Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The collapse of the IRON stable coin

irony-97882.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 502 posts

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#291

Post by seoaeu »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #245
ikeboy wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's enough time for most people to exit during normal circumstances. Sometimes longer periods are used. Definitely better than nothing. In this case people wouldn't have been able to exit due to the bug, correct.

> It's enough time for most people to exit during normal circumstances. Most people don't monitor the finer details of their investments 24/7. 12 hours is better than nothing, but it's unrealistic to expect everyone to stay tapped into news feeds about their crypto at minimum twice a day.

Yeah, 12 hours means you can't even count on watching during business hours, you need to constantly be checking evenings and weekends too.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#292

Post by xyzzy123 »

bob33212 wrote: post #280
lmilcin wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's obviously the point, though. You are trading one set of risks for a completely different set of risks. But that's exactly the point. People are not able to interpret "smart" contracts. For normal contracts most people can understand the contract and if there is a dispute you have laws and courts who can interpret in every case. In case of "smart" contracts even the contract developers more often than not see…

This is how ALL of Crypto works. A decentralized ledger means that you cannot call the CEO or CFO of the ledger and have a clearly fraudulent transfer revoked. That is the tradeoff.

What I think a lot of people don't appreciate yet is that computationally decentralised systems can still have legal single points of failure.

Lots of chains have holding entities or foundations (nominally for governance, really to justify their premine or "reserves") and seem rather vulnerable, especially if they pay the core developers.

The CEO of that entity won't take your calls but they are absolutely exposed to the whims of the legal system in their founding jurisdiction.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#293

Post by canadianfella »

georgyo wrote: post #5

This has always been the problem with smart contracts. They are infact dumb contacts. To program one you need to think about all the edge cases. The programmers here likely did want >0 here. The possibility that the thing feeding price data return zero incorrectly was higher than the price legitimately being zero in their minds. There is no court or lawyer who can interpret the spirit of the contract.

Infact

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#294

Post by meowface »

wallacoloo wrote: post #286
freewilly1040 wrote: post #266

> I’ve since learned that the developer(s?) behind this are already the laughing stock of the DeFi community, having wrecked each of their 3 previous projects (now 4) — though this might be their biggest hit yet What's the best DeFi project? One where the value proposition is actually clear, there are actually people using it and it's actually at parity or better than a traditional financial system offering?

Uniswap, the decentralized exchange. Is it decentralized finance ?… up for debate (but at the very least, it’s a critical component of the DeFi ecosystem). But I can plop $x of Ethereum and $y of tokenized BTC onto it, providing a valuable service to anyone who wants to exchange the two for any reason (e.g. tuning their price exposure to those assets), forget about it for a couple months, and come back to see that it…

I think a better question might be: what are some valuable "non-ouroboros" projects?

Most of the stuff people use essentially seems to be one form or another of shuffling the unit(s) of account around, like the ones you listed.

You have a cryptocurrency. What are the uses for the cryptocurrency? Well, you can swap the cryptocurrency for another cryptocurrency or let someone else borrow the cryptocurrency in exchange for some more of the cryptocurrency or use the cryptocurrency to obtain a cryptocurrency that's a derivative of another cryptocurrency so you can make more of a different cryptocurrency. And what can you do with that cryptocurrency? Well, you can swap that cryptocurrency for another cryptocurrency or...

There's a bit of a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" thing going on (in the initial sense of the term).

Despite the cynical question, I'm genuinely fairly optimistic about the future of smart contracts and Ethereum. I think there are some interesting non-ouroboros ideas in the space, like Kleros, but none of the ones I've seen seem too popular, valuable, or useful yet. But I could be missing some, and I know it's still the very early days.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#295

Post by marcosdumay »

lmilcin wrote: post #265
thebean11 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no court or lawyer who can interpret the spirit of the contract. That's obviously the point, though. You are trading one set of risks for a completely different set of risks that might suit your use case much better; your counterparty being able to contest a contract in court could very well be a "bad" thing for you.

> That's obviously the point, though. You are trading one set of risks for a completely different set of risks. But that's exactly the point. People are not able to interpret "smart" contracts. For normal contracts most people can understand the contract and if there is a dispute you have laws and courts who can interpret in every case. In case of "smart" contracts even the contract developers more often than not see…

Well, to be fair, people write legal contracts without fully understanding what they are writing all the time too. I do disagree that people understand them on most cases.

Things are better on consumer law because it assumes from the start that people are stupid and have no idea what they are doing. But other kinds of contracts have quite large security risks.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#297

Post by api »

tluyben2 wrote: post #73
gruez wrote: post #9

This is good for USDC right? Because it's $262 million that they don't have to pay back? >EDIT: I’ve since learned that the developer(s?) behind this are already the laughing stock of the DeFi community, having wrecked each of their 3 previous projects (now 4) — though this might be their biggest hit yet And people poured $262 million into this?

As I get older, I do not understand how known scammers, especially the ones that raise millions over and over, get support time and time again. If not in jail, why do they still get jobs. I know some who just told me in my face that they were scammers of millions (or simply were happy screwing people even with viable ways out) and they raise money again, screw people again etc. People do use Google right? Due diligen…

They have charisma. Charisma is mind control. I'm pretty convinced that charisma can literally override the rational mind.

I've seen some pretty amazing examples of charismatic people spewing absolute nonsense with the audience hanging on every word like they are a genius. Put far more interesting ideas in the mouth of someone with no charisma and they are ignored.

Humans are merely clever. We are not truly intelligent.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#298

Post by worik »

bob33212 wrote: post #280
lmilcin wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's obviously the point, though. You are trading one set of risks for a completely different set of risks. But that's exactly the point. People are not able to interpret "smart" contracts. For normal contracts most people can understand the contract and if there is a dispute you have laws and courts who can interpret in every case. In case of "smart" contracts even the contract developers more often than not see…

This is how ALL of Crypto works. A decentralized ledger means that you cannot call the CEO or CFO of the ledger and have a clearly fraudulent transfer revoked. That is the tradeoff.

Yes. Trading off hundreds of years of experience and judicial tradition and precedent for a brand new shiny (just trust us programmers) system.

If the former system were to be irretrievably corrupt, teetering on the edge of collapse, and the proposed replacement were capable of replacing it then it would be worthwhile.

The existing international financial system is corrupt, the judiciary in most of our world is complicit, but it is not on the edge of collapse (look how brilliantly it sailed through the 2008 crises. It used its political power to get the middle classes to bail out the super rich). The proposed replacement (cryptro currencies) has no support from cryptographers (I am not one) nor finance geeks (that I have been). It is even worse that that which it proposes to replace.

Additionally in most of the Western World we have the democratic institutions that can be put to use to fix the system. Economists are slowly coming around to recognising the catastrophic mess that the current system is, how it is sapping our vitality as a community, enriching the few (hi Unicorn founders - fly to Mars please) and impoverishing the middle classes.

We can fix this. But we have to give up on single fixes (like crypto). This requires modern system thinking....

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#299

Post by marcosdumay »

hbosch wrote: post #85
sashimi-houdini wrote: post #8

I wrote Skepticoin as a serious parody of Bitcoin. Articles like these about the "state of the art" of cryptocurrency make me wonder: would a parody of a more "modern" cryptocurrency even be recognizable as such?

Dogecoin literally started as a parody.

Are all the people saying "hold it, we will get rich!!!" on Reddit joking? I honestly can not tell, but I'm not sure it's not a parody up to this day.

I mean, there are some people there basically saying "yeah, I brought $0.10 worth of it, now I just have to wait until I'm a millionaire", even those I can't decide if they are joking or not.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#300

Post by xtracto »

neutrinoq wrote: post #276
freewilly1040 wrote: post #266

> I’ve since learned that the developer(s?) behind this are already the laughing stock of the DeFi community, having wrecked each of their 3 previous projects (now 4) — though this might be their biggest hit yet What's the best DeFi project? One where the value proposition is actually clear, there are actually people using it and it's actually at parity or better than a traditional financial system offering?

The one I actively use and have benefited a lot from is PlanetFinance.io You can easily get 50%+ APY a year on various stablecoins and crypto.

That looks so shady... It has a very 2017 ICO feeling. A lot of buzzwords, a stupid name "AQUA" "BluePlanet" "RedPlanet", a bunch of extraordinary and unfounded claims, etc. Reminds me of a "Amfeix" scam that was all the rage in the crypto circles a couple of years ago. It was even advertised in "reputable" crypto pages.
Post reply on HN