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Comment by swarnie | Hacker News Reader

10c tip, $31 gas fee.

In some chains it is 1c

trouble is the interface to actual money - the only coins that have any depth of dollar liquidity are BTC and ETH, both of which are proof-of-work. Even if your low-fee shitcoin just happens to have a USD pair, it's startlingly unlikely to have enough depth not to have massive slippage on trades; so functionally, buyers have to go via BTC or ETH. This is also the fallacy of non-PoW NFT chains.

Looking at SOL/USDT on Binance.com [1] as an example, it looks like there are typically orders for a few thousand USDT within a 1 cent spread (0.006% of the price), or orders for a few hundred thousand USDT within a 25 cent spread (0.15% of the price).

Most of us aren't trading millions at a time, and these spreads seem fairly insignificant compared to fees extracted by banks, credit card networks, etc, so is this really an issue?

[1] https://www.binance.com/en/trade/SOL_USDT?layout=pro

that's why I said actual money, not USDT - which is absolutely not actual money.

If you don't want USDT, you can trade SOL/BUSD instead. The order book may be a little thinner, but not a big deal if you're not moving millions.

While you might claim that BUSD isn't real money, you can just immediately withdraw it as fiat in your bank account, as long as Binance remains solvent.

Or if you're still uncomfortable with BUSD for whatever reason, just trade e.g. SOL/USD on Coinbase.

I am talking about USD, not about stablecoins, and particularly not about stablecoins on tether exchanges. You are not refuting in any way whatsoever my point about the serious lack of actual-money liquidity for your favourite coin.

What is the depth of SOL against USD? Not against USDT, not against BUSD, but against actual-money dollars?

See for yourself: https://pro.coinbase.com/trade/SOL-USD

Again, there's hundreds of thousands in orders within a $0.25 spread - plenty of liquidity if you're not moving millions.

We really need to stop using the term stablecoins

ScamCoin maybe?

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