Live data from Hacker News

Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk

reserve.org

31–40 of 119 posts

Re: Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk

#31
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the people calling USDT a scam know that it's backed by nothing, and Tether has no obligation whatsoever to redeem them, ever (it's in their T&Cs). Their banking partner, Deltec, in the Bahamas is chaired by the man who created the Inspector Gadget TV series. [edit] Tethers are chuck-e-cheese tokens that became so integral to the entire cryptocurrency market (90% of ETH inflow and 80% of BTC inflow are Tether, no…

It's not backed by nothing, Tether probably has at least $10B USD in cash or so in deposits safely stored somewhere. The problem is that there are 25 billion USDT.

"Somewhere" isn't good enough!

Arcticbull was very clever to check the Bahamain government report. It's interesting to see how much money can be laundered and hidden, but $10bn starts to be noticeable.

Re: Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk

#32
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people calling ‘USDT’ a scam probably haven’t used it. For the past 5 years, Tether has been the most amazing way for me to transfer dollars across exchanges, or just to hold during market drawdowns. The fact that it is unregulated, and weakly subject to AML/KYC is a feature for me, not a problem. My money, my business, not the governments.

No, the people calling USDT a scam know that it's backed by nothing, and Tether has no obligation whatsoever to redeem them, ever (it's in their T&Cs). Their banking partner, Deltec, in the Bahamas is chaired by the man who created the Inspector Gadget TV series. [edit] Tethers are chuck-e-cheese tokens that became so integral to the entire cryptocurrency market (90% of ETH inflow and 80% of BTC inflow are Tether, no…

What's wrong with Inspector Gadget?

Re: Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk

#34

I want Monero but as a stable coin. Can someone just bring that out so we can have a crypto currency that is actually useful as a currency?

/s isn't that Zcash ? the price doesn't change much. /s

Zcash will be adding support for user defined assets. may be some one will create a stable coin based on Zcash using this.

https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/830

Re: Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk

#35
post #30
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can you make an honest ROI if you don't have income? This seems like a very curious view of the world to me. Do you believe that people who buy houses and sell them at a profit 20 years later are dishonest?

You are right, it's just like real estate investment, but using speculative tokens that have no intrinsic value. It's like you take the housing part out of the housing bubble, and are left with the speculative aspect, the bubble.

At least with cryptocurrency speculation people aren't forced into slums or worse.

Re: Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk

#36
post #10

When it removes the peg to the dollar, how it's supposed to be stabilized? "bunch of random collateral" isn't quite convincing. How are people going to trust that the collateral, like tokenized bonds, are actually valuable? I'm not going to trust such a system. Money based on trust is dead. The only purpose of this currency is to enrich those who invented it.

On one hand, yes, you are right. This "it's turtles all the way down" approach regarding valuation of tokenized assets is a huge source of systemic risk and those that want to be able to get greenbacks will be better off by using centralized stable tokens (like Circle's USDC or STASIS' EURS)

On the other hand, any project that can be transparent about its reserves (whether though "smart contracts" or plain old armies of bean counters writing actual compliant reports to Uncle Sam) is welcome by my book. Anything that can take the influence and dominance from Tether in the crypto market should be brought to the table and considered for analysis.

> The only purpose of this currency is to enrich those who invented it.

Isn't that exactly what's happening with the existing relationship between governments, their central banks and the financial elites?

I'm not a fan of Reserve either, much less of this Silicon Valley idea of governance, but as long as they they make good on their deals and make their money by providing stability in exchange of absorbing risks, I don't see anything immoral or unethical about the fact that private individuals and organizations can go on to try to create an alternative to central banks.

Re: Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk

#37
post #10

When it removes the peg to the dollar, how it's supposed to be stabilized? "bunch of random collateral" isn't quite convincing. How are people going to trust that the collateral, like tokenized bonds, are actually valuable? I'm not going to trust such a system. Money based on trust is dead. The only purpose of this currency is to enrich those who invented it.

> The only purpose of this currency is to enrich those who invented it. As is tradition in crypto. It's kind of implicit. [edit] I mean, think about this rationally. You're creating a new token, that doesn't have revenue, a business model, or any way of generating income. And yet it is "100% asset backed, and funded by top Silicon Valley investors." Those investors aren't in it for their health. They don't care about…

I assume these stable coins are making interest off the assets they hold to back the stable coin. Isn’t that the obvious play here?

Re: Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk

#38
> Crypto-as-money is still young. We have a lot to do. Do you remember Napster? Tether is kinda like Napster – it's taking off, people love it, it's a little sketchy, and it's probably not the design that will last. We don't want to make the equivalent of Kazaa – another blip in the history that ultimately doesn't ultimately work out. The challenge is to build a platform that's as robust as BitTorrent and as great to use as Spotify and Netflix.

For something on an about page, this copy draws some extremely frank comparisons.

> If users all have to go through a KYC process, this significantly limits the viability of the token to permit free movement of money across borders.

KYC processes are, essentially, the law. Governments go out of their way to do this to cut down on financial crime. Regardless of whether you believe these laws are useful or just, I find it difficult to believe they'll have any success trying to work around these laws. Governments (in general) do not like it when folks try to create loopholes: I wouldn't bet on a project whose stated goal was to avoid complying with the law.

Re: Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk

#39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only purpose of this currency is to enrich those who invented it. As is tradition in crypto. It's kind of implicit. [edit] I mean, think about this rationally. You're creating a new token, that doesn't have revenue, a business model, or any way of generating income. And yet it is "100% asset backed, and funded by top Silicon Valley investors." Those investors aren't in it for their health. They don't care about…

I assume these stable coins are making interest off the assets they hold to back the stable coin. Isn’t that the obvious play here?

Precisely. Provide stability in exchange of absorbing the risks from the underlying assets. It's what every bank could do, even without fractional reserve.

I've had my share of discussions with arcticbull, it's amazing how smart he can be when he wants and how clueless he makes himself to be when it comes to acknowledging the upside of crypto projects.

Post reply on HN