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Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

home.treasury.gov

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Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#171

Post by jollybean »

biztos wrote: post #115
dexwiz wrote: post #49

All these coins are proven to be worthless. When speculation is making everyone money, the money isn't worth much. Edit: Love the immediate fear downvote. No one wants to hear their gold is really just shiny dirt.

I just went through the process of buying something expensive in a "trustless" system in an IRL country. It was pretty painful and very expensive -- I paid $300 just to get a guaranteed check cut! Of course this is a trivial problem to solve with smart contracts, if you can have things like real-life identity and real-life money mapped to them. While I don't think any of the crypto stuff out there today solves any of…

"Of course this is a trivial problem to solve with smart contracts, "

No, it doesn't. The 'contract' was never the issue really. We need a judicicial and regulatory system in which the contract is valid, the means to redress issues, undo transactions.

Now, $300 is probably too much to move money and speaks to the incumbency of financial actors ... but a good chunk of that cost is actually the reality of the fact that it takes a lot of very smart, very conscientious and super 'small-c' conservative running financial infrastructure.

I think regular fintech startups will beat down that $300 cost faster than crypto will.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#172

Post by SavantIdiot »

nscalf wrote: post #127
dexwiz wrote: post #49

All these coins are proven to be worthless. When speculation is making everyone money, the money isn't worth much. Edit: Love the immediate fear downvote. No one wants to hear their gold is really just shiny dirt.

Amazing how many people are die hard advocates of being closed minded. The net market for crypto hits over a trillion dollars, and you still say things like this declaring they are proven to be worthless. This is posted on a report by the US government on a technology that is effectively a digital wrapper to use the US dollar easily online. How is there no worth in that? Out of curiosity, what would it take to change…

I'd like to see people actually spending it day to day items, rather than hoarding it or spending it on blackmarket/illegal goods. There's a claim that people send money home to families in other countries, but I don't see how that could be trillions? And when pressed, enthusiasts hide behind "third world" claims.

No one is buying groceries with it. No one is buying commodities with it. People are buying it to get rich. Even in El Salvador, it failed immediately because the transaction fees were too high and the stipend given to citizens swung in value too radically.

I will be convinced when people are buying groceries with it and not trying to become crypto mill/billionaires overnight.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#174

Post by young_unixer »

dexwiz wrote: post #49

All these coins are proven to be worthless. When speculation is making everyone money, the money isn't worth much. Edit: Love the immediate fear downvote. No one wants to hear their gold is really just shiny dirt.

Who said speculation is making everyone money? Some people are going to lose money, specially those who buy at the top.

And the fact that millions of people are willing to pay 60000 USD for one of these coins proves that they aren't really "worthless".

Is the dollar worthless because you can't use it to buy the same things you could buy in 1995 with the same amount?

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#175

Post by jafo »

wpietri wrote: post #111
dustingetz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk is that a tether run causes all of crypto to collapse, not just USDT. How many actual dollars are in the system? Everything real has been exfiltrated through electricity bills, taxes and early adopters selling, the entire crypto economy is a hollow shell, leveraged on retail deposits.

Exactly. Ultimately cryptocurrencies are a negative-sum game in that they take in real money and just move that money around, while spending some on overhead. In contrast, imagine investing in, say, a new fast-food franchise joint. They money you put in there is used to acquire assets that are used to produce goods that people will pay to consume. If it's a well-run business, the value of the outputs will be more tha…

> They money you put in there is used to acquire assets that are used to produce goods that people will pay to consume

Is a decentralized, public ledger not a good people will pay (via cryptocurrency) to consume?

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#176

Post by rglullis »

pcwalton wrote: post #153
nscalf wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing how many people are die hard advocates of being closed minded. The net market for crypto hits over a trillion dollars, and you still say things like this declaring they are proven to be worthless. This is posted on a report by the US government on a technology that is effectively a digital wrapper to use the US dollar easily online. How is there no worth in that? Out of curiosity, what would it take to change…

> The net market for crypto hits over a trillion dollars At its peak, the gross size of Madoff's investment scheme was $64.8 billion. > a digital wrapper to use the US dollar easily online. How is there no worth in that? Because it's harder, and less safe, to use Tether than to enter my credit card number on a Web site.

Then don't use Tether. Plenty of more reputable companies and projects providing stabletokens with strong (USDC, GUSD) or soft (DAI, sUSD) pegs to the dollar.

Also, you are missing the point of view of the merchant and the amount of possibilities that open with crypto. E.g, you can sell digital goods with zero risk of fraud or chargebacks, to anyone in the world, at whatever price point. No credit card operator will ever be able to do that.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#177

Post by nostrademons »

alonsonic wrote: post #150
mmaunder wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This public official laying down rules “you are free to… but please” tone has become commonplace on HN in the past few years. Anyone know the origin? Perhaps a shift in public enthusiasm for controlling speech? Did it start at universities? It seemed to just show up one day around 2018. It’s incredibly distracting.

The audience of hackernews has grown and old users are trying to maintain the culture of the site. The value of this site comes from its community. Let's not turn it into reddit. I personally welcome this type of policing.

There's a certain irony in creation dates here:

mmaunder: 2007. satellite2: 11 months ago. dexwiz: 2015. alonsonic: 2016. burnished: 8 months ago. nostrademons: 2007.

Anyway, I don't think such tone-policing is all that off-culture for HN, nor do I mind it all that much. PG explicitly said back around 2008 that posts which keep the discourse civil and intellectually honest are welcome even if they don't directly add content. I just thought that there's a certain irony about "old users trying to maintain the culture of this site" when the users in question are less than a year old and are responding to someone who's been here for 14 years.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#178

Post by SavantIdiot »

lowkey wrote: post #167
mosdl wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can already use the us dollar easily online.

Yes, but you likely live in a first-world country with generous options for banking. Bitcoin can serve anyone anywhere, regardless if they live in a privileged country or not. Try using your USD bank to send/receive money as a citizen of Iran or Libya or Nigeria. There are over 1 billion unbanked in the world today. They cannot use the US dollar easily online.

This is the fallback argument crypto enthusiasts use when their primary arguments fail. I'd like to learn more about the truth to this claim.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#179

Post by jmstfv »

whatshisface wrote: post #129
Muromec wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what kinds of economic activities, besides ransom, drug sales and donations to wikileaks and others not liked by u.s. government does bitcoin facilitate? Remittances to countries under repressive economical regime or under embargo? Not saying those are good or bad, just aiming to quantify the market size.

The potential of cryptocurrency is a lot brighter than the potential of Bitcoin. The right investment to make in cryptocurrency isn't buying it, it's thinking about it and economics to try to figure out how it can be gainfully used. Ethereum has many potential applications and so may be worth buying, but only if you have a use for it. (The price of every asset is such that buying it is a martingale.) BTC isn't even t…

This summer, China banned Bitcoin mining, which resulted in a temporary drop in the hash rate. We're almost back where we were before the ban: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate

That speaks volumes about how resilient Bitcoin's ecosystem is.

Bitcoin isn't Chinese. Bitcoin doesn't belong to any country, nation, tribe, political party, institution, or person at all.

Re: Report on Stablecoins [pdf]

#180

Post by clintonb »

alex504 wrote: post #103

Would the act of regulating Tether and other stablecoins in and of itself crash the market? If the government shut Tether down, wouldn't that cause the run they are afraid of? The money is already missing, it is only a question of when the market realizes it.

The best time to stop the fraudulent scheme was yesterday. The next best time is now.

It's better the Tether market crash now than after it's grown even more. This will suck for the folks that lose money, but it was going to hurt at some point.

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