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I think what a lot of people are missing about stablecoins is that it's not just about clearing transactions faster than SWIFT. With stablecoins you get program

I think what a lot of people are missing about stablecoins is that it's not just about clearing transactions faster than SWIFT. With stablecoins you get programable money without having to deal with the wild fluctuations of crypto. A simple (and contrived) example: Let's say I want to send you $100 on Tuesday, but only on even-numbered hours. This is a trivially easy smart contract to write. Sure, you could do this with crypto, but if you want to protect yourself against price fluctuations it makes sense to use a stablecoin.

Yizahi 1y ago
Yeah, great innovation. Also allows for many amazing and useful features for us people, such as allowing these tokens to expire and disappear from your account, or programming specific tokens to be only transferable to specific accounts or for specific goods, or for example controlling all token accounts in every single country on earth from the central location. E.g. for example Trump (assuming a USA stabletoken) not only sends you to the Salvador death camp, but also blocks and confiscated all your tokens and blocks you from ever having a token account in the future, all with a single click from NY central bank. Or replace the same with any other country and central bank. Amazing utopia awaits for us, can't wait to take part in that hell economy :)
- GenshoTikamura 1y ago
  And we can clearly see that some people are defending their utopia agressively by trying to fade your comment to gray
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    It's mindboggling really. And the most puzzling to me is that this forum has a large proportion of independent thinkers. Some care about privacy, some care about removing copyright (I disagree, but respect their position), some care about free access to information etc. How can these same free thinkers advocate for a single most oppressive authoritarian system we have ever seen? And a very real system currently in late stages of testing, soon to be worldwide, not some abstract future evil. People who want independent currency, or maybe less dependent on the govt would get a currency absolutely under control of a small group of people in the govt. People who donate to privacy foundations or buy privacy tools would see that they simply aren't allowed to do that with their "money" (non-fungible tokens). People who want to pirate stuff or download some info would have DMCA strikes not on their neat little blog or youtube channel, they will have DMCA 2.0 strikes right on their bank account, because all that shit will be automated and centralized. Just imagine, downloading something and then getting all your accounts go to 0. Or maybe not to 0 but have a fine applied and subtracted from your token balance automatically, on the discretion of the megacorp across the ocean in a different country. It is literally dystopia, no scare quotes, no ifs no maybes, it just is.
- scyclow 1y ago
  Sure, but banks can lock your account without the blockchain, so you're not enabling any new dystopian behavior here. And if you're worried that they can restrict your transaction behavior, then don't hold that coin! Swap your money into a stablecoin that doesn't have spending allowlist logic encoded into the smart contract.
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    Not even close. I can have a legal USD account in some Veishnoria country and Trump has almost zero influence on it (yeah, there are clearing banks involved at the US side, but all in all the whole scheme is mostly in semi-independent blocks). At the same time I can have there an account in EUR, or any other currency. All legal, all according to the Veishnoria andd international law. But resilient and not dependent on the flavor-of-the-day madness in the USA. But if it would be a token system, then ALL accounts in that token in ALL countries are fully under control of the USA central bank. Also currently all dollars, or yen, or yuan, are fully fungible. You can spend any single dollar on anything you want and in reverse any sold good/service acan be bought with any dollar in existence, they are the same. Now tokens are not like that, they are non-fungible and can (and will) be limited in multiple ways. For example you can have 1000 tokens in your account, but out of them only 200 can be spend on the "bad" goods like alcohol or gambling or whatever (on political opposition support, on different religion donation etc.). Or for example you have 1000 but they have an expiration date and will go to 0 in one calendar year, so that you won't save them. The possibilities are endless. In fact, all of that has been already tested in my Eastern Europe country (Ukraine). We had a pilot program of digital tokens. They required a separate account of course, they couldn't be converted o the regular digital money. Every tranche had an expiration date (for example first one was half a year, next one a year iirc). They could have been spent only on a specific list of goods defined by the government - in that pilot it was only approved entertainment like books, movies and also donations were allowed. I'm personally horrified by this very real and very close future prospect. Like that's not even some abstract Matrix or Cyberpunk level horror. It is here, it is almost deployed. EU is talking all the time about it. It is mind boggling to me how regular people aren't protesting this shit. Don't you all see the implications?
    - 1y ago
hiddencost 1y ago
Or they could use fed now?
tacitusarc 1y ago
This doesn’t feel like a good thing to me. I can imagine a lot of pretty abusive smart contracts.
- NoahZuniga 1y ago
  How are you going to abuse sending other people money?
  - viraptor 1y ago
    It's a pretty common scam already. "Sign this to receive airdrop". Haha, you just signed away all the money in your wallet. People are already losing lots of money this way and they're the ones who at least understood the concept a little bit.
- scyclow 1y ago
  Like what? It's just a streamlined and versatile way to escrow money.
  - tacitusarc 1y ago
    US govt creates a list of companies eligible to receive social welfare money, and the smart contract money will only be exchanged with those companies. They can remove companies from the list at will, on a whim. They could also do this with all money if it’s something like FedCoin. They could do all kinds of interesting, dystopian things. I bet there’s a black mirror episode somewhere like this.
    - scyclow 1y ago
      Sure, but we already have something similar to that in NY called SNAP. And honestly, it would probably be easier to keep doing that without getting the blockchain involved. In any case, I don't think that's the sort of product that commercial banks are itching release when they launch their new stablecoins. I'm sure a lot of coins will have a deny list for AML/KYC reasons, but an allow list would be pretty cumbersome to maintain and probably turn off most users.
only-one1701 1y ago
You could also do this with any other kind of API a bank might expose? Why is crypto necessary here?
- solumos 1y ago
  In this scenario, imagine that “you” are in a different country or perhaps you don’t have a bank account. Or maybe you don’t want to pay $10+ or X% to receive funds.
- arccy 1y ago
  crypto isn't necessary... it's just that no bank wants to take on the risk of exposing an api to the regular consumer.
- xyzzy9563 1y ago
  Crypto doesn't require 3rd party permission to send money or verifying anyone's authenticity, real name, or legal compliance. So it's much easier to build APIs around. If you created banking APIs you'd need very extensive controls and monitoring for anti-money laundering and so on.
- bo1024 1y ago
  One thing is stronger guarantees for the receiver, who can verify that the smart contract will automatically transfer the funds. Another is interoperability. The receiver can write a contract to e.g. always donate half of that income to a charity as soon as it is received every two hours. Another is transparency and verifiability, anyone can check that the receiver is giving half this income to charity. Not trying to get pulled into any arguments about whether cryptocurrency is good or bad, just some potential answers to your question.
- jrm4 1y ago
  E.g. Automatic bill pay to a VPN. Now you have very good anonymity.
  - acdha 1y ago
    If you’re making regular payments from a known wallet on a public ledger, where is the anonymity coming from?
gs17 1y ago
> A simple (and contrived) example What about a simple but not contrived example (or if no good simple examples exist, a complex one)? Smart contracts are neat but I'm not sure there's any real benefit, especially for banks which likely don't need to do things without trusting each other.
- jrm4 1y ago
  Not sure why op didn't go with "$100 on the 1st of every month." That's just "automatic bill pay" without a bank, etc.
  - scyclow 1y ago
    I wanted to pick an example that is slightly more complicated than what existing banking software provides out of the box. But my point was that you can just write your own logic without relying on the bank or another third party.
- scyclow 1y ago
  I want to buy an event ticket from you, but we're strangers. So I write a contract that releases the money to you once you send the ticket, or vice versa.
  - cube00 1y ago
    The ticket would have to be on the chain and you could then see just how much TicketMaster was making and we can't have that.
    - scyclow 1y ago
      Well, the good news is that you could also program event ticketing logic with a blockchain and build a TicketMaster competitor. But now we're venturing outside simple examples :)
  - kiitos 1y ago
    ebay has somehow managed to support this use case for something like 20 years on the normal existing banking infrastructure
GenshoTikamura 1y ago
Sending $100 on Tuesday only on even-numbered hours is not a very likely use case for it. Paying wages that are only valid for a month, are split into parts which can only buy specific foods and goods inside a geofenced zone and can't be tranfered to any other person are much more likely.
- scyclow 1y ago
  I said it was a contrived example! But people have really specific payment logic that doesn't seem to make much sense from the outside. What you're describing can only be achieved by encoding specific logic into the coin's original contract, so you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time. And this is tantamount to agreeing to be paid in a specific gift card with a really small payment network. No need to get crypto or stablecoins involved.
  - nicbou 1y ago
    > so you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time That does not mean that you have the power to do anything about it.
    - scyclow 1y ago
      You could do something about it in the same sense that you can opt to be paid in dollars instead of itunes gift cards of chuck e cheese tokens. If someone has the power to decide how they're paying you then they can screw you just as easily without crypto.
      - ab5tract 1y ago
        “Opt to be paid in..” Seems like you haven’t had much time with the history of company towns and company stores.
        scyclow 1y ago
        I haven't, but it sounds like they can restrict their employees' spending just fine without crypto. Also, if they can exchange their Company Stablecoins for USD (as the legislation requires) then it makes it pretty hard to restrict their spending.
kiitos 1y ago
stablecoins don't protect you against price fluctuations. they don't even guarantee reliable mapping to their underlying currency.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
viraptor 1y ago
This is not simple at all. What happens if you don't have the money available? If you want to provide some guarantee, how would you do it without locking up N x $100 forever? What are even numbered hours - which timezone? What happens if your transaction doesn't get accepted within that timeslot? Etc. etc.
- scyclow 1y ago
  Okay, I'm simplifying a little bit. It wouldn't work exactly like that. You'd lock up $100 (or approve the contract to spend up to $100), specify the time I'm unix timestamps, and leave it up to the recipient to claim their money. That's sort of besides the point though. I'm just saying that you have the ability to implement whatever ad hoc or arbitrarily complex payment logic you want without relying on a middleman.

Yizahi 1y ago

Yeah, great innovation. Also allows for many amazing and useful features for us people, such as allowing these tokens to expire and disappear from your account, or programming specific tokens to be only transferable to specific accounts or for specific goods, or for example controlling all token accounts in every single country on earth from the central location. E.g. for example Trump (assuming a USA stabletoken) not only sends you to the Salvador death camp, but also blocks and confiscated all your tokens and blocks you from ever having a token account in the future, all with a single click from NY central bank. Or replace the same with any other country and central bank. Amazing utopia awaits for us, can't wait to take part in that hell economy :)

GenshoTikamura 1y ago
And we can clearly see that some people are defending their utopia agressively by trying to fade your comment to gray
- Yizahi 1y ago
  It's mindboggling really. And the most puzzling to me is that this forum has a large proportion of independent thinkers. Some care about privacy, some care about removing copyright (I disagree, but respect their position), some care about free access to information etc. How can these same free thinkers advocate for a single most oppressive authoritarian system we have ever seen? And a very real system currently in late stages of testing, soon to be worldwide, not some abstract future evil. People who want independent currency, or maybe less dependent on the govt would get a currency absolutely under control of a small group of people in the govt. People who donate to privacy foundations or buy privacy tools would see that they simply aren't allowed to do that with their "money" (non-fungible tokens). People who want to pirate stuff or download some info would have DMCA strikes not on their neat little blog or youtube channel, they will have DMCA 2.0 strikes right on their bank account, because all that shit will be automated and centralized. Just imagine, downloading something and then getting all your accounts go to 0. Or maybe not to 0 but have a fine applied and subtracted from your token balance automatically, on the discretion of the megacorp across the ocean in a different country. It is literally dystopia, no scare quotes, no ifs no maybes, it just is.
scyclow 1y ago
Sure, but banks can lock your account without the blockchain, so you're not enabling any new dystopian behavior here. And if you're worried that they can restrict your transaction behavior, then don't hold that coin! Swap your money into a stablecoin that doesn't have spending allowlist logic encoded into the smart contract.
- Yizahi 1y ago
  Not even close. I can have a legal USD account in some Veishnoria country and Trump has almost zero influence on it (yeah, there are clearing banks involved at the US side, but all in all the whole scheme is mostly in semi-independent blocks). At the same time I can have there an account in EUR, or any other currency. All legal, all according to the Veishnoria andd international law. But resilient and not dependent on the flavor-of-the-day madness in the USA. But if it would be a token system, then ALL accounts in that token in ALL countries are fully under control of the USA central bank. Also currently all dollars, or yen, or yuan, are fully fungible. You can spend any single dollar on anything you want and in reverse any sold good/service acan be bought with any dollar in existence, they are the same. Now tokens are not like that, they are non-fungible and can (and will) be limited in multiple ways. For example you can have 1000 tokens in your account, but out of them only 200 can be spend on the "bad" goods like alcohol or gambling or whatever (on political opposition support, on different religion donation etc.). Or for example you have 1000 but they have an expiration date and will go to 0 in one calendar year, so that you won't save them. The possibilities are endless. In fact, all of that has been already tested in my Eastern Europe country (Ukraine). We had a pilot program of digital tokens. They required a separate account of course, they couldn't be converted o the regular digital money. Every tranche had an expiration date (for example first one was half a year, next one a year iirc). They could have been spent only on a specific list of goods defined by the government - in that pilot it was only approved entertainment like books, movies and also donations were allowed. I'm personally horrified by this very real and very close future prospect. Like that's not even some abstract Matrix or Cyberpunk level horror. It is here, it is almost deployed. EU is talking all the time about it. It is mind boggling to me how regular people aren't protesting this shit. Don't you all see the implications?
  - 1y ago

hiddencost 1y ago

Or they could use fed now?

tacitusarc 1y ago

This doesn’t feel like a good thing to me. I can imagine a lot of pretty abusive smart contracts.

NoahZuniga 1y ago
How are you going to abuse sending other people money?
- viraptor 1y ago
  It's a pretty common scam already. "Sign this to receive airdrop". Haha, you just signed away all the money in your wallet. People are already losing lots of money this way and they're the ones who at least understood the concept a little bit.
scyclow 1y ago
Like what? It's just a streamlined and versatile way to escrow money.
- tacitusarc 1y ago
  US govt creates a list of companies eligible to receive social welfare money, and the smart contract money will only be exchanged with those companies. They can remove companies from the list at will, on a whim. They could also do this with all money if it’s something like FedCoin. They could do all kinds of interesting, dystopian things. I bet there’s a black mirror episode somewhere like this.
  - scyclow 1y ago
    Sure, but we already have something similar to that in NY called SNAP. And honestly, it would probably be easier to keep doing that without getting the blockchain involved. In any case, I don't think that's the sort of product that commercial banks are itching release when they launch their new stablecoins. I'm sure a lot of coins will have a deny list for AML/KYC reasons, but an allow list would be pretty cumbersome to maintain and probably turn off most users.

only-one1701 1y ago

You could also do this with any other kind of API a bank might expose? Why is crypto necessary here?

solumos 1y ago
In this scenario, imagine that “you” are in a different country or perhaps you don’t have a bank account. Or maybe you don’t want to pay $10+ or X% to receive funds.
arccy 1y ago
crypto isn't necessary... it's just that no bank wants to take on the risk of exposing an api to the regular consumer.
xyzzy9563 1y ago
Crypto doesn't require 3rd party permission to send money or verifying anyone's authenticity, real name, or legal compliance. So it's much easier to build APIs around. If you created banking APIs you'd need very extensive controls and monitoring for anti-money laundering and so on.
bo1024 1y ago
One thing is stronger guarantees for the receiver, who can verify that the smart contract will automatically transfer the funds. Another is interoperability. The receiver can write a contract to e.g. always donate half of that income to a charity as soon as it is received every two hours. Another is transparency and verifiability, anyone can check that the receiver is giving half this income to charity. Not trying to get pulled into any arguments about whether cryptocurrency is good or bad, just some potential answers to your question.
jrm4 1y ago
E.g. Automatic bill pay to a VPN. Now you have very good anonymity.
- acdha 1y ago
  If you’re making regular payments from a known wallet on a public ledger, where is the anonymity coming from?

gs17 1y ago

> A simple (and contrived) example What about a simple but not contrived example (or if no good simple examples exist, a complex one)? Smart contracts are neat but I'm not sure there's any real benefit, especially for banks which likely don't need to do things without trusting each other.

jrm4 1y ago
Not sure why op didn't go with "$100 on the 1st of every month." That's just "automatic bill pay" without a bank, etc.
- scyclow 1y ago
  I wanted to pick an example that is slightly more complicated than what existing banking software provides out of the box. But my point was that you can just write your own logic without relying on the bank or another third party.
scyclow 1y ago
I want to buy an event ticket from you, but we're strangers. So I write a contract that releases the money to you once you send the ticket, or vice versa.
- cube00 1y ago
  The ticket would have to be on the chain and you could then see just how much TicketMaster was making and we can't have that.
  - scyclow 1y ago
    Well, the good news is that you could also program event ticketing logic with a blockchain and build a TicketMaster competitor. But now we're venturing outside simple examples :)
- kiitos 1y ago
  ebay has somehow managed to support this use case for something like 20 years on the normal existing banking infrastructure

GenshoTikamura 1y ago

Sending $100 on Tuesday only on even-numbered hours is not a very likely use case for it. Paying wages that are only valid for a month, are split into parts which can only buy specific foods and goods inside a geofenced zone and can't be tranfered to any other person are much more likely.

scyclow 1y ago
I said it was a contrived example! But people have really specific payment logic that doesn't seem to make much sense from the outside. What you're describing can only be achieved by encoding specific logic into the coin's original contract, so you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time. And this is tantamount to agreeing to be paid in a specific gift card with a really small payment network. No need to get crypto or stablecoins involved.
- nicbou 1y ago
  > so you'd know what you're getting yourself into ahead of time That does not mean that you have the power to do anything about it.
  - scyclow 1y ago
    You could do something about it in the same sense that you can opt to be paid in dollars instead of itunes gift cards of chuck e cheese tokens. If someone has the power to decide how they're paying you then they can screw you just as easily without crypto.
    - ab5tract 1y ago
      “Opt to be paid in..” Seems like you haven’t had much time with the history of company towns and company stores.
      - scyclow 1y ago
        I haven't, but it sounds like they can restrict their employees' spending just fine without crypto. Also, if they can exchange their Company Stablecoins for USD (as the legislation requires) then it makes it pretty hard to restrict their spending.

kiitos 1y ago

stablecoins don't protect you against price fluctuations. they don't even guarantee reliable mapping to their underlying currency.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

viraptor 1y ago

This is not simple at all. What happens if you don't have the money available? If you want to provide some guarantee, how would you do it without locking up N x $100 forever? What are even numbered hours - which timezone? What happens if your transaction doesn't get accepted within that timeslot? Etc. etc.

scyclow 1y ago
Okay, I'm simplifying a little bit. It wouldn't work exactly like that. You'd lock up $100 (or approve the contract to spend up to $100), specify the time I'm unix timestamps, and leave it up to the recipient to claim their money. That's sort of besides the point though. I'm just saying that you have the ability to implement whatever ad hoc or arbitrarily complex payment logic you want without relying on a middleman.