Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like land under feudalism -- the land was /everywhere/ !
... but the ownership was not.
Indeed, crypto is fedualism by-design.
Libertarianism with land as property is feudalism.
Solend seized $170M of user funds
201–210 of 221 posts
Re: Solend seized $170M of user funds
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern finance is much better at handling fraud. Insurance exists, and recourse also exists since anonymity is not a requirement. Decentralized finance has thus far been demonstrably worse than everything in modern finance. It's illiquid, transaction costs are higher, full of scams, buggy, and recourseless. The whole space needs to grow up fast.
Try wiring someone money and see how helpful your bank will be at reversing that transaction. The vast majority of people losing money in the crypto world are the equivalent of people installing sketchy extensions in the early days of the internet that perform attacks on unsecured online banking portals. That this doesn't happen more often against banks is largely a function of the gated-ness of browsers and that tar…
Most people do not wire money, they transfer money through some other mechanism that has fraud protection.
For example, if you buy something on eBay and the seller sends you a brick packed in a cardboard box instead, you dispute the charge on PayPal and most likely get your money back. Or suppose that some pissed off hotel clerk decides to charge your credit card for made-up damages during your stay in a hotel.
My experience is that it’s not hard to get your money back. This is why actual scams tend to involve some step where you convert money into something else—since a wire transfer or ACH transfer can be reversed or at least traced, you have scams where the patsy has to turn transfers into cash or gift cards.
Re: Solend seized $170M of user funds
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is not the legislation. The point is enforcement . You can write and pass whatever law you want. If it can not be enforced, it does not exist.
If our government can catch money launderers because they’re running empty washing machines or selling unused tickets to shows, it’s hard to think of anything useful crypto can do that couldn’t be meaningfully regulated away.
The government takes billions of dollars from people every year without due process, using civil forfeiture laws:
https://ij.org/press-release/new-report-finds-civil-forfeitu...
But there's no evidence it stops much real money laundering:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
If money laundering were effectively dealt with, that would stop almost all theft and organized crime, as laundering the proceeds of these crimes to spend them would be nearly impossible.
Obviously that will never happen.
Re: Solend seized $170M of user funds
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because you have to convert the crypto into fiat to procure goods and services and the state will just control the border. There will be cases in which a weak state economy can become bitcoinized the same way some have become dolarizesld, but for strong states it is easy to make the border between the currencies as tight as they want it.
> into fiat to procure goods and services and the state will just control the border. Regurgitated “fiat” meme. Counter-example 1: buying services over the internet. What fiat and where is the relevant border? Counter-example 2: go overseas and use services. What fiat and where is the relevant border? Arguments about fiat and borders are often silly. However, a jurisdiction can make crypto illegal or risky.
What exactly is "over the internet" and "overseas"? Aren't those real world countries, with real world legislation, where real world offerers of services can be jailed for using crypto? Or your entire argument is based that there will always be some exotic country (like El Salvador tried and apparently failed) will have a better view on crypto and also offer all services you might need?
Re: Solend seized $170M of user funds
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
They say "do your own research" and then when you do and have questions about difficult to conceive (or seemingly irrational things) they belittle you, attack you, and—at least on Twitter—reply with snarky memes. As soon as I started investigating Ethereum, ERC-20 tokens, etc. at a technical level, I realized it was a house of cards of immense proportions. The place that didn't happen? Bitcoin. There's not a lot of e…
What's wrong with erc20 tokens?
Not him, but in my opinion upgradeable contracts (not all erc20 use them of course)
Re: Solend seized $170M of user funds
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of "decentralized finance" projects have a way for a centralized entity to control them. Often times an individual. And other times a multisignature address controlled by two of the same individual's addresses. Users should be more discerning but are not.
You can't, and don't have time to be discerning if you want to 'get rich quick' during a bull market in an ecosystem that produces nothing of value.
Although there are several things I disagree with in that statement, I can understand why people believe that and participate the way they do:
All the extremely high alpha opportunities I’ve had were because the opportunities presented themselves in the protocols that I knew and understood. It was all luck that “my” protocols were the ones that became wildly mispriced or had a flaw or attracted vast interest. And it is distressing seeing all these different protocols have these wild returns or opportunities that I was only able to be aware of in hindsight. But I don't chase.
My strategy has been to wait. I do this in many markets and asset classes. Wait for the perfect storm that fits my criteria. It doesn’t matter to me that other people can’t understand it because the trading or valuation book with survivorship bias on its side hasn’t come out or been revealed yet. Since it hasn’t had time to. By the time the equivalent of 1980s technical analysis books come out for this market that some future children will swear by, it will just be a different market.
For DeFi sector, I also wait and act fast. I saw a protocol (that I was already familiar with) get hacked and people sold off the tokens. Initially seeing the price drop so hard, I went to twitter to see that there was a hack. Then I went to discord to see what people were thinking. Then in parallel I went to the blockchain as soon as I found the transactions. The information asymmetry immediately presented itself to me. People were afraid of many things happening that could not happen. Like they were primarily afraid that the hacker had a bunch of the project’s token and would sell it - crashing the price before the other users did. Secondarily, they were afraid that the project’s technology was irreparably flawed. And thirdly, the lowest weight, they were afraid that the reputation would be hit. For one and two they were simply wrong. So I bought the dip. For three, well because users aren’t discerning lol… there just isn’t a history to really support that when the supply stays the same, and there are so many for projects can do to appease their audience, so it fit my risk profile and the token recovered to pre-dip prices in a week and I ultimately made 6,000% on it. For the users of the actual product, the ones that took out insurance policies elsewhere were immediately recompensated. There should be news articles about that, but again I’m pretty fine with the information asymmetry where there is a belief that everything goes wrong.
People don’t know how to do what I did, but what I did is a very low bar. Its not genius, it is reading some code and blockchain analysis, and the luck/risk is heavily reduced. Confirm with the blockchain and know how that protocol works. Or don’t participate. The people I compete against do that, and the people I compete against in other markets are also highly optimized for those markets, so who cares if “reading code” sounds like an absurdity to today’s wannabe crypto traders.
Another thing I do is scan the blockchain for previously unique method signatures. This means someone is launching a clone. It doesn't matter to me that other people don't scan like that or at all, I know that I'm competing with some people that also do this.
If you don't know what you're buying, get out of the market. Or be my exit liquidity.
Re: Solend seized $170M of user funds
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Question: who's making this claim and on what basis? The Solend Team. https://realms.today/dao/7sf3tcWm58vhtkJMwuw2P3T6UBX7UE5VKxP... > Question: why is allowing this liquidation the end of the world? Its not. They believe a function in their own project will cause the underlying Solana blockchain to have some uptime issues, because a similar function has been a culprit in the past, according to them. (Solana has f…
> Its not Solend's problem. Right, that's my confusion. Which is what makes the whole thing smell fishy.
Its amateur hour.
Currently governance projects have no bylaws to constrict the nature of a proposal, and they have no continuity between proposals to restrict future proposals, and there is no arbiter, and proposal outcomes mostly have to be coded by the original team so people are trusting them, and there is no agreed upon compensation path for a third party implementation team.
Re: Solend seized $170M of user funds
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, "you deserve it if you got scammed" also plays well with the anti-crypto crowd. A person pays the price of a house for NFTs of pictures of apes, gets tricked into giving them away to scammers, then buys them back from the scammers? Ha, what a fuckin' idiot.
People get off on criticizing crypto. It makes them feel better about themselves.
No doubt the crypto fanatics also get off on believing in the superiority and 100x growth of cryptos then.
Re: Solend seized $170M of user funds
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the things that cause these problems, like stolen apes, would not work on Bitcoin as it lacks smart contract functionality.
Bitcoin has some scripting[0] functionality, and its non-fungibility[1][2] can facilitate NFT-like colored coins[3][4] [0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Fungibility [2] https://sethforprivacy.com/posts/fungibility-graveyard/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored_Coins [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=889JSfIaPzs
Theoretically possible but practically impossible, and one of the reasons that NFTs and DeFi will probably never be adopted on Bitcoin L1 unless the protocol changes.