Fake Tesla, Apple stocks have started trading on blockchains

Another negative news about blockchain and hacker news. It doesn't surprise me anymore.

I did, and it doesn't.

The mechanism behind Maker DAO simply doesn't work. That's why it lost the peg so badly, and for so long. There simply wasn't any working mechanism to deal with the situation where the price rises above one dollar.

When people create ETH-collateralized DAI and sell them they are basically doing so in order to go leveraged-long on the ETH/USD pair. So when you use ETH to buy DAI from one of these people, you're basically making a (collateralized) margin loan to somebody who wants to increase their leverage. In return you get something sort of like the ability to short the ETH/USD pair (not exactly due to liquidations, but it's pretty close). All of this actually works as advertised: Maker pairs up people who want to go long with people who want to short. But what if there aren't equal demands for both sides of that trade?

If there aren't enough people who want to make margin loans (i.e. go quasi-short) Maker can raise the margin loan interest rate (i.e. stability fee) to make lending more attractive.

The big problem is if there aren't enough people who want to increase their long leverage. There will be too few DAI-sellers and the DAI price (in ETH) will go up above the USD price (in ETH). That's what happened. And kept happening.

The solution was to capitalize Maker DAO with centralized stablecoins -- Coinbase's USDC and Tether.

As a result, Maker DAO is effectively no more than an "index fund" of centralized stablecoins. It absolutely is not trustless.

It is trust laundering.

It's not like if hyperinflation could be avoided everything else should be fine. No, hyperinflation is a sign that the economy is grossly mismanaged, and that in turn is likely the result of desperate, incompetent government facing all sorts of economic, social and political problems. Switching to a different currency isn't going to fix a failed state, sorry.

All the evidence shows that a rate of inflation around 2% averaged over the business cycle is beneficial and necessary for the economy. Trying to adopt a deflationary currency is akin to refusing to drink water because people drown in lakes.

> Yes you can provide liquidity for eur-usd if you jump through all the hoops.

The emphasized part is important. Most people either can't or don't know how to jump through these hoops. Is it even worth it to jump through these hoops, when I only have 100 USD to "invest"? Entities like Uniswap make the process much easier and widely-accessible, which makes a big difference (particularly if you live outside the developed world).

Furthermore, you did not respond to what I asked: which institution do I need to contact for this? My bank?

> A quick google search will show you that lots of savings accounts have positive yields. Rates have been low cause of fed action but banks have provided positive returns in savings accounts since like forever ago.

This comment is rather US-centric. My experience where I am right now (outside of the US) is that interest rates currently are either negative (yes, you have to pay money to the bank to park your money there; example: [0]) or basically zero (an interest rate of 0.01% might not even cover the "maintenance fees" of your account, let alone losses due to inflation, particularly if you are not rich... might as well just stash the cash under my mattress and keep the maintenance fees to myself).

So, yeah... this is what entities like Uniswap provide that traditional financial institutions don't. Among other things:

* Capacity to borrow, lend, buy and sell "crypto-assets" or whatever you want to call them (most traditional financial institutions will not touch them with a 10-feet pole, for obvious reasons);

* Capacity to do those things with minimum friction/overhead, from anywhere in the world, at any time (no KYC, no gatekeepers);

* Exchange and interest rates that are actually decided by the market, rather than centrally planned (by your bank and central banks), which leads to reasonable interest rates for borrowing/lending (i.e. positive rates).

Of course, you can argue that some of these "features" are "anti-features" (e.g. no KYC = no friction, but it also means that perhaps money laundering could take advantage of it). Either way, it seems clear to me that Uniswap et al. enable you to do things that you (or, at least, "most people") simply cannot do within the traditional financial system; you may not see too much value in these things, and even be generally suspect of "cryptocurrencies", but it seems complicated to argue that Uniswap does not bring anything new to the table.

The proof is in the pudding... if Uniswap was not useful (beyond what traditional financial institutions already provide), you wouldn't see so many people flocking to it.

[0] https://www.nationalbanken.dk/en/marketinfo/official_interes...