… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.
Before I start, just a little bit of background on me so you can understand how biased I am (😅): I’m a 16 years old programmer and I won a few crypto hackathon/funding rounds and I made a lot of friends in the field. It allowed me to get quite a bit of ETH/XMR along the way!
I see cryptocurrencies getting a lot of hate, rightly so for the number of scams, shitcoins, NFTs bullshit, “governance”, DAOs and all those often useless & snob terms.
However the founding ideas of decentralisation and freedom with your money are very appealing to me. Smart contracts are really interesting for creating your own banking operation and tokens can represent anything! It’s a world of possibilities to play with, and you get to build something useful for people!
I’d just like to add a bit of nuance tho: I see a lot of apps being built and what’s really making me laugh is the lack of open-source, decentralisation and auditing on privacy. Granted, there is a lot of fake promises, but it’s like everything, you have to find the talented people to follow.
I find it fascinating to build unstoppable, decentralised, user-first apps. I just hope that web3 stays true to its founding principles.
Hope it was interesting, tell me what you think!
EDIT: title+typos+the game is not comfortably played in Act 2
The concept of decentralized finance infrastructure without outside regulation and governance is interesting in a vacuume.
In practical reality, it’s by definition, a return to the century+ old unregulated financial wild west. Scams and stupidity were rampant. We had to create all the regulations and restrictions we’re used to now, for people to be able to use the system instead of their mattresses to keep their money.
Is using the mattress such a bad thing? Nobody is going to care as much about your money as you will. If you fuck up and lose everything you are devistated. If the CEO of Wells Fargo looses your money they have no need to care because the government will force their slaves to make it up to you, or not. At the end of the day they can choose not to help you and you can do nothing about it.
Edits: spelling
It all depends on how much money you stick in the mattress.
A mattress can burn, and you end up with nothing. A bank that burns, either gets saved, or you get the government pinkie swear it will give you up to some amount of money back.
Keeping less than the deposit guarantee in a mattress, is silly, the government has more guns than you have to defend it, and if it tries to go back on the promise, there are many more people willing to tear it a new one.
Keeping any excess above the deposit guarantee, can make sense… but most people don’t have that much cash, or are in debt already, and it’s more important for them to not get foreclosed on the house mortgage with the mattress in it.
BTW, mortgages rarely burn even if a bank burns, funny how that works.
Aint that the damn truth. Ask the Canadian truckers how safe their money was in the bank. Whether or not you agree with what they were doing its quite clear that the minute you put money in a bank its no longer your money. Its a conditial IOU that can be revoked at any time for any reason whatsoever or no reason at all. Donated tovthe wrong social cause? No groceries this month. Didn’t stay off the beach during a pandemic? No gas for you. Maybe ask cyprus what a haircut to your bank account is like.
Their money was pretty safe, along with their debts; other people’s money… well, some money can be charged and convicted, never trust money. Or the wrong government, for that matter. Like, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Libya, Niger, North Korea, China, or Russia, are a no-go, but anyone with big guns and a vested (or existential) interest in looking like they’re honoring those IOUs, like the US or EU, can work.
Even if the CEO of Wells Fargo loses your money, you will still get at least $250,000 of it back (assuming you had deposited that much) via the FDIC.
The FDIC will honor their obligations because to do otherwise would be to risk a massive bank run, of the sort that started the Great Depression. This wouldn’t just screw you over, it would screw over the ultra-wealthy too, and we can’t have that.
At the end of the day, someone can just not take your mattress money and you might be out of luck. Your mattress can burn down and all that money is gone, which is far more likely than Wells Fargo taking your money and then the FDIC not giving you anything.
The FDIC only has enough to “insure” ~0.7% of all bank deposits under $250k. They pray that there is never a huge bank crisis. With the failure of SVB and the other 4 banks earlier this year the FDIC would have been totally out of money several times over already. The only thing that stopped that was the bigger banks like JPMorgan being told to buy them out. The FDIC is a house of cards just waiting to collapse. They only have enough money to convince everyone that they will be safe when in truth a few banks failing at once wouldnt even leave the couch to look for pennies in.