[vmception]

okay, there is a robust repurchase agreement (repo) market on the Ethereum network that allows for anyone to enter the repo market to settle trades of practically unlimited sizes.

before last year this was exclusively the domain of investments banks given the privilege of using the Federal Reserve's overnight repo market. Where the Federal Reserve would provide hundreds of billions of liquidity and destroy it at the end of the trade, allowing the banks to use credit to finish deals overnight.

in the Ethereum network anyone is allowed to use this, it is called "flash loans" in that market, and as always, writing any transaction on the Ethereum network requires the use of ETH, the native fuel necessary to commit transaction to the state machine and save the state.

flash loans = repo market

the difference being that on the Ethereum network, people borrow from liquidity pools, instead of newly created dollars like when a central bank is involved. this has much greater accountability and confidence. the transactions are executed in one block, if it is not possible for the operation to return capital to the liquidity pool then the transaction fails and it was never executed, but the person that attempted it still pays the transaction fee in ETH as the nodes still did use compute time.

Ether is just necessary to access compute nodes on the Ethereum network - specifically to write, as reading is free - no different than dollars are necessary to access compute nodes on the AWS Lambda network. Its not that complicated. If you don't need to write to compute nodes, and you are also not providing collateral to liquidity pools, then you don't need Ether.

[anotha1]

In this perfect new world do bad decisions also haunt you forever? Like student loan debt, your ETH reputation will follow you through bankruptcy (but obviously crypto-vestors are all too financially savvy to worry about that).

[vmception]

"much greater accountability" not equal "perfect new world"

my response to you was completely devoid of ideology and you keep trying to shoehorn snarky versions of enthusiast ideology into it

any way regardless of if you were actually asking a question or if you had already made an answer to it, the answer to that question is no, they don't haunt you forever and if the observable nature of blockchain transactions bothers you there are plenty of projects reducing that as well, which some segment of the market might find valuable

[anotha1]

"We don't trust each other so we need immutable ledgers" sounds like "we need more horsepower so we need stronger horses!"

Works in theory...

Edit:

@vmception: If something leads everyone and their grandmothers to "invest" then it deserves scrutiny. And there is nothing to respond to.

I mean "yes sir, that's right, you have knowledge of financial instruments and speculation, very good, now I'd like to ask why you're OK with people mistaking this as a serious investment instead of the quant-level speculation you are referring to, sir, thanks."

[vmception]

In response to your edit

"I'd like to ask why you're OK with people mistaking this as a serious investment instead of the quant-level speculation you are referring to"

I literally do not care how people use their money but if you actually read between the lines, I have been saying that ETH is not something you should hoard. You only need as much ETH as necessary to write to compute nodes based on the computational expensiveness of the operation. You can do fairly arbitrary executions as long as you are willing to pay for it. I don't personally care what those executions are. But of the subset of those executions, the repo market and liquidity pool providing has stood out to me. And as I've said two or three times now, if you want to speculate on other people doing those "quant-level speculations" because now you don't need to be a top investment bank anymore and instead can just watch a few youtube videos to borrow and repay a few hundred million dollars for a few seconds, then go ahead an hoard ETH.

My actual opinions on unsophisticated people investing has nothing to do with Ethereum specifically. I am opposed to any barrier on investing when there are no barriers on gambling. Negative expected values games are available to all, but for something with positive expected value we want to coddle "grandmothers"? Miss me with that nonsense.

You act like you are here to provide scrutiny but were predictably never here to discuss any use case. You act like you were diplomatically asking for use case, and then never discuss any one of them only to move the goal post until revealing what everyone could tell you were trying to get at. Thats why I asked you, are you in the market for anything? Its useful to me to be able to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars for 5 seconds to earn a few basis points on an arbitrage I identified, without asking anybody. You can pretend that a MySQL database is better for that, but nobody is offering that service and it is fairly impossible to because of the financial legal barriers for a central party to offer a service that are exclusive to a central party, primarily around custody of funds, fiduciary duties, money service licenses, broker dealer licenses, settlement and inefficient state currency controls. The current evolution of the onchain services do not have custody to begin with, which are legal explicitly written exemptions to all of those laws.

[vmception]

you never respond to anything I say and that's annoying

and to the things you do randomly say - as if procedurally generated - so what?

stop trolling, do you want or need to commit state to compute nodes on that network or not? do you want or need to provide liquidity or not? do you like to speculate on other people doing those things more in the future or not? if the answer to all is "no" then move on