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Comment by zeroclip | Hacker News Reader

A lot of day traders on FTX are learning first hand the value of DeFi and self custody.

Yes, because DeFi never suffers from collapses or hacks. Nobody every drained a DAO with a flash-loan, or used one to cash-out illiquid assets with no intention of paying it back... DeFi is as much of a joke as the rest of the ecosystem.

Different category of risk.

CEX and DEX can both have hacks. An open source DEX can be verified, formally tested, and made immutable and un-upgradable on chain, like Uniswap.

Uniswap V2 contract is 2 years unchanged, $3.8B TVL and $1B daily volume, close to 10 year old Coinbase CEX. Not bad for being a joke.

Those stories about smart contract programming errors leading to money getting permanently frozen are quite scary. Though admittedly in the grand scheme of things they seem to have “only” lost millions of USD, not billions.

Yes, it's a risk. If a contract or protocol is several years old, processing billions per day, and the code is un-upgradeable, you might say the risk is lower.

I'd rather gamble with Uniswap protocol risk than FTX human fraud and greed risk.

So we’ve gone from “Everyone is learning the value of DeFi” to “I can come up with a single example of a DeFi system that hasn’t been hacked (yet)”

Hardly says that DeFi as a category is reliable.

Here's a bigger list for you[1], the top 10 all have $1B+ TVL.

[1] https://defillama.com/

Great, you can point to some that haven't been hacked, exploited or just plain collapsed yet.

You said "day traders on FTX are learning first hand the value of DeFi", but DeFi is just as much of a shitshow as the rest and has had just as many collapses.

Uniswap, AAVE, MakerDAO traders will disagree with you.

I am one of these people: I had funds locked into a CEX, was lucky to pull them out some days before turmoil but others not so lucky. During that time my DeFi holdings were fine. I would now rather take on protocol risk of something established and proven like Uniswap, instead of risking with an unregulated CEX.

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