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Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

home.treasury.gov

591–600 of 697 posts

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a strictly worse monetary system by any measure. It's massively more expensive to transact, it's unbelievably inefficient - requiring as much power as Thailand and generating as much e-waste as the Netherlands to scribble 2-3 tx/sec into a ledger. That's 60 days of power for the average US household and 1 iPad of e-waste per transaction . [1] [edit](97% of all mining hardware will be thrown away without ever win…

Visa or PayPal are quite expensive to transact. It ranges from one to three percent overhead on every purchase you make. I don't think btc is that high is it?

21 billion in mining rewards / 100 million transactions per year is about 210 dollars per transaction. You'd need an average transaction size of $7,000 for a 3% fee to be comparable which it most certainly is not.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#592
post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That same thing will happen if crypto has a major run. The exchanges already conveniently "go down" when Bitcoin dumps even now To this point specifically: is there any proof this is malicious? Amazon, Facebook, Google have all had outages before; shouldn't we apply Hanlon's Razor when a cryptocurrency exchange fails to serve requests during a massive traffic spike?

The exchanges never go down when the crypto price rises, only when it falls. Further, an honest exchange makes money on people’s trades. Going down when volume is high means giving up peak profits. Equivalent of amazon reliably going down on black friday.

Most exchanges started as garage-based operations and most were built quickly or shodily. It wouldn’t be surprising if most of them have enormous piles of technical debt, especially as the number of alt coins exploded.

Making a robust exchange is hard and requires an amazon level of development. Huge movements in price correlate with massive increases in volume. The simplest explanation remains firmly in the realm of poor platform, in my mind, rather than nefarious and illegal manipulation.

Just look at Robinhood. They offer a sleek looking product, but their crypto offering falls down under load (positive and negative) regularly.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think we will forever be organized and segregated by governments? Since you asked, yes. I do. To me, it's like asking if a beehive will always have a queen. It's in our DNA. > Also, you're right. POW as a consensus method is flawed. But again, all V3 cryptos have essentially transitioned to delegated proof of stake at this point. I honestly don't know enough about "V3 cryptos" to speak to it, and I'm not try…

> Since you asked, yes. I do. To me, it's like asking if a beehive will always have a queen. It's in our DNA. Not the asker, but thank you for answering this--it goes a long way toward understanding where your arguments are coming from.

All humans enforce laws with physical interactions, especially violent ones. If you have no central governing body then every human makes their own rules and laws and when they enforce these rules they will be just as violent as the governments they wanted to run away from.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain how all gains are from other peoples losses? Someone invented a technology. Initially it was worth zero. Now it’s worth 1tn. The gains are from the gradual realisation that the technology has some merits. There are way more gains than losses… so far at least.

Other than the number in someone's bank account, what do you get from cryptocurrency? With technologies like washing machines and dishwashers and stoves, it's pretty easy to see the real gains in wealth: you save labor. Ditto cheap housing and automobiles: you can live places you wouldn't before, which opens up a yard and white picket fence to people who previously lived in tenements. The Internet opened up a whole n…

I agree with you. However I’m not sure about classing them as losses.

If the price now plateaus indefinitely (obviously this won’t actually happen) then the early adopters made some profits and the more recent investors don’t lose anything. Everyone is free to buy and sell as they wish going forward.

Plus, if the crypto offers some people some benefits, such as avoiding large fees when sending money abroad or avoiding inflation, then it’s possible that the crypto invention is a net positive.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#595
post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That same thing will happen if crypto has a major run. The exchanges already conveniently "go down" when Bitcoin dumps even now To this point specifically: is there any proof this is malicious? Amazon, Facebook, Google have all had outages before; shouldn't we apply Hanlon's Razor when a cryptocurrency exchange fails to serve requests during a massive traffic spike?

The exchanges never go down when the crypto price rises, only when it falls. Further, an honest exchange makes money on people’s trades. Going down when volume is high means giving up peak profits. Equivalent of amazon reliably going down on black friday.

This has occasionally been mentioned elsewhere about some of the sketchier exchanges. I have never seen it mentioned with any of the exchanges I use - is there any non-anecdotal confirmation of this phenomena?

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#596
post #47

This is good. The backing of stablecoins is a very real issue. As the Treasury points out, there's a very real possibility of a run. Two stablecoins have crashed so far, SafeDollar SDO, and $TITAN. They went all the way to zero. Can Tether survive a net outflow? Probably not. They don't have the collateral. Dai is really a derivative of Etherium. Dai is backed by Etherium at 150%. So value in Dai is at risk if the pr…

'Backing' via reserves doesn't actually matter much in practice.

What you want is a thick equity cushion.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#597
post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really enjoyed this convo, if you want a bit more of a long form of my thought process on this, read the Sovereign individual (With a grain of salt, it gets a bit wild) My main point is don't completely dismiss a nescient technological field based on it's lack of utility now. Sustained development effort with real venture capital only dates back to around 2017, 2018. All major silicon valley firms have launched funds…

Is there any short form version of something someone can read to get a sense of the value you’re seeing? I followed this conversation with interest, but still find myself unenlightened as to what there is I haven’t understood yet about the space. Whenever I talk to a proponent it seems very theoretical. There are often analogies to the early internet, but I was alive then and remember some of the early, tangible use…

I think two of the coming applications that has me most excited (of which there are many others on the horizon), are permission-less stock markets where shares are fully accounted for at all times in real-time (an actually transparent financial market), and proper third party markets for digital goods whereby goods bought online can essentially be treated like you do physical goods.

Both are applications of NFTs and both have significant players developing them.

I can elaborate more on these two applications if you want. Currently on mobile.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#598
It may not be immediately obvious that all banks run their own "stablecoin": LD: "Ledger Dollars". How do "internal bank ledger dollars" differ from stablecoins?

As well, very many countries of the world "peg" their currency to the USD.

From https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currency-peg.asp :

> Countries will experience a particular set of problems when a currency is pegged at an overly low exchange rate. On the one hand, domestic consumers will be deprived of the purchasing power to buy foreign goods. Suppose that the Chinese yuan is pegged too low against the U.S. dollar. Then, Chinese consumers will have to pay more for imported food and oil, lowering their consumption and standard of living. On the other hand, the U.S. farmers and Middle East oil producers who would have sold them more goods lose business. This situation naturally creates trade tensions between the country with an undervalued currency and the rest of the world.

> Another set of problems emerges when a currency is pegged at an overly high rate. A country may be unable to defend the peg over time. Since the government set the rate too high, domestic consumers will buy too many imports and consume more than they can produce. These chronic trade deficits will create downward pressure on the home currency, and the government will have to spend foreign exchange reserves to defend the peg. The government's reserves will eventually be exhausted, and the peg will collapse.

> When a currency peg collapses, the country that set the peg too high will suddenly find imports more expensive. That means inflation will rise, and the nation may also have difficulty paying its debts. The other country will find its exporters losing markets, and its investors losing money on foreign assets that are no longer worth as much in domestic currency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exchange_...

Is this the game:

  (A USD / B USD) * X = (C LD / D LD)
Who decides what the monetary bases - B USD and D LD - are? Should online games just keep issuing in-game currency? Are gift cards also stablecoins?

Perhaps "All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization" could be updated to indicate which of the depicted assets are stablecoins and which are derivatives? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...

Are there some historical examples of centralized economic planning resulting in currency devaluation and subsequent directly resultant unrest?

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#599
post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Ethereum, the majority of transaction fees are burned. In effect, they are distributed to ETH holders in the same way that stock buybacks distribute corporate revenues.

I disagree, crypto incentivizes to add more miners such that equipment + electricity = revenue so there is no profit. Stock buybacks effectively transfer income into the share price so that when you sell your stock it will be for a higher price and thus you will make a profit.

But most of the fee revenue isn't going to the miners, it's being destroyed. And sometime in the first half of next year there won't be any miners; with the reduced issuance, the ETH supply will begin to shrink.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#600
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 9th Circuit ruled that source code is protected under the First Amendment in the Bernstein case, which legalized the export of cryptography. If you just publish the contract and don't have any ongoing administration, I would think that gives you a pretty strong legal defense.

Publish the code, or activate/enable/fund/start/whatever to instantiate the activity. If you just publish it github - thats probably a good defense (linux T isn't to blame for all bad things that ran on linux). If you publish a smart contract in a way that enables people to start using it, then that may not be covered. While its different than actively running an API/Service that needs continuous/paid hosting, its pr…

If the government were to take a hard line on this, then publishing on github for anyone to deploy would work. It's easy to verify that the compiled contract matches published source code.

But the Bernstein case was about PGP, and after the decision people had no trouble with using it, making compiled code available for download, etc.

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