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Comment by alistproducer2 | Hacker News Reader

This is wrong on several levels. Decentralization was not for transactions, it is for censorship resistance. These exchange stable coins fail this requirement. As anyone who has been licked out of an exchange account knows, your funds are never yours when they're on an exchange, much less if the only place to redeem those coins is a place that has locked you out.

Your observations about the community is flawed. Many are just speculators but there are many, like myself, who care about the technology and the core principles. For the latter, you need to be reading a place like bitcointalk.

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>For the latter, you need to be reading a place like bitcointalk.

BitcoinTalk is the launchpad of virtually every ICO that has violated these core principles. I am very skeptical of your claim that it's a haven for those who care about the technology and its principles when they have boards solely dedicated to announcement of new ICOs: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0

bitcointalk is the canonical location for most of the discussion regarding cryptocurrency and has been for years. They have a lot of ancillary boards, but the foundation of the board is the tech.

Coinbase's observation is that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is filled with many different players, with many different goals, and by facilitating commerce between them they can profit off all of them.

Your goal may be to accumulate Bitcoin and develop the technology until it takes over as the world currency. An (honest) ICO's goal is to take Bitcoin or Ethereum, convert it into fiat, and use that money to fund development of an interesting new technology. A day-trader's goal is to get rich off short-term price movements. An arbitrager's goal is to get rich off of price differentials on different exchanges.

So your goal might manifest itself in the strategy of "Always buy when I have fiat available, never hold money on an exchange, and invest in promising ICOs that look like they actually have a product and interesting technology." You buy Bitcoin monthly on Coinbase, immediately move it off Coinbase into your own wallet, and buy promising ICO tokens on IDEX as you become aware of them. This makes the price of Bitcoin on IDEX lower than on Coinbase (since you only buy on Coinbase and sell on IDEX), so an arbitrager buys on IDEX and sells on Coinbase. Your purchase was a net buy of Bitcoin relative to fiat, which makes the price rise, so a day trader takes note of that and decides he's going to sell and park his money in USDC until the arbitrager comes along and sells on Coinbase. Eventually everything evens out, and Coinbase makes a profit off every transaction.

You didn't have to deal with USDC at all, and only with Coinbase as a regulated U.S. exchange where you can exchange $USD for Bitcoin. But the other participants in this market have no moral issue with censorship or centralization, and they're all too happy to take their profit and park it in USDC while they're looking for buying opportunities.

The article says USDC is an ERC20 coin, which means you can keep it in your own wallet (i.e., not the exchange). You are still trusting the centre consortium to maintain the coins value.

According to USDC's documentation, accounts can also be frozen by a centralized authority.

USDC tokens are ERC-20 compatible and can be used with any ERC-20 compatible digital wallet. However, a global blacklist is maintained by CENTRE for USDC, which prevents tokens from being sent into or from blacklisted addresses. Reasons for blacklisting could include known fraudulent or illegal activity, or a legal order or process. Reserves associated with USDC balances held on blacklisted addresses may be wholly and permanently unrecoverable.

https://support.usdc.circle.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600160603...

Ah interesting. While that's a bit disconcerting, it does offer some advantages. You get the flexibility of an ERC20 token, but the (potential) benefit of the consortium being able to give you back tokens that get stolen (blacklist theif's account, issue you new coins). Might be a good middle ground between the wild west/code is law state of crypto currency and the protections of traditional banking.

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