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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

I run arb and loan liquidation bots, and have for over a year now. These are atomic transactions almost always using flash swaps/loans that exist only exist for the life of the transaction. I am only exposed to potential losses on transaction fees, but have never had a losing day while running production code. My yield on my investment (mostly infrastructure costs) is closer to 5,000%...per month. I will not lose my funds, whether the market is good or bad.

There are funds out there that conduct these activities, I know because I recently consulted for one. They are promising risk free returns and getting them.

There are things that exist in DeFi (such as flash loans) that have no real world equivalent, which is why blanket statements made about traditional markets don't necessarily apply. If used properly, these things do in fact offer "too good to be true" types of returns.

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> My yield on my investment (mostly infrastructure costs) is closer to 5,000%...per month.

As in, $100 in January becomes $500 in February, $2,500 in March, ... $976,562,500 in December?

Edit: actually I read that wrong, that would only be 500%. 5,000% per month (money x 50) would turn the $100 into $9,765,625,000,000,000,000 by December.

Unless by 5,000% yield you mean you get 50x your original investment on top of the original investment, like how 5% yield on a dollar gets me $1.05. In that case it would be more. But I think the 9.8 billion billion would be good enough for me.

No, sadly that return is based on my infrastructure costs, which I can't keep increasing and get the same return. But yes, I'm doing better than 50X my monthly infrastructure costs with this, which are my only actual risk.

Ah, ok, so this is more like a thing where you drive around looking for loose change on the ground, and you find enough to exceed your fuel and maintenance expenses. But you can't scale it up by hiring more drivers, because there is only so much loose change to be found.

Surely you see how even a 10% safe return on investment like these DeFi schemes offer is a whole different thing, when it's a compounding return. There's no way to sustain it. All the arbitrage opportunities in the world can't deliver the funds required to make investors' money grow exponentially.

You are correct, but all investments have a maximum size at which returns will stop. That said, even large banks are seeing returns considered impossible in traditional markets with DeFi strategies, often with lower risk. Arb bots like mine are now generating more than $1 billion per year in risk-free earnings, so the pie is not exactly small. Estimates are that statistical arbitrage bots, which do take on some small capital risk, generated over $5 billion in profits last year.

I agree with you that throwing money at anyone who tells you they can take an unlimited investment and offer compounding returns on it is a recipe for disaster. But in DeFi, intelligence and strategy translate directly to greater yield. Math has proven time and again that those things matter very little in traditional markets.

>But in DeFi, intelligence and strategy translate directly to greater yield. Math has proven time and again that those things matter very little in traditional markets.

You're all over the place with your usage of concepts.

Here you say that intelligence and strategy matter little in "traditional" (vague) markets. Yet, in DeFi, they do.

Not buying it. It feels like I could copy and replace your replace all of your uses of "DeFi" in this thread with <insert ponzi scheme>.

It's "different" than normal markets...I made it work personally (but not at scale)...

There are countless articles showing that literal monkeys throwing darts at a dart board can pick sticks as well or better than most fund managers. This is not the case with DeFi. I’m not all over the place with anything, DeFi is a place where skill still matters because of inefficiencies and the presence of a large amount of “dumb” money.

> I will not lose my funds, whether the market is good or bad

Is your counterparty risk always zero (between you and the chain)? Custody? What if a chain is halted or amended?

These systems run on novel rails. You couldn’t honestly tell an investor “you will not lose your funds,” and you’d refrain from using the word “deposit.” Because you’re trying to honestly communicate an opportunity, not to defraud.

Is your counterparty risk zero? Custody risk?

In the case of flash loans/swaps, the answer is yes. It's 0. Further, I never have any capital at risk, all of my bots use flash loans/swaps. These transactions are atomic, which means that either all parts of it succeed or they all fail (it's a "revert" in blockchain parlance). So I can borrow $200 million without any prior permission and do an arb/liquidation or anything else I want with it for the life of my transaction, with the only requirement being that I must return it by the end. If my arb/liquidation/whatever succeeds and I return the loan, I keep the profits. If not, it's as if the whole thing never happened. The only risk is the transaction fee, which on the chains I do this on are miniscule.

I realize that it sounds unbelievable, but it exists. My code does thousands of these daily. I am not the only one doing this. See https://eigenphi.io/ . With the exception of sandwich transactions, every one of the bots you see on there is making profits without any capital at risk.

> it’s 0

The risk of the trade on chain defaulting is virtually non-existent, agreed. Custody risk is never zero. Dollar in / dollar out returns involve lots of counterparties.

Hi there. My name is Bryan, and I'm a member of the EigenPhi team. Thanks for recommending us; twice!! :D Would you please spare a few minutes to have a quick chat? I'd love to receive your feedback and provide more valuable data! Here is my email: bryan at eigenphi.com. Looking forward to your reply!!

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