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Comment by trophycase | Hacker News Reader

idk but I keep most of my wealth in stablecoins or cryptocurrency. The yields are better than a bank and I can withdraw more from Coinbase in a day than my bank would let me wire per day anyway, so why not?

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Because those better yields are there for a reason. That reason isn't lack of intermediaries, it's high inherent risks.

Economy has a risk-free rate of return, that of 1-year treasuries, at 0.05% currently. Anything above that involves risk. A rate of return of 7%/year means there's 7%-0.05% chance of the instrument being worthless after one year, ~14% chance of it losing half its value, ~28% chance of it losing a quarter of it's value, etc. There's no free lunch, and there's no financial arbitrage

Two economists are walking down the street and happen upon a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. The first economist says, "Look at that $20 bill." The second says, "That can't really be a $20 bill lying there, because if it were, someone would have picked it up already." So they walk on, leaving the $20 bill undisturbed.

Stablecoins without verifiable banking are terrible places to keep wealth. No upside, big potential downside.

DAI is pegged to the US Dollar, stabilized by algorithms and has been for a few years now without fault. The upside is 20 - 30% APY by providing liquidity to decentralized exchanges. Bank accounts are providing no where near that return on currency.

It's great that there are still people in the world paying you 20% a year for not taking on any risk. Really gives you hope for humanity, doesn't it.

> stabilized by algorithms and has been for a few years now without fault

This is a textbook example of a "gray swan".

I might if the market cap would be bigger: we still need to see if it can stomach a large scale actual financial crisis. What happens when 99.99% of owners want their USDT converted to USD and sent to their bank to buy bread. Those are things that can bring btc to actual 0: we have not tested this yet as we had no significantly big crisis since 2008. People liken blockchain to the beginning of the web: that beginning had major crash in 2001 which took companies years or decades or never to recover from. And similar sounds: 'things are different now'; the favorite hodler phrase since tulipmania. Nothing goes only up and the MSFT shares and such are not healthy imho. Something must happen and the question is; how far is crypto dragged with it. The promise was that it wouldn't (safe haven in times of inflation and recession) but a little financial crisis like begin 2020 crashed crypto quite hard. So what happens with a large one?

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