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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

> I think crypto will similarly find its way into the traditional finance sector and live on but the utopia of decentralised finance will never eventuate.

To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance.

So far it's like quantum computing. Nothing is better solved with a quantum computer right now. Will that change in the future? Maybe. Until it does they simply won't be used. After all, why would they - except as an opportunity to build in-house expertise in a new space, and for the perception of being hip?

There is no preordained future where it's accepted, it has to earn its spot.

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> To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance.

I’ve been assuming that one of the companies in that space will pivot to basically modern PKI infrastructure (signed transactions, etc. without 90s baggage like PGP, decentralized only in the sense of working offline on cheap hardware well enough to replace a paper check with a signature using their phone’s secure element) long enough to declare victory and get acquired, at which all of the cryptocurrency sales guys cosplaying as developers will start claiming that’s what they had in mind all along.

>>> To do that it would have to do something, anything, even one tiny little bit better than something in finance.

To be fair, DeFi offers better returns than are commercially available to the average consumer (granted, with increased risk, but still).

Yeah but those returns are artificially subsidized by VC and retail speculators. They’re, by and large, not the result of non-crypto people or companies purchasing tokens in order to meet direct needs.

A conventional Ponzi scheme also offers very high returns, at a very high risk.

Further, roughly 10% of the entire TVL of the DeFi space was lost last year to hacks and thefts. If you're not getting at least 18% APR (10% risk, 8% inflation), you're better off with series I bonds.

Put another way: if this clear yield actually existed, it would be arbitraged into the dirt by Cumberland/DRW and Jump - not left to the retail schlubs.

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