[lottin]

You don't seem to get it. If the borrower has to put up 100% collateral it means that their buying power remains the same. Borrowers borrow money in order to increase their present buying power (at the expense of future buying power). You can't do that with overcollateralised loans, smart contracts, or blockchain technology.

[mywaifuismeta]

> You don't seem to get it

No, you are only describing a part of what borrowing is about. Your use case is valid, but it is just one of many use cases. Consider the following:

I own a a long-term retirement account, but I need to pay an emergency medical bill and don't have cash at hand. Obviously I don't want to liquidate my savings account, but I can put it up as collateral to go to a bank and get a cash loan. If I'm unable to pay the account may be liquidated. That's an overcolleralized loan. It's useful. The same is happening when you put up your house as collateral, or arguably even your reputation.

The blockchain equivalent of this is the same. You put up one asset as collateral e.g. Bitcoin, and you can get another more liquid asset.

Another use case for this is simply market exposure and hedging. You can put up Bitcoin as collateral, still having exposure, and then use the loan to buy another asset to get exposure to, creating a more complex structured exposure. This has nothing to do with blockchain, it's the same in traditional finance.

[lottin]

An overcollateralised loan is equivalent to a swap (a type of derivative). Swaps have their uses, and are used in finance, but they don't provide financing. The point is if blockchain technology can't be used to do financing, and it definitely can't, just don't call it the "future of finance", because it is not. It can't perform the basic function of finance, which is financing.

[carlosdp]

How is a mortgage not financing, and how is a mortgage not just another over-collateralized loan?

Every loan has some form of collateral. Even credit cards do, it's just less tangible: you are staking your credit score, which they'll start chipping away at as soon as you start defaulting.

[lottin]

A mortgage is indeed a form of financing because the lender does not keep the collateral until the debt is paid off in full. If they did, there would be no financing going on. It would be equivalent to saving for 30 years and then buying the house.

[dannyw]

Mortgages are overcollateralized loans.

Credit cards are loans based on future income streams (which can be securitised in fact with crypto technology -- think a defi bank automatically getting 20% of your future income until it is repaid)

[lottin]

The problem isn't overcollateralisation itself but the inability to seize the collateral in particular, and assets in general. A mortgage depends crucially on the bank's ability to seize the collateral in the event of default, and the same applies to credit cards. The problem is blockchain assets are unconfiscatable, which means any form of financing involving such assets is unworkable.

[dannyw]

No, blockchain assets can be confiscated. Maker, Aave, confiscate and liquidated billions of assets in the past few days.

Smart contracts are Turing complete and you can build anything with it. You can even build an opt-in judiciary system with the power to reverse transactions.

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised if you look at how DeFi actually works.

[lottin]

No, Maker & Aave haven't confiscated anything in the past few days. Either you don't know what 'confiscate' means or you don't know how Maker & Aave, and DeFi lending in general, work.