I don’t care what Mark Cuban thinks, I hardly know who he is beyond being wealthy and liking limelight.
If you're genuinely interested, you can check out my project which tokenizes real estate rental income: http://leasehold.io/
I wrote a detailed article which explains how it works: https://jonathangrosdubois.medium.com/how-leasehold-achieves...
The idea is to use blockchain tokens instead of shares but later we will also allow people to use LSH tokens to pay for rent when staying in one of the properties in our network.
We essentially invented a new concept called 'Proof of Profit' - Imagine if you could have irrefutable proof that a company earned a certain amount of profit in a specific month. Typically you need to trust company financiers and accountants. Not so with Leasehold. If you just launch a node to sync with the blockchain, you can verify the profits yourself with absolute certainty; just by looking at on-chain buybacks for that month. Tell me this isn't innovative and useful.
HN is going to miss the boat. Build more cool stuff. You will become insanely rich, since so many people seem set to let this opportunity go to waste.
The focus on where to buy your token, how much your token is selling for, etc is a major turn off for me. It might not be fair, but my first thought after landing on your website is that it's another ICO that isn't going to go anywhere.
And looking at your token model, users can "see" that Leasehold the company is reinvesting in itself by buying property or buying back shares. This seems very easy to game - what keeps you from just burning some of the "significant" shares that you own to prop up the price / prove that you are receiving income?
Now for a true defi, you can't depend on the physical world (some authority out-there). Only cryptocurrencies are possible in this case, and maybe, if the blockchain becomes advanced enough: Dynamic value derivatives denominated in crypto.
It might sound as limited but money (and the transfer of it) is kinda a huge thing. Crypto's downside is volatility. Being able to hold crypto as crypto while preserving stability (or better: value) will be a game changer. It'll also mean KYC and regulation will be harder to implement.
KYC/regulation/blacklisting are huge tools for governments. Government can have control over centralized entities (ie: an exchange, a bank, etc...) but they can't control everyone's wallet. They might be able to mess with a couple guys or figure out if a certain gang used such and such, but it'll be impossible to track everyone transactions that are happening in the blockchain (worse, the "whole world" is out there). And even worse: Current events have showed that governments are way behind when it comes to blockchain technologies. Some governments are not even aware of its existence or meaning.
In my opinion, this is huge. Most societies/civilizations collapsed when they failed to collect taxes. Peasants (your lovely citizens) are unlikely to pay when given the opportunity. Less taxes means less control, it's a slippery slope. Bad news for many governments around the world.
Look into Compound, Balancer and MakerDAO.
How does "being your own bank" do these things? My understanding is that you would still need a "regular" banking layer for each of these activities, which seems like it defeats the point?
You have a contract written in software, people pledging money to liquidity pools, and the rest is just magic. Sure you can go to a bank or someone and pay a currency exchange fee, but the fact that its possible P2P is quite neat.
It's basically Banks-as-software, collaboratively maintained like Wikipedia.
Plus I can already do P2P currency exchange. I don't because it's inconvenient to find those to exchange with, so I happen to use a marketplace (TransferWise), and they take a cut because they're providing a useful service and now they're an exchange. Exactly the same will happen with DeFi currency exchange, so how is it better?
It’s better because instead of transfer wise controlling the money from point A to point B and taking a percentage as a fee (0.1% or whatever) you have 10 000 people who build a liquidity pool where the money gets transferred from point A to B. All those 10 000 people share the 0.1% fee. Maybe less, in an extremely competitive space.
Basically all the centralisation, the app takes a fee bullshit goes away, and instead you get 10 000 or 100k or 1mil people all sharing their money and receiving part of the fee.
The dev can also write into the smart contract that he gets paid a percentage as well. Boom, you have a transferwise competitor with 100 mil in liquidity within days with 0 server costs. You can do this right now with a few days/weeks work on a decentralised application. You don’t think that’s big? Any app that “takes a cut” in exchange for having written a few thousand lines of code and maintaining server infrastructure will be challenged by decentralised alternatives.
> you have 10 000 people who build a liquidity pool
> The dev can also write into the smart contract that he gets paid a percentage as well.
This is literally what TransferWise is. They convinced thousands of people to work together to build a liquidity pool – that's the hard part – and then they take a small cut.
Getting a loan on DeFi takes minutes.
There's nothing about regular banking that prevents this, or anything about DeFi that is required to make it happen.
I think you're mistaking the fact that DeFi is a hub of great innovation for DeFi itself being the great innovation.
DeFi might be able to provide this, but we don't need DeFi to get it.
However the fact that it’s confusing doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Cuban has rightfully said UX in the space is beyond awful - some of it is virtually unusable without deep instruction.
My assumption there would be that you lock that bitcoin away. And you get 150% of the value of the BTC in another coin - DAI or whatever.
So you might have had 1000 usd in BTC but by the end you have 1500usd in DAI ? Dunno
Granted, they're costly if you're poor, but I've yet to see a blockchain application that seems likely to be useful for poor people who may not even have consistent network access.
Payment processors, on other hand, certainly charge vendors and result in some level of markup to the sale price of goods and services. But blockchains as payment processors add cost as well. This just happens to be hidden right now by the fact miners can earn so much profit from the value of their holdings skyrocketing that they don't charge anything. Crypto values have to stabilize at some point to ever be usable for transactions, so this cannot continue forever, and users will eventually need to pay the cost of the transaction processing directly, just as they do with non-blockchain payment processors.
Decentralizing something doesn't make it costless. Some work is being done somewhere by some machine or person.
> poor people who may not even have consistent network access.
There are plenty of poor unbanked people whoe have enough network access to use bitcoin, especially with the lightning network. You only need network access when paying (or receiving). You don't need consistent network access.
>This just happens to be hidden right now by the fact miners can earn so much profit from the value of their holdings skyrocketing that they don't charge anything
That's not true man. Miners are not empowered to charge anything. Miners can only accept transaction fees that users place on their own transactions. Its a market and miners choose the highest fee transactions. That's how it works. You're implying that coinbase rewards subsidize low fees, but you're very wrong about that. When the coinbase rewards go away, fees don't consequently go up - rather miner revenue goes down in such a case.
> Decentralizing something doesn't make it costless
But it can make it orders of magnitude cheaper. Paying someone on the bitcoin lightning network costs less than a tenth of a cent. Tell me that isn't cheaper than any other traditional payment mechanism.
My point is that none of this is actually possible. My employer doesn't pay me in Bitcoin/etc, has no facility to right now, and would get into a lot of legal trouble if they didn't pay payroll taxes. I don't frequent any shops or online services that accept payment with cryptocurrencies. My landlord wants to be paid in GBP because that's what he's paying his mortgage in and he doesn't want the hassle and cost of conversion.
I get that these things are all possible when everyone has moved over to cryptocurrencies, but that's a huge chicken-and-egg problem, and I've yet to see a path from where we are now to this future world that is at all credible/accessible/legal/compliant/safe/cheap.
Except it is possible.. What you mean is that the people who pay you don't want to pay you in bitcoin, and the places you buy from aren't taking bitcoin. But they could if they wanted to. It is in fact possible today.
You asked "how does being your own bank do these things". I think its pretty clear how they do those things and how banks are not necessary for you to pay someone else (in bitcoin) today.
> would get into a lot of legal trouble if they didn't pay payroll taxes
Paying employees in bitcoin does not prevent them from paying payroll taxes...
> huge chicken-and-egg problem
Its really not tho. Individual merchants can (and do) accept bitcoin without all their customers willing or able to pay in bitcoin. Its just another option. Individual employers can offer the option of paying employees in bitcion (especially easy if they're a merchant that accepts bitcoin). Individual employees can opt into such an option. There is no chicken and egg problem, it can happen gradually one person at a time and one company at a time.
Just because DeFI exists, doesn’t mean it solves a problem that anyone actually has in a way that is measurably better than our existing systems.
I get that you’re passionate about this, but you’re simply not selling it. The least appealing thing in the world to me is to “be my own bank”. I hardly want to interact with a bank, let alone be one.
That would mean that for 1.0 CPU on Akashlytics, I would need to pay $13.40/hr versus $4.25/hr on AWS. The cost savings claims on their pricing is deceptive at best since it is not comparing apples to apples.
I don't see how this makes sense unless you are looking for < 1 CPU, but then there are places like Digital Ocean which is likely more cost competitive there as well.
I am totally open to being wrong though as Blockchain seems like something so many smart minds are working on, but the solutions where it makes sense over not using Blockchain have so far not been apparent to me.
Autodesk will probably get there first, and everyone will pay to use a centralized system instead and then have to export the data to their legacy accounting system.
But, a group of collaborating firms, that still dont quite trust each other, or want to hide certain amounts of profit, are a use case.
http://www.warrenhenke.com/writing/essays/triple-entry-accou...
https://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html
I find it odd to say "thats a human problem" as if technical invention over centuries isnt specifically to abstract away human inefficiency.
A group of somewhat trusting firms doesnt need crazy PoW/PoS. The idea of companies sharing a collaborative ledger when working together shouldnt be dismissed so flippantly. Everyone keeping their own (unreconciled automatically with each others) book may be the status quo, but it doesnt make it optimal.