cinquemb

> But in all states of the universe, Tether is far far worse than whatever sort of off-shore cruft you think the typical bulge bracket is hiding.

I've seen whats on some bank balance sheets that are non public on some SEA and NG banks for $ deposits after briefly working for a few fintech's and doing intergrations (and prob will never see the light of day [and most wont blink an eye because its not crypto to clutch pearls about, esp some failures _pre_ covid global lockdowns that could fall under any of your classifications for cases, that were mere footnotes in the public eye wrt financials unlike tether which is still operating I might add to the chagrin of many]) information unlike what we have _seen_ for tether in _public_, and this very much hyperbole… ssdd in eurodollar land… even as far back as 1975[0] from Richard Debs, FRBNY’s Chief Administrative Officer:

"Finally, for the sake of logic, I should mention the legal framework of the Euro-dollar market, since I included the Euro-dollar market in my working definition of international banking from the point of view of the United States. However, I’m afraid that I can’t do much more than just mention it. The Euro-dollar market itself is not easily definable, and its legal framework, if any, is even less so. The market grew rapidly without the assistance, or burdens, of an integrated or even coordinated set of laws. It is an international—or multinational, or transnational—phenomenon, but it is regulated only to the extent that the Euro-dollar activities of the institutions operating in that market—the Euro-banks— are subject to regulation and supervision by the national jurisdictions in which they operate."

[0] https://alhambrapartners.com/2021/09/17/dollar-warning-updat...

> unbridled speculation (or probably, Tether)

One can thank decades of central bank malfeasance for this. I consider crypto in large part just a bit further out on/at simmilar place on the spectrum than DM/EM HY, neg nominal-yielding $ denom soverign/corporate bonds, and neg eps corps equity.

I think those who are clutching their pearls over tether and ignoring the fact that many offshore banks with $ denom "deposits" (no fdic "backstop", that still wont protect against systemic risk onshore, and various amount of rules and regs on paper only [no enforcement powers, very little operations transparency into all the derivatives under then sun, most bilateral]) on their balance sheet are in a weaker position than them and are generally ignorant of the eurodollar system (esp wrt rampant rehypothication of collateral/cashflows denominated in currencies their local jurisdictions cannot mint at will).

> it became clear that a huge chunk of yield was coming from earning tokens that had market value for no particularly clear reason.

Yeah, i hate this about the defi lending (over/under/un -collateralized) space now and I purely focus on what of that yield is actually in stablecoins and ignore the part that isn't (I can always dump that part for stablecoins and put that back in).

> I think this is insanely cool to observe, but also insanely stupid for people to put material capital (often capital they can't really afford to lose) into these experiments which are likely to fail.

I agree, and the same is true in tradfi markets for most speculative actors and those where the cb/gov cannot "afford" to "backstop" everything up to junk bonds when passive global leveraged long-duration trade rolls over occasionally.

When people are ok with moral hazard being ignored for so long, these types of things are inevitable…

I expect any assets in collateral chains with evergrande paper that are offshore to be liquidated at will.

Better pray collateral multipliers are sub 6… lol

Yeah, I said "fuck it" when they started buying corp bonds… DeFi only now, and just finished getting an audit for a decentralized derivatives protocol that was seeded funded with a decentralized incubator.

We're planning on the protocol being able to lend liquidity into existence out of thin air (well more accurately, taking advantage of collateral dynamics and protocol stablecoin flows) and packaging that debt into decentralized stablecoins denominated in $…

Thanks to the moral hazards, they've have motivated me and others to pursue alternatives that in their eyes have systemic risk, and I'd agree, very risk to their bailoutistan system :D

Centralized organizational structures (governments, corps and ngos) in the US and abroad must be treated with extreme prejudice and avoided for decentralized/federated and open alternatives if available.

For those orgs above (or those who work apart of them) who will actively fight those from pursing decentralized/federated and open alternatives for all aspects of ones life: there is subversion, exfiltration, exploitation and demolition. The best of those orgs will help people bridge the gap to future where power isn't nearly as centralized to the degree it is now.

Deff agree with electron.

> unrelated to the prior move from Gecko to Chromium/Blink

Is there publicly available reason for this move? No worries if there isn't.

No plans on forking from ff v ~70-ish with the servo stuff and going with the rust stuff or just more with chromium? Too much work and not worth it at this point or other tradeoffs? I like a lot of stuff you have been doing with brave (use the default search instead of ddg now in my ff fork) and wish some of it was in ff without me personally having to do it xD

> No, that’s not ‘arguable’. It’s ridiculous and obviously wrong.

I'm arguing it now, you may disagree, but I can for sure tell you that If I had at least 5 felonies like certain corporations do (and the exact same ones they were charged with and merely paid punitive fines for that barely scratched the surface of the profits extracted), I certainly would not be able to continue to operate in certain jurisdictions like they can and continue to do. You may not think such is a utter failure of enforcement, but I do. Thankfully, my actions, thoughts and ideas are not bounded by what you think.

Regardless, there are dao's that are not incorporated in any jurisdiction and are sufficiently decentralized that even if any one or many of their actors that are distributed in many jurisdictions we're arrested or killed, their evm deployed contracts will continue operate just fine regardless of what you or I think of such dao's and the assets of such daos, will remain out of reach of punitive actions of any particular jurisdiction.

> Given that you could simultaneously prove me wrong and inform other people by doing so, I think it’s clear this is just bluster.

Right, ignore the social and non finance related dao's listed in the link I provided, and continue to form your opinions strictly based on someone else definitions of "goodness" or "badness". All just bluster ;)

> What certainly is dishonest is to pretend that a mechanism that isn’t used consistently is equivalent to no mechanism at all.

Arguably, any instance where such enforcement mechanism fails to happen in response to an infraction in law, or fails be applied consistently to all actors, is a failure of said enforcement mechanism in totality (compared to evm where the contract will revert at runtime to the state before such method reverting execution if inputs + contract state go beyond the bounds defined within the contract and within the evm, every single time, for all actors as defined by the contract). Just because enforcement of the law sometimes works, does not remove its systemic flaws that might as well make it no real enforcement mechanism at all (especially so for some actors who can bypass meaningful enforcement pretty much any time they make an infraction).

Granted, you do not have to use anything defined by the evm. But others have and will continue to do so without any jurisdictions permission.

> Perhaps you have a single good example you can point to? I assume you must think at least one of them is good.

I think at this point, you have enough info to start to DYOR if you want to or not. I don't think there is much point in me spoon feeding you more stuff, and you can come to your own conclusions of ones "goodness" or "badness" and not rely on mine, and what ever you conclude, everyone else will not be bounded by such.

> Except with no actual enforcement mechanism.

Can we not ignore when any given enforcement mechanism associated typically with laws don't get executed when laws are broken by various actors? It's dishonest to pretend that traditional enforcement mechanisms are consistently used.

> although from what I can see nothing breaks out of the financial derivatives space yet.

You'd probably think that traditional non profit organization with a bank account is a financial derivative then if you research some of these Social DAO's and consider them being in the financial derivatives space.

> Corporate law, labor law, contract law, IP law, Tax law, and other legal disciplines do a lot to tell people how to build and run companies in every jurisdiction.

If you fork uniswapv2 code and deploy it on chain, it enshrines a bunch of rules that essentially tell one how they can interact with it in the same way these laws do.

People have to come up with these things, turn them in to law (or code), while also varying by jurisdiction (and highly susceptible to selective enforcement unlike code the executes the same way thru the evm) that people break/exploit those rules all the time that go against whats stated in them (people can hack contracts whose logic isn't tightly defined).

> Boundaries set by the evm are nothing like legal boundaries.

I'd say they are far superior than legal boundaries at enabling consistent and transparent interactions between people to the degree that some groups of people decide at using them vs incorporating in any jurisdiction at all like they may have in the past.

> Can you think of an example outside finance, where someone has build a company as a DAO instead of using legal incorporation?

If you are seriously interested, look here[0] (which is not a comprehensive list)

[0] https://coopahtroopa.mirror.xyz/_EDyn4cs9tDoOxNGZLfKL7JjLo5r...

> Nobody is explaining how to build anything

Because people can write whatever contracts they want that allow of group users to execute actions. The contracts do not need to have any financial incentives at all.

No one tells people how to build/run a company (and neither does the law in any particular jurisdiction, though they may set some boundaries, just like the evm sets a different sort of boundaries), people come up with their own methods for doing such and spread/share those methods with others.

> However, there is no explanation of how you build an ‘organization’ out of this.

There's not a one size fits all of what being a DAO is (and many people bicker about those calling themselves a DAO when they may not be[0], and some protocols are more decentralized on day one than others), maybe this can help you understand some of what's going on by some of the examples listed [1] and the various actors (there are non financial DAO's not talked about here).

> And it seems like you are saying this isn’t true.

It is true to the degree that for the positive/negative incentives to take place -- “a specific jurisdiction, expensive lawyers and army of accountants” -- are not needed like they are with centralized organizations who incorporate in a particular jurisdiction.

[0] https://nitter.42l.fr/josephdelong/status/143272844148131841...

[1] https://vadymnesterenko.medium.com/participants-in-a-defi-pr...

The users cannot do anything with the funds outside of what is dictated by the contracts, and there are various forms of incentives for executing specific contract actions for varying amount of actors.

I.e. if you want to borrow stablecoins against ones assets on aave, you must deposit up to 150% (and the limits of how much one can borrow are up to 100% of the value of the assets) of those assets and they will be liquidated if you do not pay back the debt before its due.

There more complex examples than this. Law doesn't stop people from breaking laws or not upholding contracts in the same way that code on the evm doesn't force users to interact with it (people break laws and get arrested after the fact and get liquidated all the time).

Because the code determines how funds can/or not flow from one address to another and is viewable by everyone by default.

I used zipcar when I was in college, super convenient to have in providence without having to buy or take a car to school (esp for international students). Was much better to lock it in for days rather than by the interval they had (i think it was 30 min, but this was over a decade ago for me).

Though I can see how it would be less so if you only need to go from point a to b and not back to a.

> The existing systems are much more efficient.

If you ignore the costs of the trust issues between participants (as well as a lot of physical infrastructure apart of trust chains) and how that plays out through the entire system, and a lot harder to trace CO2 values on (esp those that people will all agree on).

Here's one persons take on this with Banks vs BTC wrt CO2[0] with their numbers from last year that I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with in one form or another (usually without numbers of their own).

[0] https://medium.com/@mukeat/carbon-footprint-differences-btc-...

> which is a disaster for what we got in return (ransomware)

Right, that's all "we" got for it… "nothing" besides ransomware and easier ways to pinpoint CO2 compared existing systems it seeks to obsolete…

The last quote is from the wiki, but the first one is from the article

Are they trying to persuade? I figure they were just trying to signal their "loyalty" to some audience they have in mind.

I found this hilarious:

"The Thiel Fellowships, which began in 2011, initially provided $100,000 each to 22 high school students with big ideas for changing the world… Unsurprisingly, these dreams came to nothing."

Because of [0]:

"He dropped out of university in 2014 when he was awarded with a grant of $100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship, a scholarship created by venture capitalist Peter Thiel and went to work on Ethereum full-time."

Which I guess is "nothing" for these sorts of people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalik_Buterin

More important than guard rails (which makes a value judgement on what actions are "allowed") is a way to determine how to settle the thing that bets are being made on ("did these actions that have stakes on them, actually happen"), auger[0] does this by:

"Once a Market’s underlying event occurs, the Outcome must be determined in order for the Market to Finalize and begin Settlement. Outcomes are determined by Augur’s Decentralized Oracle, which consists of profit-motivated Reporters, who simply report the actual, real-world Outcome of the event. Anyone who owns REP may participate in the Reporting and Disputing of Outcomes. Reporters whose Reports are consistent with consensus are financially rewarded, while those whose Reports are not consistent with consensus are financially penalized."

Where the market here can take these states/phases:

    > Pre-Reporting

    > Designated Reporting
    
    > Open Reporting
    
    > Waiting for the Next Fee Window to Begin
    
    > Dispute Round
    
    > Fork
    
    > Finalized

[0] https://v1-docs.augur.net/

> And if that individual doesn't get their $0.25 of water, they die.

And in reality, people usually are willing to steal for things when they are desperate for them (which markets may or may not price in thru higher prices) before they are just willing to die.

> How is that a reasonable outcome in any functioning society?

I think the issue here is that I don't think we as people can all agree as to what is reasonable, or what "functioning society" actually means, though we are much better at coming up in aggregate with states that are possible in a given society (despite how unlikely some of those states are). In this, society is comprised of a combination of more or less likely "reasonable" and "unreasonable" states.

Yeah, i still think it would be pretty doable (esp if just changing return values and commenting out stuff), esp with the amount of time I spent over the years modding/removing/adding stuff to my ff fork in both rust code and c++ code.

But I was mostly interested in the theoretical situation if brave forked from the servo stuff and not its existing chromium stuff, no interest in touching that.

Ahh, yeah don't know any outside of those that make specific defi protocols that are at least GPLv3. I'm deff interested in being apart of something like it in the future with shinedao (maybe being incubated by them in the future, anyone is free to join and put forth an initiative to the community to gauge interest though, for this or any other project), I just don't know of many people are the same and can actually contribute via code and also in the defi ecosystem (there are a few software devs and even hardware engineers in the community, but many more who aren't), but I think it will be a natural progression from all the GPLv3 stuff being put out there related to web3.

Not too familiar with the "Web Compatibility" issues firefox has, but that would have been from when they moved off gecko at least, i doubt that was the case from using electrons chromium fork to upstream chromium. I wonder if they'd consider servo or would be too much work for them at this point?

This[0] says they started off with electron pre dec-2018, nothing about gecko.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#History

Of DAO's funding/incubating projects? shinedao does (though mostly revenue generating focus for now, although those projects can have r&d components, haven't seen pure foss dao's but i dont know everything going on in the space), probably others.

Of decentralized lending protocols? aave, compound, benqi, etc.

> I think people are forking Chrome because it’s better code, but I might be wrong.

I'm going to go with the latter, but at best this is debatable and highly subjective depending on what matters to you.

> I have only seen the code of Chrome and it’s very Google-like C++, with truly enormous codebase.

I don't know where you are going with this; FF is a large code base too, uses servo (rust) and c++.

> Even Chrome did not fork Firefox back in the day and forked Safari.

> Electron did not use Firefox either.

Good for them? Never been interested in chrome/chromium or electron based apps.

I had always wondered why since Brendan Eich came from mozilla, forking from it and going their own way would be natural for them (imo), highly doubt that all of a sudden all the stuff he worked with for years became crap overnight and the decision was probably more political than anything, but who knows, just baseless speculation on my part.

I think we're eventually going to see more DAO's focused on purely FOSS where their members can pool some resources and autocompound their treasury in a decentralized overcollateralized lending protocol to fund core operations and free ourselves from some of these centralized foundations desires.

> I don't care which core browser tech I use,

Yeah, i do.

> so I'd take a trustworthy chrome fork that meets my other requirements.

Fair enough.

> Unfortunately, Brave = untrustworthy player: https://brave.com/brave-ads/

Yeah, but i can compile that stuff out like i do with the mozilla crap, while still getting some of the core stuff they add like native ipfs support

Mostly what I talk about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21653909