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The collapse of the IRON stable coin

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Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#461

Post by DennisP »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #416
DennisP wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Uniswap is interesting. That doesn't use an oracle.

But it also only works with on-chain cryptoassets.

If you want to work with off-chain things then necessarily your system is going to include off-chain things. I'm not sure of your point here.

However, I can think of an exception. Augur is a prediction market that doesn't use a trusted source to resolve bets. It doesn't get a lot of use these days, and probably won't before scaling resolves gas prices, but the bets that have been live on the system have resolved correctly.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#462

Post by snak »

aazaa wrote: post #311

> _share_price here refers to the price of TITAN, as provided by an oracle, which is correctly reporting it as… 0 (somewhere in the distance, you can hear a room full software engineers burst into laughter ). Aside from the amusing programming error, the main problem with much of the "smart contract" activity today is that doing anything remotely interesting requires an oracle. An oracle is basically a server that re…

> Aside from the amusing programming error, the main problem with much of the "smart contract" activity today is that doing anything remotely interesting requires an oracle. An oracle is basically a server that reports the outcome of an event. And servers can be attacked in ways that systems like Ethereum can't.

Thank you! I've tried to put it into words before but I think this is as close to perfection as one can get while describing why smart contracts are not what people believe them to be.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#463

Post by realce »

redisman wrote: post #238
juliansimioni wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, much different: In a ponzi scheme, the perpetrators will not willingly directly reveal that it's a ponzi scheme. In cryptocurrency, the perpetrators are honest and transparent about it being a ponzi scheme, but surround it in so much techno-babble that they make it sound like a ponzi schme is what you WANT.

These are not Ponzi schemes. In a ponzi you have a mechanism to distribute money to early adopters in the tree. These are just pump and dumps but you create and pre-mine the asset before pumping it. There were ponzis some years back like OneCoin and BitConnect.

My God, I haven't thought about the word "BitConnect" in a very long time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwDbx-nuQ5o

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#464

Post by wins32767 »

jMyles wrote: post #445
wins32767 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not everyone believes in the legitimacy of the state, let alone that the legal system is somehow the proper authority for evaluation of disambigous source code. This is something that I haven't been able to figure out about blockchain enthusiasts. Assuming the blockchain is wildly successful, it poses an inherent threat to the ability of the modern state to collect taxes. Why do blockchain enthusiasts, who already d…

Isn't this ultimately a 'might makes right' argument?

If you believe taxation is theft, and that governments are illegitimate, I just don't understand how you can go from that belief to "but if I do this one weird trick the people who threaten to use armed force to collect my taxes won't find some way to compel me".

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#465

Post by wins32767 »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #401
wins32767 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not everyone believes in the legitimacy of the state, let alone that the legal system is somehow the proper authority for evaluation of disambigous source code. This is something that I haven't been able to figure out about blockchain enthusiasts. Assuming the blockchain is wildly successful, it poses an inherent threat to the ability of the modern state to collect taxes. Why do blockchain enthusiasts, who already d…

The key thing here is that nobody can force you to pay your taxes. If you refuse to pay you can be arrested and/or go to jail but the change here is that you can't force someone to give you money but you can compel them to. I like to see cryptocurrency and crypto-assets as a pseudo force of nature. It's not really possible for governments to stop them and they pretty fundamentally change the game for most governments…

The internet requires a bunch of physical infrastructure to operate and crypto requires use of that physical infrastructure. Physical infrastructure is definitely controllable by governments if they so desire. The CEO of Comcast isn't going to go to jail to ensure that Bitcoin is accessible to the average user of their network.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#466

Post by jMyles »

wins32767 wrote: post #464
jMyles wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this ultimately a 'might makes right' argument?

If you believe taxation is theft, and that governments are illegitimate, I just don't understand how you can go from that belief to "but if I do this one weird trick the people who threaten to use armed force to collect my taxes won't find some way to compel me".

I don't think it's a weird trick. Call me naive, but I think that there are plenty of statesmen (and -women obviously) who can see the writing on the wall and realize that their capacity to control reality doesn't extend to the ends of the universe.

The emergence of the internet is an incredible happening for humanity, and the gamble that the relic of the state will somehow cork it is probably not a wise one.

Nobody wants war - even the war profiteers don't want it in their hearts. Nobody wants violence or insecurity. At the end of the day, we're all here together on this little blue ball and we have to share power with each other and with nature.

To the extent that the internet is a phenomenon of nature - which I think it's a very reasonable view - it's hardly a "weird trick".

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#467

Post by ineedasername »

everfree wrote: post #439
dwaltrip wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Formal verification doesn’t help with bad assumptions that went into the design of the program.

That is absolutely true, but even legal contracts can't help you with bad assumptions that underpin the entire contract itself.

Yes, that's sort of what I mean though: you can't avoid mistakes like that, but with legal contracts there is mechanism to resolve that issue with hundreds of years of experience and benchmarks and mechanisms for figuring out how to hand these things. It's messy and imperfect, but there's no achieving perfection human affairs.

Smart contracts don't have a mechanism if this sort. If you have an issue with them as in this case with IRON, your best hope is that IRON will find a way to handle it that satisfies everyone (which may be hard) or that the normal legal system is able to resolve it.

Both of those kind of negate the purpose many people want smart contracts to have in being free of sovereign legal systems and, once implemented, automated without the need for human judgement that may be biased or bad etc, so no longer able to be trustless. At best they simply automate portions of a contract, which is still a very good thing, but not really what enthusiasts are hoping for.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#468

Post by ineedasername »

IanCal wrote: post #421
ineedasername wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and when normal contracts don't ( because they can't ) anticipate every possible scenario, there is a meta layer on top of that to resolve edge cases. In the case of a smart contract, it can even happen that both parties agree in how things should take place when there's a problem! But bad code doesn't work that way, and you can find yourself in a null state of indeterminacy without a built in layer to resolve t…

Regular contracts don't have a built in layer to resolve issues either. As you say, it's a meta later above this. Laws still apply to things handled with smart contracts. You can't say "well sure the escrow contact did the wrong thing but it's code so you can't come after me for your money back".

I agree that right now the legal system still applies.

The problem is that lots of smart contract enthusiasts embrace them for the same reason they embrace crypto currency: they see it as a way to avoid government institutions that they do not want to have to work with or trust. In fact they want the entire contract to be trustless: agree to the terms, implement them in code, and and since the rest is automated you don't have to trust that the other party won't follow through.

I don't see how that can actually work in an automated fashion. Whether it's traditional government or some other legal system or analog, you need a resolution layer above contract layer, but at that point you've lost a lot if what enthusiasts want in smart contracts.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#469

Post by shkkmo »

RaketenStadt wrote: post #224
shkkmo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why isn't "the operator of the scheme" synonymous with "the central actor?" There can be multiple operators. I see zero good reasons why decentralized schemes can't be ponzi schemes. Your argument is akin to claiming that a three legged dog is not a dog because dogs have four legs. I wouldn't be so uncharitable as to presume to know why you have chosen to make this argument. I think your argument would be clearer i…

So why isn't "the operator of the scheme" synonymous with "the central actor?" >I see zero good reasons why decentralized schemes can't be ponzi schemes. Do you know who Charles Ponzi was or why Ponzi schemes are named after him? Do you know what he did or what Bernie Madoff did? They operated the Ponzi scheme. That's why they were a critical part. This money really was going into the smart contract, wasn't directly…

You should work harder on understanding what other people are saying. I've tried to give you the benefit of the doubt several times but your tone keeps getting worse.

> Why didn't the masterminds behind this scheme walk away with that cash? Because it was a mistake. Not a genius scheme being run in the shadows.

Please fet your basic facts right. Nobody in this thread is accusing IRON of being a ponzi scheme. IRON was a partially collaterized stablecoin. The quote about how non-collateralized stable coins require constant growth is from the founders of IRON explaining why they made IRON collaterized.

> So why isn't "the operator of the scheme" synonymous with "the central actor?"

Already explained in my last comment.

> You don't know what a Ponzi is and you're trying to save face, I get it

If you really thought you had an argument, you wouldn't feel the need to descend to this level.

Re: The collapse of the IRON stable coin

#470

Post by runbathtime »

xur17 wrote: post #369
runbathtime wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance or not understanding the money transmitter rules is not a defense. Focus directly on the entity doing the money transmission in this case- the smart contract IRON. They take in USDC and give out IRON and TITAN. IRON and TITAN are money substitutes. Money transmission includes anyone by any means conducting exchange of one type of money for another. Functionally that is what this contract is doing. The code…

> Focus directly on the entity doing the money transmission in this case- the smart contract IRON. They take in USDC and give out IRON and TITAN. IRON and TITAN are money substitutes. Money transmission includes anyone by any means conducting exchange of one type of money for another. Functionally that is what this contract is doing. The code didn't write itself, there are people behind it that released it, and they…

If you just write the code that does money transmission and share it on github, not host it, not put it in production, then no you aren't doing money transmission, you just wrote some code and shared it. If someone takes that code and puts it in production, then they are doing money transmission.

I think people are trying to use the idea that ethereum works differently than AWS, but that doesn't matter. The point is the owners or writers of that code wrote it and put it out to the world with intent or purpose to do money transmission. They published that code, paid the gas fees to do so on ethereum. Now anyone can interact with it.

If you want to prove that ethereum is different please state step by step why it is the case.

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