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>has a pretty poor history It has a terrific history - you must be not counting all the stuff that fails for previously known reasons that people try again. Su
by ChrisLomont 4y ago
>has a pretty poor history
It has a terrific history - you must be not counting all the stuff that fails for previously known reasons that people try again. Sure, if you only cherry pick post hoc examples of things that eventually worked, then you can claim a poor history. But the correct evaluation is to pick all things being tried right now by any person on the planet, and measure how many were new and worked for the first time.
You know what does have a poor history? People claiming something will work because they once saw some unrelated thing work and assuming that means all things will work, no matter what the previous evidence.
>barring obvious violations of the laws of physics
Why limit yourself to physics? Those are not the only laws that govern how societal structures work. Also is it possible that the reason some dreams in economics fail because they eventually hit physics? The same works for crypto.
Santa isn't real. Unicorns don't live in the chimney. There is no free energy, despite probably 10s to 100s of thousands of people and inventions that said there were. All those people that found counterexamples to Fermat's Last Theorem were wrong. The list of medical things tried well after they were known to be wrong is astounding, and none of those things will likely ever, ever work. I could go on and on. It's far easier to make up stuff that will not work than to make up stuff that possibly could work or definitely works.
So no, most things that currently don't work will never work, which is how we acquired the knowledge we have - we ruled out dumb and stupid things.
There is a tiny, tiny sliver on the edge that is undecided, and that is where almost all new things and inventions come from. The vast landscape of settled knowledge will stay that way.
So, as to stablecoins, and mostly crypto in general - this is what happens when programmers generally wildly ignorant of the reasons for how modern finance work try to make modern finance. Since they're mostly ignorant of why the system has evolved to where it is over millennia of knowledge, they're simply trying to reinvent all that stuff one destroyed speculator at a time.
The current stable coins imploded as nearly anyone with much knowledge about econ would have guessed. I didn't follow them closely, but one night a friend carefully explained all the processes behind (I think it was) Luna. At one point I told him that the pieces he explained form a dynamic equilibrium instead of a static equilibrium, which means a little perturbation and the whole things goes off the rails. He remarked that my insight, after hearing the details for the first time, was exactly what did happen.
It's funny watching crypto slowly try to reinvent every financial item that failed and do exactly the same things that caused previous things to fail. Stable coins are not new, after all.
It baffles me that people keep trying to do things that are simply dumb, either out of hubris, greed, or ignorance.
Good luck on whatever stable coins you expect to happen. If they keep it up long enough they might eventually invent financial derivatives, but I expect that to be when the world has already moved past those and found yet better products.
- svnt 4y agoCongratulations on your discovery of dynamical systems. You describe the very scenario where stablecoins come into being, but you are too perfectly rational to engage in that creative behavior. That’s fine. You admit others probably will but decide it will be a failure at the point where it works because someone else will have somehow bypassed this whole process. I don’t hold any stablecoins or care if it works.