DeFi’s Rise to Shame: Its Problems and How to Fix Them | Hacker News Reader

DeFi’s Rise to Shame: Its Problems and How to Fix Them

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22 pointsWiligut4535 comments

> However, the technology does have quite a few advantages, provided that you’re investing in a legitimate project with a good & planned-out vision: > > 1. It’s a great and risk-free way of earning interest on your crypto holdings

This section is where I basically stopped reading. Anything that earns interest is not risk-free. Full stop. The whole point of earning interest is to reward the lender (and to be clear, "staking" is lending to the system) for the assumption of the risk that they may not get their money back. There are low-risk opportunities (usually accompanied by low interest). And in the case of staking a token, the staking comes with the implicit risk that the value of the token may decline substantially.

I see a lot of talk of "risk-free" opportunities in the DeFi movement, and that's why I stay away. It sounds too good to be true, and it is.

There are other issues in that article -- in particular, most DeFi APY calculations are variable and constantly changing -- but that one was the full-stop for me.

They never answer the simple question: where does the money come from?

You are watching on DeFi as a hype-risk, but it is not. It's more about technology, for example bridges, oracles, staking.

The first step is acknowledging that “DeFi” really means “Deregulated Finance” right now.

Eh, no. Defi should continue to mean the sort of systems where failures like FTX can't happen. Uniswap for example has no admin functions; the only person who can move your funds is you.

No, it is a technology that omits third parties and centralized institutions from financial transactions. If FTX had been a DeFi platform, the fraud committed wouldn't have been possible. Granted, DeFi can't do everything FTX used to do, yet.

Decentralisation means more people get responsibilities and therefore are liable if something really bad happens. It doesn't mean regulations don't apply.

With the way Tornado Cash went down, I disagree that DeFi is "deregulated". The stakes are as high as ever for the people working on these projects. The people getting scammed by DeFi companies just don't have as much money to burn on lawyers and influence to take action when their deals turn out too good to be true.

Tornado cash never went down. It continues to operate.

It can't go down without Ethereum going down, in the same way several blockchains contain child porn that can never be removed without taking down the entire chain.

Yet donations have been refused out of fear of being branded with the USA's sanctions for dealing with a sanctioned company.

It's a form of peer to peer finance. And you engage in "deregulated" financial activity every day. It's a basic human right.

Too lazy to look it up, but I am quite sure "deregulated finance" is mentioned nowhere in the UN charter of human rights.

The UN charter of human rights does not give us our rights. Some people consider the rights god-given, some consider that we have all negative rights until they’re taken away.

The UN is not the authority on human rights. It's just a weak, ineffective political body that represents no one in particular. Certainly not me nor you.

From the U.S. constitution: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Since I am not a US citizen, the US constitution doesn't really matter to me. The UN, as the only global body we have, does matter so.

The UN has no power. It is not an elected Congress nor does it have sovereign authority of any kind. It has every country in it, even those that routinely abuse human rights. It is purely intended as a preventative body for war. It's not even great at that.

There is a word for unelected groups that have power over you. The word is tyranny.

The UN doesn't matter

The UN has no voter mandate.

The UN is a waste of *every* country's taxpayers' money.

I doubt it. Diplomacy is far cheaper than conflict.

Diplomacy for whom? Not the for people who finance it. They have no say in its membership and no control over its actions.

This is about human protections more than rights. Otherwise we have learned nothing in the last few weeks.

What happened in the last few weeks regarding decentralized finance?

Turned out some decentralized projects like Serum are just the big boys in a mask grabbing all your money, or a counterparty that was losing all of their own client's money.

"Turned out"? Serum is built on Solana, the VC founded "blockchain" that Andreessen Horowitz heavily invested in and promoted, among others like coincidentally Alameda Research. No one who's seriously into defi thinks any of these projects are properly decentralized, it's hardly a step above something like Flow. At least they allow users to withdraw funds to their own wallets - that is when the chain isn't down as regularly happens ;)

However way you look at it, it's the mainstream falling for vaporware and scammers, including this very forum as well. Something has crypto written on it, there will be hype around it and then when it inevitably collapses people lament that cryptocurrency is dangerous.

Ignoring the new tech aspect, it's essentially the same thing that's been happening forever in finance. I know plenty of people who unironically think money itself is a scam. Their evidence is central and private bank shenanigans, the way creation isn't public and isn't tightly restricted, etc. All these are not money problems but people and institution problems. When you give your cash to some random guy on the street because he offers you winnings in a shell game, it's not the banknote's fault when you lose it or the issuer's but that of the scammer and your own for falling for it.

In the same way, I would advice against transferring digital currency to some random guy faking to be an autistic trader genius, no matter how many politicians and media outlets endorse him (because they got bribed). This should be a lesson for people regarding herd mentality and trust. And that's exactly what blockchains are for, because people simply seem completely incapable of learning this lesson. We need to have financial systems that are built on verification, not trust. The exact opposite of something like FTX and legacy finance. Apparently no one even bothered to properly look at their books and the auditing was done by a Metaverse-present auditing firm called 'Prager Metis'. You can't make this up: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/11/meet-the-metave...

DeFi summer was, if anything, a ride of high-octane. Now that capital has learned that high APYs are unsustainable the notion of "Real Yield" [1] should help stabilize DeFi.

1 - https://cryptobriefing.com/real-yield-mania-hits-defi-five-p...

How To Fix Them:

1. Use A Bank

2. Admit That Cryptocurrency Only Solves Problems If You Like Crime

1. Use A Bank

citizens of china, lebanon, and history would like a word ser

2. Admit That Cryptocurrency Only Solves Problems If You Like Crime

if crime is the ability for the average internet user to custody their own money and to use it however they want without intermediary, then I would assume most enjoy crimes winkwink

a good tell if one is on the right side of history or not, is whether they support the free flow of capital and the rights of individuals to own their own money/capital.. or not ;)

If the cost of enabling some banking for a small subset of people in countries with terrible governments is also enabling absolutely massive fraud, rampant speculation, and a transfer of wealth from less-financially-literate people to wealthy hucksters, then I think we need to find a better way to help the people in those countries.

"Those people need help; this helps them; ergo, we must do this" is not sound logic.

1. You are from Africa, how will you use your money without banks, eh? 2. Not at all. In this logic, everyone who is a prisoner, 100% guilty?

"Roman Wiligut @Wiligut

Growth hacker, tech enthusiast, journalist, futurist, writer, entrepreneur."

A journalist/marketer telling us how to fix things, cool.

"You just... easy!"

Can fix them easily by finding literally any valid use case. Maybe in another 10yrs

Kill it with fire, nuke it from the orbit.

There, fixed.

Ban it.

Problem solved

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