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Comment by deepvibrations | Hacker News Reader

Sure - some problems being solved right now: What problems does DeFi solve? There are a few straightforward ones when looking at financial systems -

Inefficiency - Banks and financial institutions spend billions on opex (ex. BoA spent $53 billion on SG&A and occupancy/equipment in 2020). Well written protocols and decentralized trust can increase efficiency and collapse this number

Permissioned access - For better or for worse, anyone can create financial products and a whole market for it without asking the SEC

Opacity - Instead of using paper/hidden digital ledgers, open source contracts lets one easily follow money flow through code and transactions

Access - Turns out the world is very big and lots of people are either locked out from traditional financial institutions or their preexisting ones just really suck.

(some examples taken from article https://parthchopra.substack.com/p/part-2-why-defi-is-not-a-...)

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But they don't really solve any of that.

That are inefficient too, slow and costly. 51% was possible from China anytime until they banned it. Insane workarounds are proposed for easy problems.

Instead of the SEC, some sharks/influencers are ruling the markets. Not a week goes bye without a new hack or malicious ownership of the cloud solution or an on purpose malicious contract or extreme scams ( eg. Tether, USDT, ...). Within a second, all their money is away.

People just hide money with currencies that hide their money trail.

The nr. 1 problem for access to banks is internet access, look at El Salvador. They are suddenly creating internet access that hasn't been there before, creating a fake dogma. They had access to banks, it was just a long drive away. Transferwise could reduce transfer costs, but a big problem is also a faulty governement or eg. In case of Libanon: stable electricity. Crypto doesn't solve any of that.

In the end, it's all about the hype and a lot of the end-users don't understand how it works and aren't protected from their own stupidity.

Which is exactly where eg. Opex helps.

Ps. Copy pasting your answer without a minor edit even just shows how mindless this thing has become.

It's pretty clear you haven't actually used DeFi. To convert my shares into dollars in my bank account takes almost a week. In DeFi I can do it within minutes. Same with sending money, trading, loans, providing liquidity, purchasing insurance. It's a night and day difference between this and the existing financial system.

Sure.

And what party are you trusting for your insurance?

In which country?

And how can shares take one week to convert? My broker has a deposit account in a German bank, it takes 1 click to convert. The button's name = buy/sell.

I'm not sure if i have ever encountered a problem. I can use methods outside wire transfer to have additional funds deposited immediately.

And the shares on Defi aren't exactly shares, are they. I wouldn't touch a bank that does this and calls it "shares".

As said before, it doesn't solve any problems.

Ps. In case you didn't knew. Knowing the country is important for potential legal action ;)

https://www.rekt.news/

Now tell me, what country is Binance located. They are one of the biggest in DeFi ? :) And how trustworthy are the "stable coins" backing the different DeFi protocols? :)

OK, I can see you are just drawing conclusions without doing any real research, you have the opinions of someone who left crypto in 2017 and never looked at it since. I'm not going to bother wasting my time on you, but do advise anyone else reading this to look into the space and see some. of the great projects such as Helium Network HNT, Akash AKT or Aave.

> OK, I can see you are just drawing conclusions without doing any real research.

Do i need to remind you that you literally copy-pasted your "conclusion"?

You have given me no reason to proof me wrong.

Saying "do your research" is exactly the reason of my conclusion and answering with that statement is another way of saying: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Eg. Helium Network HNT - decentralized hotspots?

Like i said, nothing new. Decentralized mesh networks already exists and those solutions are inferior to an ISP forcing a hotspot option, existing options, esim or mobile hotspot.

It's absolute bs that their "Network Coverage" page only shows info about their Blockchain and price, not actual wifi coverage that is of interest for customers, lol.

https://explorer.helium.com/

This is how it should look like: https://fon.com/maps/

Masquerading their Blockchain as a product doesn't make it useful in real-life.

At least give something that is actually useful instead of "i don't know an answer, but check this and that".

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