223 karma · joined March 24, 2016
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Agree with the posit- stablecoins grew a lot during periods of strict monetary policy (ie capital outflow from China starting in 2015, hyperinflation in 2023).
Note my original post said disruptive, not good. Meant it in the truest sense of the word; both good and bad comes out of it.
I assume you've never experienced hyper-inflation? If you have, do you think it's fair that you were forced into a hyper-inflationary currency? And, if given the means to, do you think it's fair that people _should_ have the ability to choose?
My point is stablecoins give you choice to opt out of that. The only way to opt out before was very expensive
It's hard for the average non-US person to opt-into the US financial system. Sure, they could hold dollars in banks, but local monetary policy can nix that privilege at anytime by imposing foreign exchange controls. It's happened before, in some of the largest economies in the world: China in 2015, India in 2013, Argentina in 2011.
The current way users solve this problem requires a lot of resources. That's why you usually only see rich people have Cayman accounts, Canadian real estate, and shell companies in Panama. Stablecoins on permissionless blockchains make this process 100x more accessible for the average person.
So yes, stablecoins currently let you circumvent regulation.
But regulation can be a prison where you can pay to be free.
So what happens when it costs nothing to get out of jail? What kind of strains do this place on economies that people escape, as well as the economies that people join?
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
If you think 1% is a reasonable number, that’s 1BN per year at current market cap. Tethers been around for 10 years. Dead funds also compound.
Let’s say Tether was grossly insolvent (ie only had 50% of reserves) for the first 10BN in market cap (in other words, for the first 5 years of their existence). In addition to the 6BN+ of interest income they earn every year, there’s 1BN of reserves that will never get redeemed added every year
If Tether was insolvent before, they just need time to change that
if you trust your banking system to be a better custodian of your money than Circle, you're one of the lucky ones. billions of people in the world don't have that kind of luxury (see: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68778636), hence a part of the reason why stablecoins have grown to a little under a quarter trillion
That being said, not knowing anything at the start about the industry you build a company in yields 0 signal about someone's competence. How much did Brian Chesky know about hospitality or marketplaces before starting Airbnb? The Lyft founders about taxis? Zuck or Page/Brin about ads?
The question is- what is the incentive to burn gas (re: money) to timestamp the manifests before the regime comes into power?
> Producing, storing, converting, and transporting energy is what I had in mind as the missing top-level category.
Not a tax advisor, but I thought capital gains counts as taxable income? So someone who sells $50k worth of BTC will pay 15% on $10k.
[1] https://www.truckinginfo.com/10126660/fmcsa-denies-request-f...
[1] freight.amazon.com
> to encourage people to keep all their spare money one-click away from its investment products
These are not mutually exclusive. Robinhood could write this off as CAC that's mitigated by investments into (relatively) safe and low-yield investments. Robinhood could spend a million on Google/FB ads, or they could have an X% chance of losing an amount equal to (3%-bond yield) where X is reasonably low. The (mitigated) loss gives them access to capital and access to customers. If the 3% is permanent, there is no reason for anyone to store their money in a different checking account, as inflation will eat into their savings if those savings aren't invested. Extremely smart move on their part.