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by v64 2359 days ago
> No vendor for your products is accepting these magical tokens. No one in the economy except vanishingly small fractions accept digital tokens for trade.

MakerDAO has a list of vendors who accept Dai today [1]. The list also contains a number of payment processors that enable businesses to accept Dai. It's true that it's not widely used now, but every product has to start somewhere. I don't think I'm going to be getting paychecks in Dai within my lifetime, but that's no reason to discourage its growth.

> All they've done is create a bank and sprinkled the fairy dust of "tokens" on it so the Fed stays away.

You say that as if creating an automated decentralized bank that generates an asset pegged to the US dollar is something that just anybody could do. Regardless of how Dai is ultimately used, creating the system and deploying it to the public is a successful proof of concept in itself.

[1] https://github.com/makerdao/awesome-makerdao#spend-dai

2 comments

> It's true that it's not widely used now, but every product has to start somewhere.

Fair enough. If it grows, it grows.

> You say that as if creating an automated decentralized bank that generates an asset pegged to the US dollar is something that just anybody could do.

If you have 100% collateralised loan, yes, anybody could do it in this day and age. Money can actually grow in an automated fashion without a central authority if we accept the inevitability of economic crashes and depressions.

Here's my thought experiment - say DAI suddenly overnight replaces the dollar. I don't know enough about the system, but I know finance very well. Next, say the day after the economy starts crashing. Manufacturers cannot see any orders coming in, consumers don't want to spend money etc etc. Run of the mill crash. What would DAI do?

I'll tell you how this works out in an uncontrolled money system - the crash goes on for more than a couple of years. People lose jobs, companies close etc. The federal reserve's one and only job (the regulation part is hogwash, they can't regulate for shit) is to cushion such an economic crash. What happens without it? Will the benevolent DAI system controllers step in?

The products being sold by vendors that accept these tokens still price their products in real currencies, and I'm assuming they immediately exchange it as soon as the transaction completes.

With that in mind, accepting cryptocurrencies is just a technicality and doesn't reflect any acceptance of it as a real currency.

Are there any vendors who actually price their products in a cryptocurrency?

> With that in mind, accepting cryptocurrencies is just a technicality and doesn't reflect any acceptance of it as a real currency.

As a currency sure, but it reflects acceptance as a means of exchange. There are actually big segments of the crypto community who find the latter much more important