I think the decentralization ideology around Ethereum has had and does have an impact on enough people to sway the network in a certain direction. It's early. Fingers crossed.
- N00bN00b 5y agoWe'll see. Stablecoins are a workaround for the current price fluctuations, if the cryptos stabilize they might replace the stablecoins at some point in the future.
- lupire 5y agoIf cryptos stabilize 99% of users will lose interest.
- social_quotient 5y agoDerivatives are then dreamed up to add more excitement and volatility (beta) to the underlying boring asset?
- Animats 5y agoWhy? The obligations of USDT and USDC are unrelated to what system hosts them.
- wmf 5y agoBut the custodians have to choose just one chain because they only have enough assets to back one copy. They don't want a situation where there's, say, 50B USDCA and 50B USDCB backed by only $50B in assets. So if there's a fork, a custodian will decide that the USDC on one chain is redeemable and the USDC on all other chains is not redeemable (i.e. worth zero), then other DeFi assets on the losing chain will go to zero as well, and it snowballs.
- koolba 5y agoWhat if they choose two different chains?
- wmf 5y agoThat would explicitly break the one promise they made, which is that their coins are backed 1:1.
- koolba 5y agoI meant what if USDC and USDT pick two different chains to bless as their “official” chain? Is that not possible? EDIT: I just realized the last letter in your examples are “A” and “B” to signify two versions of the same thing. My eyes aren’t what they used to be!
- cinquemb 5y agoIt is possible.
- user-the-name 5y agoUSDT is already running on multiple chains. That is trivially possible. The question is what happens if one of those chains were to split.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]