[davidkohcw]

It's a synthetic stock which is overcollateralized by stablecoins. So for example, if $100 dollars worth of the stock is issued, someone else had to lock up $150 dollars worth of USD to issue it. And when the price rises (and hence collateralization ratio drops), the issuer has to constantly top up collateral or run the risk of them being liquidated.

How do they get price to track the real stock? By simple incentives. If the synthetic stock is trading lower than the real price, people have incentive to buy it. If it is trading above, people can easily mint new stock and sell it.

There are lots of benefits to this: 1. It allows people who typically might not have access to the US market to get price exposure to US companies

2. It allows 24/7 trading

3. US stocks are just the start, before more innovative synthetic products can be built on top.

[lottin]

> If the synthetic stock is trading lower than the real price, people have incentive to buy it.

Why? The synthetic stock isn't convertible, so there's no arbitrage opportunity.

[KirillPanov]

You can "burn" the synthetic and claim part of the collateral.

I don't think there is a problem in this particular situation.

The place where there will be a problem is where MakerDAO had problems: when there aren't enough people willing to mint synthetics. The only reason to mint a synthetic is in order to sell it, in order to get a synthetic short position. If not enough people want to do this, but other people want a long position, this will generate excess demand for synthetics and the synthetics will trade consistently above the price of their real-world underlying.

This is precisely what happened to MakerDAO before it turned itself into a "stablecoin index fund". DAI was trading way above $1.00 for several months running. MakerDAO's goal was to provide a trustless stablecoin. If it costs $1.15 to buy one this week and $1.00 next week, it's not very stable. Those 15 cents didn't make DAI expensive -- they made DAI a failure at its goal of producing a stable coin.

Mirror's case is different. They're not trying to create a stablecoin. If the synthetics trade at a premium to the underlying, that difference is effectively a brokerage fee charged in order to open a long position. If the fee charged to open a long position swings around by 15% week-to-week that is certainly unattractive, but it doesn't make Mirror a failure.

This might actually work as expected. The likely failure mode will be annoyingly high fees for long positions, rather than failure to deliver on its promise (as happened with MakerDAO).

[grey-area]

Oh you mean it is backed by those unaudited, unregulated, unredeemable opaque tokens like USDT which are also a scam.

What could possibly go wrong!

[davidkohcw]

Not sure why you have to be so snarky about this. Yes, USDT has dubious backgrounds/origins... but there are lots of other reputable proejcts out there.

You can take a look at USDC (https://www.circle.com/en/usdc) which is a Goldman Sachs backed start up. They publish reserve attestations very regularly (https://f.hubspotusercontent00.net/hubfs/6778953/USDCAttesta...) and its very easy to redeem the USDC (stablecoin) for actual USD dollars in your fiat banking systems.

[mypastself]

Perhaps you were responding to the wrong comment, but the parent was referring to a different mechanism from what USDT uses, more akin to MakerDAO. You can be skeptical of that approach as well (I am), but there’s a notable difference in implementation and collateralization ratios.

[cinquemb]

> unaudited, unregulated, unredeemable opaque tokens like Federal Reserve Notes

Would be nice if every single FRBNY operation were able to be queried by anyone in the public in real time, had a fixed set of rules all holders of notes could see and vote on, and was redeemable for gold like they used to be before the rules changed underneath holders who couldn't take part of governance (foreign holders)…

> What could possibly go wrong!

We're stuck in bailoutistan globably, and now it will be more expensive for tradfi entities to get bailed out on chain (which will happen, but cant shut down the dex's, cant reverse trades unless contracts allow for that) which will benefit non tradfi entities that take the opposite side of their highly leveraged trades conducted on chain.

[grey-area]

There are plenty of reasons to complain about fiat currencies like USD and the rights that states claim to control all transactions or control the value of our money.

That doesn’t make using unregulated stable coins from terrible terrible people like those behind bitfinex a good idea, or mean that trustless distributed consensus is worth the massive downsides of a decentralised system like bitcoin, or that we should trust projects without the most basic financial controls.

We have laws and regulators controlling money supply and financial transactions for good reasons, most of the unregulated experiments ‘defi’ is trying have already been run in fiat and banned for good reasons, including massive leverage, unregulated banks and exchanges, money printing etc etc.

[cinquemb]

> That doesn’t make using unregulated stable coins from terrible terrible people like those behind bitfinex a good idea…

Good thing is, you personally don't have to, but others will, and you have no say over that. Heaven forbid a decentralized uncollateralized stable coin comes into existence, where its mechanisms for inflation and deflation are purely market driven, that won't be controlled by any single entity, used by people from all over the world without your (or regulators) approval… not like existing interbank eurodollar transactions have much of that approval anyways (than the same transactions, junk rated rehypothicated collateral backing that entities like bitfinex engage in, yet with lower cashflows; can't seriously sit here and tell me that regulators are in control of dollar denominated liabilities being swapped offshore everyday in non local currencies and usd deposits created from that are 1:1 backed and have FDIC coverage…).

Hell, we know more about bitfinex operations than we do of the a typical tradfi bank engaging in the same transactions overseas… what a joke lol

> or mean that trustless distributed consensus is worth the massive downsides of a decentralised system like bitcoin

Let's not pretend that there aren't any better trustless distributed consensuses systems out there that people are actively using because you would like to dismiss something you don't like/use.

> or that we should trust projects without the most basic financial controls.

Not too hard to use/build protocols that implement controls you wish and stay away from those that don't. Not everyone has to ape into shitcoins and shitchains with no research. Not everyone has to follow the whims of someone else.

> We have laws and regulators controlling money supply and financial transactions for good reasons…

That routinely fail to address (and as well as regulators failing to comprehend [at best])

> …massive leverage…

In the forms of ever novel derivatives cropping up in tradfi

> …unregulated banks and exchanges, money printing etc etc.

After talking with people who had to trade lehman positions out of administration and all the shit that went down behind the scenes… TBTF might as well be unregulated, when their positions are routinely bailed out at expense of others in many different ways and leads to people having

> … plenty of reasons to complain about fiat currencies…

That have long gone unaddressed because of the existing incentives that stand in the way. Plenty of kabuki theatre about it though from "regulators", worth about as much as the latest shitcoins cropping up.