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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Sure there is! Innovating new ways to separate suckers from their money. It's a tough pill to swallow for the laser-eyed, I know.

The problem is there's a lot for the HN community to like in it, if you're willfully blind to it's hypercapitalist and manipulative nature: fun technical challenges, little-guy-vs-the-world. I get it, I really do.

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I agree there is a lot of this in the space, but if you look past the laser eyes, there is some really awesome stuff happening in defi.

I don't disagree there's some cool technology, and in particular in the DeFi space - the problem is it's all fruit of the poison tree at the moment. It's all dependent on price action and the price action is dependent on Tether, on sketchy exchanges, on crime and criminality, on 125X leverage, on manipulation.

And of course, there's so many problems with smart contracts - even the core idea of permanent, irrevocable transactions where bugs can leave you destitute and without anyone to speak to. And no way to unwind them. [1] Unless you're big enough, I guess, and can just fork the chain like Vitalik did with the DAO.

[1] https://www.rekt.news/

Man I’d hate for you to learn actual us history then…

Haha, the history is past, ideally we should learn from those mistakes not facilitate re-creating them!

Most major exchanges have reduced max leverage to 20x or less now. Regarding bugs, the space is still young, so of course there will be risks attached, even. more so when the space is innovating so quickly, but projects like Aave and Compound can be considered pretty safe now, with hundreds of millions value locked and have stood the test of time.

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