Software bug causes YAM cryptocurrency to implode two days after launch | Hacker News Reader

Software bug causes YAM cryptocurrency to implode two days after launch

theregister.com

85 pointsseanhunter31 comments

I keep seeing the rhetoric that it was just an experiment and that it was expected to implode. Sure, okay, maybe it was - but in that case, the hype built around it was completely inexcusable.

From its creator to shills on Twitter, I hadn't seen such fervent shilling (obviously, they were all in a prisoner's dilemma with it, but still).

It's true there was a lot of shilling; but there were also (IMO) plenty of warnings.

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The official YAM announcement said things such as:

> YAM holds zero inherent value

> This was a 10-day project from start to launch. We STRONGLY urge caution to anyone who chooses to engage with these contracts, and think a proper professional audit would be highly advisable if this project gets any meaningful use.

(see https://medium.com/@yamfinance/yam-finance-d0ad577250c7)

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There was shilling, but there were also people like Taylor Monahan of MyCrypto.com (one of the main Ethereum webwallets):

> please dont be the poor fucker who loses more money than they can afford to lose on an experimental mashup of all the defi things that was started 10 days ago.

(see https://twitter.com/tayvano_/status/1293236568614871045)

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and DCInvestor (mod of r/ethfinance, one of the main social sites for Ethereum):

> This is financial advice: Do not buy $YAM.

(see https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1293555904378474498)

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and Eric (?last name?) ("econoar" of the Into The Ether podcast, one of the bigger news reporters within the ecosystem):

> Everyone is about to go crazy over this but please for the love of god read the whole post. "Audits: None." Just assume you're going to lose everything if you play with it and you're fine.

(see https://twitter.com/econoar/status/1293974467794726912)

(edit: added descriptions of who these people are)

All cryptocurrencies live or die by “shilling”. Like with any software, it’s not terribly likely that any single one of them is entirely bug-free, but the loyalty of invested early adopters is what hides mishaps from the public and persists the hype.

The problem is, this was technically a financial instrument (it falls under DeFi - decentralized finance) that was completely unaudited, and could've been released in stages, on a testnet, etc. To use an analogy, this was essentially pushed directly to prod, not even to master... unless I'm missing something.

It just seemed so reckless to me.

It's very interesting to see what happened on Ethereum this week. After YAM fiasco, there is another drama. Someone front-runned the official project by launching the code first on Ethereum.

https://twitter.com/CurveFinance/status/1294088489118715905

They probably shouldn't have published their admin (public) keys in advance. That way it would have been impossible to "front-run".

Does it make sense to call that 'frontrunning'?

I probably wouldn't trust someone 2-years out of college to manage my money (YAM creator's capital management firm).

I sure as hell wouldn't invest in their home-grown crypto currency.

Story Headline: Recent college grad doesn't know what they are doing and it ended as expected.

I think the moral of the story is to focus less on making the business work and more on finding suckers to solicit investments from. Just like WeWork.

To be fair YAM was an experiment, always communicated as-such, and was intended at-best to implode.

This tweet is unrelated then ?

@brockjelmore "i’m sorry everyone. i’ve failed. thank you for the insane support today. i’m sick with grief"

https://twitter.com/brockjelmore/status/1293820056682377216

People threw real money at something that was intended at-best to implode? Did that intention make it into the sales pitch?

Yes... (I suppose it depends on which "sales pitch" you listened to).

Sometimes people are just crazy and stupid.

Experiments should not involve other people’s money. Both companies and individuals do it all the time, but involving « investors » (mind the quotes lol) for something that’s expecting to fail is simply irresponsible.

> “If the funding goal is reached, upon the completion of the audit, we plan to support the launch of YAM 2.0 via migration contract from YAM.”

Shit happens. At least they’re undeterred. Couldn’t this just be fixed with an immediate hard fork? They’re new enough that probably nobody would protest.

It wasn't a separate block chain, just a smart contract running on Ethereum. And it was an experiment the creator advertised at the start as crazy and untested...

So the odds of walking the Ethereum chain back are about like a penny stock convincing the NYSE and all traders in world to walk back all their trades for the last two days.

In this case, I imagine that a "hard fork" would entail starting a new smart contract and copying over the old balances.

Maybe they are new enough that nobody would follow their lead

I found that these two articles provide some good context about YAM and yield farming. It seems like there is some messy, but really interesting experimentation happening in DeFi right now.

https://www.coindesk.com/defi-degens-gaming-ethereum-money-l...

https://www.coindesk.com/defi-yield-farming-comp-token-expla...

If you look into the backgrounds of a number of there big proponents of defi, it gets scarier.

What do you mean?

I guess they didn’t see any reason to fix it

https://github.com/yam-finance/yam-protocol/blob/master/cont...

Why did it become half a billion dollar worth in one day? What is special about YAM?

That figure was the market cap, the price at which a token was sold multiplied by the number of tokens on the market.

If a billion tokens are available, the market cap is $0.5B if you sell a single token for $0.5. That's what happened yesterday more or less. You won't be able sell all tokens for $0.5B, so saying they are worth $0.5B is misleading for such a volatile and young project.

The metric works much better (but not perfect) for established shares, financial products or contracts for physical objects.

Yes. To give an example: many bitcoins are lost (ie deleted private key), or in accounts that presumably will never trade, so you should remove those when calculating bitcoin total market capitalisation.

Except that it's literally impossible to distinguish between a "lost" bitcoin (no private key) and one sitting in a cold wallet (private key exists offline).

Lots of things are impossible to calculate 100% precisely, but that doesn’t stop anyone from building models anyway.

Just like “How much US$ is out there in paper currency?”. Impossible to know, especially as it’s never been demonetized, but models exist and are used.

It was named after a vegetable and vegetables meme well in Ethereum because a subset of Etherians like to "yield farm" and identify as yield farmers.

I hear their self destruct feature works pretty well

They took the best features from a number of different projects and gave an equal opportunity for all participants staking to earn tokens. Most other tokens/projects have been VC funded with an uneven number shares allocated to early funders (aka pre-mining).

It seems like software defined scarcity in this case almost defeats the point of the currency because if it's not based on anything hard and immovable it can be bypassed. It's almost as though you need some non digital impossible to fake process to back your currency. Like maybe digging in the ground and pulling out precious metals?

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