Hacker News Reader

Comment by rolltiide | Hacker News Reader

I dont think it was an unforeseen use. People that execute these smart contract dark patterns knew for a long time and didnt steer public discussions that way.

The very foreseen problem was that people dont show up to governance decision in crypto. Yes you can use a blockchain for voting but nobody shows up.

The real problem is that there are no alert protocols built into wallets and client side defi apps.

Now people are discussing it.

The bigger gamble was whether liquidation and auction could occur fast enough to prevent emergency shutdown. They did, one person showed up to the auction and bid $0.

System worked.

Everyone with dollar signs now is going to research that and bid $1 until the order book is populated and it never happens again.

Software updates to overfit for this possibility would be worse.

View on HN

"Everyone with dollar signs now is going to research that and bid $1 until the order book is populated and it never happens again."

Not familiar with this, but your comments sound like "we have a proof of concept that this issue could be solved, therefore it is solved".

> but your comments sound like "we have a proof of concept that this issue could be solved, therefore it is solved".

What? No. This is about more people showing up to a foreclosure auction because they heard about the guy that bid $0 by being the only person at the foreclosure auction, and flipped a property for $4mm.

And then you have an actual market.

The auction house itself doesn't need to be patched. The auction process doesn't need to be patched. If the auction house has sympathy for the people that got foreclosed on then they can do whatever they want to compensate them from their own pocket, they can automatically do that in case a reserve bid isn't met, but the fact that the auction occurred in a timely fashion is proper behavior.

I just feel like it's a typical libertarian comment that markets solve things because they will probably react eventually. It's not wrong to expect the feedback, but in the meantime, havoc that affects people occurs. That legitimately can affect peoples' opinion of a process.

The problem with marginalizing it to "libertarian" means that you imagine that it is a future ideal reality for libertarians that doesn't already exist, while you simultaneously don't even entertain the argument presented. Cognitively negligent.

If the auction didn't happen, then there would be a software problem to fix and a criticism of trusting MakerDao and "decentralized finance" smart contracts. If the auction did happen, and only 1 person showed up and bid as low as possible, there isn't a problem.

I was on the MakerDao video conference, and people suggested software tweaks such as a minimum, and people pointed out that it wouldn't make much of a difference for the person that got liquidated and if the market actually was moving faster (like it was at the time) an arbitrary - but software hardcoded - minimum would have disrupted the auction anyway.

The only thing that happened here is nobody showed up to the auction. Now you and thousands of other people know that there is an opportunity to be the only one at a auction, and non-existing UI prevents a crowd from being notified and showing up. And yet, if you want the opportunity to make millions, you'll figure it out, and so will other people, and you will start to outbid each other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com