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by ryanmarsh 1864 days ago
Even as a crypto maximalist I believe code can create tyrannies of it's own kind. Take the example a story posted on HN some time ago of code Hertz wrote reporting cars not turned in as stolen and getting people (unfairly) arrested.

If I call my bank, they can fix a mistake, no matter how bad, because they own "truth".

I think what will end up happing is every contract will have the ability for some authorized key to make arbitrary movements of tokens amongst custodial accounts and nobody will build contracts where anything is moved out of custodial accounts until there's been multiple authorizations. Sort of how I transfer money into Gemini, I don't just trade from my personal checking account and they won't transfer to my checking without some authorizations. Look, I know I'm not being sophisticated here, I'm just saying, you need a way of un-fucking a fuckup and if someone can abscond with tokens easily because of a small logic flaw that doesn't work writ large.

1 comments

So then why even bother with DeFi when what you're doing is just relaying trust back to a centralised human party?

It's just regular finance with extra steps.

With DeFi you can side step the non-essential bits of centralization and delay in finance and investing. There's quite a bit of unnecessary complexity and opaqueness in finance and investing today, which only serve to protect monopoly and hegemony.
Except it's not at all. You can take synthetic TSLA shares and deposit those as collateral to mint stablecoins as a loan. Where else can you do that from your web browser at 10am on a Sunday and confirmed in 30 seconds?
Clearly the demand for this isn't exactly as important as anyone claims given the abject failure of the microloans industry to pan out.

The problem with loans generally isn't that you can have one at 10Am on a Sunday morning.

I've always thought the retail lending side of DeFi was silly. The risk is too high. Screenshot this, mortgage backed securities will be the first major success of blockchain debt based products.