Why DeFi Isn't Bullshit | Hacker News Reader

Why DeFi Isn't Bullshit

hackernoon.com

10 pointsbhalina3 comments

I'm trying not to be too rude here, but this reads like Baby's First Crypto Article. Every reason they've listed here has been discussed to death and refuted by most people "in the know" so to speak.

- Self-custody is being dismantled by regulators, and the people who do cater to self-custody are selling P2P which is far too inconvenient for the average person.

- Interest rates are higher, but gas fees are even worse if you want to push an L1 transaction (L2 transactions undermine your security/decentralization/transparency benefits).

- Modern DeFi is hardly transparent, and the parts that are visible have only proven useful to speculative investors and law enforcement agencies.

- Sure it might go beyond investment, but what examples can we point to? The dumpster fire of NFTs? The Wild-West world of crypto loans? I've been watching for nearly 8 years now, and nothing has come up.

- The whole "distributed" nature of these systems is definitely nerd porn, but the general public doesn't care. On top of that, there's really no benefit to decentralizing a currency that will be treated and handled like a regulated asset when all is said and done, so the only "benefit" is that we're now using hundreds of times more computation/energy/time to process and verify individual transactions. It was cool in 2012. Today it's just a burden.

I'm someone who likes crypto. I think it's cool, and while there might not be a finance revolution in the next decade, I think there's a great deal of problems that could be solved with decentralized fiat. Every argument here is terrible, though. This article is all hype and no substance, like it was written by a Bitcoin maxi from 2012 who just woke up from cryosleep stasis to defend their favorite currency.

Oh, and towards the bottom it's sponsored by a blockchain API company. Go figure.

There is no such thing as self-custody or P2P in defi. Every solution I've ever seen promoting that relies on eventually doing reconciliation from a L2 chain. I'm ready to say that there are no problems what could be solved with defi, the whole thing is useless.

There was (and still is, to an extent) a concept of self-custody, but for both greed and regulatory reasons most people have turned to L2 chains and managed custody. It's a real conundrum, but also pretty funny to watch exchanges increasingly pivot to bank-like structures to appease their users while undermining the values of crypto in the first place. It's one of those things that reflects the inevitability of cryptocurrency's downfall.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com