There is no such thing as a stablecoin, it's a made up term to try to lend legitimacy to new crypto scams. And I say this as someone who just bought some Ethereum in the hopes of making a profit :)
Within the larger space of crypto are the "degenerates" and "ape investors". That's what they call themselves. They're fully self-aware of their unhinged choices and behavior. They embrace it and laugh at it.
This is important to understand. They aren't uninformed or gullible. They know they're crossing a field of land mines and decide to go for it anyway.
I'd like to figure out how to build a cryptocurrency that is useful for conducting actual business but toxic to investors.
An economy that lacked parasitic middle men would be a good thing for the status quo to have to compete with.
Yes, perhaps a currency that you could trade quickly and cheaply all over the world, with 2-3% reduction in its purchasing power each year so that no one has a reason to hoard it or speculate. I wish we had the technology to create such a currency./s
Downtown there are hungry people, downstream there are thirsty people, and yet my HOA won't let me stop watering my lawn, nor will they let me replace the grass with something edible.
And if you won't accept food and drink as part of that 2%, consider the more measurable economic costs of the climate of of unrest that these practices create.
I imagine a proof of work system where there's a community work queue, and "mining" is completing tasks in the queue, borderlands-style (though hopefully without the violence). The mined tokens can be resolved to nft's which stay attached to the wallet of the user who requested that the work be done.
There's also a web of trust and a UBI component (Circles-UBI style) to disinventivise sybil accounts.
If the work-originator deems the work unsatisfactory, they can invalidate the tokens that were mined from its "completion" and recoup a fraction of what they paid to have it done.
So doing business with somebody who has a reputation of doing shoddy work, or of failing to respect good work, is risky because your tokens might evaporate.
An would-be investor in this token would have to decide whose tokens to buy, which requires much more research.
You could also have some system to disinventivise hoarding, like a token half-life.
Or you know, something like that.
Once you start talking social solutions you start looking more like a business or a commune or a community and less like a technology. You don't just have algorithms and widgets and cryptographic hashes, you have people who are supposed to execute fuzzy decision making processes like authenticating that someone "did good work", and then you need validation protocols to check whether people are executing their human-algorithms correctly, and identity and spam systems to ensure that someone isn't running a bot-net that simulates a town of people pretending to do useful work...
Which in addition to making everything way more complicated, makes you step back and say, "Wait, what am I trying to accomplish here by creating a cryptocurrency which is a currency and not a speculation-vehicle again? And why am I trying to do it by creating a cryptocurrency again?"
The issuance of paper notes is still a social problem but the act of exchanging them at a shop is not.
As for the botnet thing, I really like how CirclesUBI handles it. "Trust" is a pact to treat tokens minted for the other party as indistinguishable from tokens minted for yourself. So by all means, go simulate a small town doing "useful" work. Nobody is going to value the fruits of that labor unless they've seen them, and so your tokens will be worthless.
Once you have the base web of trust set up, you can layer other types of trust on top of it, like returns-borrowed-tools-undamaged trust and other things that lower the cost of doing business.
It's about using technology to take things that already work (cooperation) and make them work at scale (1000 people instead of 10). No need for global consistency, the resources are all local anyway.
As for being called a commune, that's fine. Communism allegedly doesn't work, so the idea that people might be doing this in tandem with traditional economics ought to be considered "not-a-threat" except in cases where traditional economics produces exceptionally troublesome outcomes.
USDC is a stablecoin, and there are plenty of others out there.
Are you talking about selling USDC to another baghholder? Thats not 'redeeming' that's trading.
Much more likely a smart contract somewhere fails than USDC/Gemini (the only two I know that do full audits to ensure 1:1 dollar backing, ignoring USDT). There just isn't much risk there, hence there not being much (any) profit trading stablecoin.
USDC has regular attestations, not audits. It's an important distinction.
> One of the things to keep in mind to differentiate each of these services is that audits are performed to discover data, risks, or compliance issues that may not have been known before the audit took place, and attestation is to evaluate and review how true the data or information is when compared to a stated purpose, internal control or system. [0]
Based on that reading, it sounds like an audit wouldn't make sense here, since we're not trying to discover anything new, just asserting a statement to be true.
[0] - https://www.ispartnersllc.com/blog/defining-attestation-assurance-auditing/That peg could certainly fail, and you could certainly argue that there's something not quite right about the practice, but it was made up to legitimize tokens long before crypto.
> Unlike centralized stablecoins, DAI isn't backed by US dollars in a bank account. Instead, it’s backed by collateral on the Maker platform.
https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/trading-and-funding/cr...
https://share.streamlit.io/tadzz/maker_dai_collateralization...
edit: From someone above https://share.streamlit.io/tadzz/maker_dai_collateralization...
Each DAI is over collateralized, and backed by more ETH than USDC.
I do agree that some stablecoins are scammy in nature, but others serve an important purpose and that purpose is to allow individuals and enterprises to navigate doing business in crypto despite crypto's high volatility. Where is the deception in that?