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Ethereum Has Issues

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Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#311

Post by solatic »

lottin wrote: post #298
thebean11 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's at least some value that can potentially be created. The fact that you can take out a loan or buy insurance and your counterparty is a smart contract is pretty interesting. It could seriously bring down insurance margins if you no longer have drones of people administering policies. Obviously remains to be seen how practical it is.

An insurance requires an independent assessment that a certain event has taken place (e.g. a car accident) and of the circumstances surrounding the event. A loan requires the ability from the lender to initiate legal action against the borrower in the event of default. Smart contract can't help with that or make any of that more efficient.

To play the Devil's advocate, if the independent assessment can be provided by a neutral third-party API, then you could have a smart contract pay out depending on the response from the API.

Realistically, this requires more Data-as-a-Service startups, so there's a bit of chicken-or-the-egg difficulty here.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#312

Post by ricochet11 »

lottin wrote: post #304
tylersmith wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? I just recently borrowed USD to buy a car at a lower rate than I could find elsewhere.

How does that work? If you take a loan from a "decentralised lender" you can essentially walk away with the money and never pay the loan back. So, "decentralised lending" can't work, as far as I can tell.

Nearly all defi loans are overcollateralized. I deposit $100 of eth, borrow $50 of eth, convert to usdc and send to my bank. Six months later if the price of eth has gone up i need to buy more the $50 worth to repay my debt, if the price of eth goes down i can pay back less than $50 of eth. If it goes up by a lot then i can borrow more against my initial deposit, if it goes down by a lot and i dont close my position then the deposit is liquidated to pay off the debt and i have a smaller position. It actually works pretty well, add on to this things like Alchemix which builds loans via yearn vaults and you can borrow money against future interest and have self-repaying loans.

If you have initial assets its an easy way to borrow against those assets. e.g. My bank wouldn't give me a loan against my eth as they don\t value the asset, instead I just open a maker vault and borrow against it in dai ($ stablecoin), and then sell that for € and deposit to my bank. problem solved.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#313

Post by jqpabc123 »

eldenwrong wrote: post #279
jqpabc123 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scammers only care about ripping you off. And the darknet is the ideal environment for them.

How come darknet markets work extremely well then? Some people value steady profits much more than a one time scam.

How come darknet markets work extremely well then?

How do you know they do --- have you done a survey?

Some people value steady profits much more than a one time scam.

Why do some people become criminals instead of getting a nice steady job? Maybe because it is more profitable and requires minimal effort. And lots of scams aren't "one time".

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#314

Post by yunohn »

akimball wrote: post #309
yunohn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess growing your money is popular, who would figure that. But… how is /everyone/ getting rich? Crypto is provably negative sum. Someone has to lose money for you to make money. And miners, exchanges, etc are all middle layers that extract large %s of fees. Where is the extra value generated to be able to make everyone a profit?

Crypto is not probably negative sum without resort to false premises.

Could you maybe explain further?

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#315

Post by lottin »

ricochet11 wrote: post #312
lottin wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work? If you take a loan from a "decentralised lender" you can essentially walk away with the money and never pay the loan back. So, "decentralised lending" can't work, as far as I can tell.

Nearly all defi loans are overcollateralized. I deposit $100 of eth, borrow $50 of eth, convert to usdc and send to my bank. Six months later if the price of eth has gone up i need to buy more the $50 worth to repay my debt, if the price of eth goes down i can pay back less than $50 of eth. If it goes up by a lot then i can borrow more against my initial deposit, if it goes down by a lot and i dont close my position…

> I deposit $100 of eth, borrow $50 of eth

I could be missing something, but it seems you're lending $50 worth of eth, rather than borrowing. Your net debt position is <0.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#316

Post by jqpabc123 »

eldenwrong wrote: post #281
jqpabc123 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What amount of money are we talking about? 10k,100k, 1m? Zero. Lot of lawyers searching for clients with a legitimate legal case. They get a portion of what they win.

I meant how much money you got scammed for. Lets say you bought a phone from Craigslist and its a fake one, what do you do? You sent a guy a wire for a collectors item and he sends you a box of rocks? What do you do? There's so many ways that you can get scammed in the real world without recourse. What's happening here is that you have a preconceived notion of "darknets markets bad"

You sent a guy a wire for a collectors item and he sends you a box of rocks?

I have bought and sold on Craigslist. This is not how it works --- unless you're stupid.

What's happening here is that you have a preconceived notion of "darknets markets bad"

Yes. People choose to operate on the darknet instead of craigslist for a reason --- usually because they are doing something illegal. And scamming people is one of these illegal things.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#317

Post by tromp »

3np wrote: post #246
rufusroflpunch wrote: post #92

This is not directly related to the content of the post but is about Ethereum. I have been putting this hypothesis out there on twitter for a while now, looking for someone to refute me, but no one has yet. This seems like a place where I might be able to find someone who understand Ethereum enough tell my grasp of the protocol is wrong (or right): Ethereum is going deflationary. Not disinflationary like Bitcoin, but…

> Not disinflationary like Bitcoin, but actually deflationary, with token burn It's possible there's some recent development I'm not aware of so please fill in any gap here, but my understanding: Token burn is already in place since EIP1559 (base gas fees get burned now, instead of getting paid out to miners/validators. There is a separate priority fee for incentivizing inclusion in times of congestion). It will work…

> disinflationary like Bitcoin

Bitcoin's supply is better described as deflationary since it's capped and Bitcoin experiences ongoing losses. Eventually there will be fewer and fewer bitcoin in circulation. This will happen way before Bitcoin emission ends in 2140, since in 2061 for instance, only 320 BTC will be mined, and yearly losses will easily exceed that.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#318

Post by yunohn »

thebean11 wrote: post #178
anyfoo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still find it pretty mind blowing that an algorithm can loan me money. I still find it pretty mind blowing that you can make a Turing complete language with nothing but S and K combinators. Good luck finding a real world application for that, though. Sometimes the crypto space (the part that isn't just FOMO coin buyers at least) strikes me as folks who have been looking at something technically interesting for th…

Why don't you respond to the insurance part of my argument? Like I said, I think that's more immediately useful.

Maybe if you supported your claim instead of vague hand waving, it would be easier to respond?

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#319

Post by fleddr »

overtonwhy wrote: post #287
fleddr wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the only use case is not illegal activity. NFTs, smart contracts in general, gaming, defi/lending/staking, DEX, DAO, Filecoin/IPFS, and a few more in itself are not illegal. You may consider them to be useless, but that's not the same thing as illegal. Even if you scrap all that, there's the remaining core use case of speculation. Which in itself is also not illegal and an incredibly important use case, if not TH…

"exponential growth rate" = pyramid scheme? You only need to get 3 friends to sign up... What a dramatic post. Do you get paid to write dystopian sci fi?

No, but I should.

Re: Ethereum Has Issues

#320

Post by fleddr »

FabHK wrote: post #247
fleddr wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need to point out the obvious, but yes, you're right...risk.

It's not only that it's risky. It's that by construction it can't work for everyone. You can only get rich at the expense of someone else.

I didn't say it works for everyone, I explained why people take the risk, what the macro backdrop is for this behavior. It's quite disappointing that nobody engages with that point.

Further, getting rich at somebody's expense is business as usual for any asset, be they stocks, housing, metals, anything. It's a false morality to think that this is a behavior that "good" people widely reject. Absolutely everybody in a position to do so, will. Have you ever met a home owner that gives a social discount to his inflated house when selling? I don't think so.

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