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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

General idea of having two balanced cryptocurrencies doesn't look bad by itself. But the promises to pay 20% of interest per year are super suspicious. Where would that money come from? What kind of goods or services do they produce? Do developers of cryptocurrency expect to receive exorbitant fees from users?

If there is no valid business model explaining where that 20% come from then it is just a Ponzi scheme.

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It's an intrinsically flawed concept even without the 20% interest rate.

The algorithmic balancing between UST/LUNA doesn't help at all with maintaining a LUNA/USD market. UST is pegged to USD indirectly through LUNA, and LUNA itself isn't pegged to anything. Nor is there a big market maker willing to buy/sell LUNA at any price.

A stablecoin that isn't pegged to USD by a 1:1 cash backing by the issuer just can't work. Putting an extra cryptocurrency and an algorithm in between the stablecoin and USD makes the system seem more legitimate to users but doesn't solve the fundamental issue with an unbacked stablecoin.

Yeah, the important thing to understand is the balance only in a simplistic model that assumes unlimited liquidity. If there isn't enough liquidity then it just death spirals.

Now the reason the ponzi was needed should be clear. (To generate the required demand for LUNA)

There are a ton of these schemes that promise 10-20%. At best it’s like those 2008 loans that won’t be paid back due to the crash, at worst it’s a ponzi. Celsius and Gemini and a hundred others. There’s a lot more tears left to be spilled

It wasn't a guaranteed 20% APY. APY for defi protocols are constantly in flux and change based off how much money it makes and how many people are providing liquidity. APY is typically calculated per block and is based off how much everyone made in that block. It doesn't mean that it will be able to keep up that rate for a year. For a time Anchor was able to make more than enough to pay out 20% APY and it built a fund to pay out when it didn't make enough. There wasn't enough demand for Anchor to support a 20% APY so they were lowering the target over time while the previous profit made up a portion of what was being paid out.

>Where would that money come from?

The money came from staking rewards from tokens people deposited as collateral and from interest on loans people took out against the collateral they deposited.

>it is just a Ponzi scheme

Anchor itself was not a Ponzi scheme. You could withdraw your investment at any time. Your money wasn't paying out other people's returns.

Thank you for clarification, but I still don't get this part:

> and from interest on loans people took out against the collateral they deposited

To be able to pay out 20% interest rate on deposits you need to issue loans at higher rate. But who would take such a loan when they can go to a traditional bank? Furthermore, the borrower needs to provide a collateral.

Money cannot appear out of nowhere. There should be somebody buying something, like products or services (not just cryptotokens). Or at least a reasonable expectation of someone buying them.

>To be able to pay out 20% interest rate on deposits you need to issue loans at higher rate.

No, as I mentioned part of that 20% comes from staking rewards. I also missed that there is also a small liquidation fee that contributes to what gets paid out.

>But who would take such a loan when they can go to a traditional bank?

Because you can instantly get the loan. Because you get paid in ANC for borrowing. This ANC can be sold to help offset the interest. 10% Anchor's protocol fees are used to buy ANC which is distributed to people staking ANC which incentivizes a demand for ANC. At times you would make more in the ANC rewards than what you had to pay in interest.

You are all insane, how is that not a Ponzi scheme

Because people were speculating on the growth of the project.

Why do you keep referring to them as projects, why not call them schemes which is much more apt

A scheme is a plan. Saying just that trivializes the massive amount of work creating a community, creating websites, working on the distributed system itself, doing the marketing, creating smart contracts, getting the smart contracts auditted, setting up bug bounties, writing documentation, moderating the community, creating tools for visualizing the blockchain or other stats, creating various other dapps, etc. Pretty much everything worked on is open source too. You can find it on github.

I don't go around calling Linux a scheme, or emacs a scheme, or blender a scheme.

Madoff also did all those things. Every time I look into one of those “projects” it either depends on money coming in or other parts of the crypto system growing. Stop fucking lying to people, and especially don’t compare it to something like Linux. So much wasted effort for nothing

>Every time I look into one of those “projects” it either depends on money coming in or other parts of the crypto system growing

Can you please explain what you are talking about. There are a lot of different projects that are related to cryptocurrency. I think we are talking past each other.

>Stop fucking lying to people

What lie did I tell? I have been trying my best to explain how things work because I have been looking into how it functions over the past fwe days.

>and especially don’t compare it to something like Linux

I was just picking open source projects which have a community built around them.

> But who would take such a loan when they can go to a traditional bank?

It’s not like people generally take out these loans to put into productive use. They put them into even riskier and scammier crypto get-rich-quick schemes.

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