iskander

>I totally agree that protocols like Aave, Curve and some others are extremely cool and useful technology, however, I've come to the preliminary conclusion that the degenerate disgrace that makes up 99% of the space now is permanently and irreversibly damaging reputation to a point where this technology might be ignored despite being useful and solid.

It's interesting because I've come to the opposite conclusion from very similar experiences. I think the regulatory and legal enforcement haze allows the infinite scams to multiply but I found it refreshing/surprising to find there is a serious and useful core technology that all the scams are imitating in style (but not substance)

It seems OK though to just ignore all the vaporware, other than maybe asking regulators to create a legal or regulatory framework to better distinguish between Aave (0.9% APY on USDC) and MonkeyBank (20,000% APY!)

The boring plain vanilla DeFi stuff seems great, especially for people who live in countries with unstable banking systems (e.g. Lebanon, Russia, &c)

If you peel back the feverish financialization, there are a few different areas of actual research which might be usable outside crypto, such as consensus methods for distributed computation. The one I have started following is the development of ZK proofs from a theoretical construct into a programming substrate. Traditional complexity texts focus on interactive ZK protocols, but non-interactive ZK proofs have been developed significantly in the crypto world. They have recently become usable for general purpose computing with interesting privacy guarantees: you can prove f(x) = y for a known f and y but without revealing x. This feels very powerful and related to other research fields like differential privacy.

Examples:

- Circom: https://iden3.io/circom

- Cairo: https://www.cairo-lang.org/docs/

- zkREPL: https://0xparc.org/blog/zkrepl

I'm really curious about DeFi being your focus, it has seemed to be that pretty much everything other than core DeFi protocols are weird casinos but things like Aave and Curve are niche but highly functional infrastructure. Can you say more about your impressions?

There should be some kind of award for these kinds of "well actually" comments on HN that lack any kind of intuition for the domain.

Cartoon montage: "By my calculations..." followed by driving a car off a bridge.

Edit: as someone who works in cancer research, I can tell you that your prior for 18/18 locally advanced colorectal cancer patients achieve CRs without surgery should be ~0.

Awareness is healthily increasing and many people have shifted long-term holdings to a real centralized 1:1 stable (USDC) or extremely over-collaterized decentralized stable (DAI).

The Curve "3crv" pool (which allows large volume low slippage conversion between USDT, USDC, and DAI) has been at >50% USDT for a long time, going up to as high as 80% when people are truly spooked: https://curve.fi/3pool

I don't think 0.9993 counts as "priced in" when the consequences of holding significant USDT during another marketwide panic might be total loss of funds:

https://pro.coinbase.com/trade/USDT-USDC

The 2020/2021 bubble is going to look like a big missed opportunity for the crypto industry to get Tether's books right. It might have been their one and only chance to find enough dollars to actually make their backing 1:1. Now that that bubble is in the past and future bubbles are at the mercy of both public sentiment and macroeconomic conditions, Tether just has to hope that a majority of USDT stays "on the sidelines" and doesn't actually get withdrawn into the real economy. They won't necessarily implode like UST but the possibility hangs over every downturn and panic.

Medical record digitization seems to have had a neutral-to-negative impact on hospital efficiency. It's hard to believe since the alternative sounds mind-numbingly inefficient but there are tons of low-tech streamlined processes (like having a whiteboard in each patient's room) which are being undermined by having a constellation of disconnected staff all dumping information into Epic and not having time to read other entries.

That video is really remarkable, I would say even more impressive than the stock in the article.

I wish any of the coverage would go deeper into what makes this forest "ancient" and whether rare species have found a niche there.

Sorry for the outdated figure, I last checked about a week ago but I guess they change fast as everyone flees to stables.

It's on here: https://app.aave.com/markets/

...but rates have fallen already, I guess everyone is fleeing to stables and within stables everyone is fleeing to USDC. Current USDC rate is 1.46% (vs. 2% for USDT)

I'd go with the 2.8% from Aave, I don't think I have seen anything better from the other major/reliable protocols.

I withdrew everything from Gemini Earn since I have no idea whether Genesis Trading, who borrows through Earn, would survive a significant loss of USDT peg.

USDC on Aave, Compound, or Curve all seem much safer.

The "honest" yield of on-chain lending protocols has decreased significantly through the year since it mostly came from lending to leverage traders. For example, USDC yield on Aave is down to ~2.8%, I think Compound's stable yield has been down to <1% for a while.

There are other sources of yield, such as Gemini Earn (6.5%), which lend to larger trading firms. Those feel riskier since they're more exposed to systemic collapse in crypto and lock up your dollars with a long withdraw delay.

Then there are the ponzi yields (10-40%), like the recently collapsed UST and the soon-to-collapse USDD and USDN. I think it's obvious why those are a bad idea.

The core financial infrastructure, like DAI and Curve, is weirdly robust: it's already been through quite a few crashes that would probably wipe out traditional financial plumbing. So, at the very least, keeping stablecoins on Curve and AAVE is a way to hedge against other kinds of systemic risks to the financial sector. This feels a little crazy in the US (where we don't anticipate systemic collapse) but less so in many other countries.

~50% increase in firearm deaths: https://www.statista.com/statistics/258913/number-of-firearm...

Major increase in pedestrian deaths and general trend away from walking: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...

~4x increase in obesity: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/news/obesity-th...

Major decrease in upward mobility through socioeconomic status: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

...and a general deterioration of civic institutions, shared culture, and mental health.

Aside from the data, it's subjectively a more fractured and less pleasant country.

Since 2009: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide/...

>when there truly hasn’t been a better time to be alive

...I liked the 90s a lot better, other than gizmos and means for distraction I can't really imagine why someone would prefer the 2020s.

Top five (non-stable) crypto assets:

1) BTC - PoW 2) ETH - PoW (but the Beacon chain PoS merge seems to be going well) 3) BNB - PoS-like 4) XRP - PoS 5) SOL - PoS

So of the top five really only BTC & ETH are PoW and soon it will just be BTC.

I got a 3 month lock from Chase this past October but it might be that things have changed since then.

It's a tool for...atomically loaning and repaying large amounts of money. You can use that however you want, most typically for arbitrage to bring markets into equilibrium while earning a profit. The arbitrage isn't fundamentally different from what happens in traditional markets and flash-loan-like primitives are being developed outside of crypto.

(I don't know what the second question means or what your mental model of a "real" currency is)

It's a loan with a guaranteed atomicity in repaying.

A single atomic transaction does:

1) Borrow $80M 2) Use $80M however you want 3) Return $80M + loan fees (e.g. on Aave this would be 0.09%)

The lender is algorithmically guaranteed to get the money back and the borrower can potentially take advantage of large scale transient opportunities, or...just wreak havoc on a poorly secured system.

More info here: https://docs.aave.com/developers/guides/flash-loans

Sorry for the somewhat sloppy phrasing. GUSD is 1:1 backed by USD, the bank accounts holding that USD are FDIC insured, and this arrangement has regulatory oversight: https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/gusd-stablecoin-gemini-do...

You're right that if you store your GUSD off Gemini and it gets stolen, then you're out of luck. I am not sure what happens if Gemini closes but my impression is that since they are a NYS trust they would have to their customers the 1:1 backing (rather than paying creditors with that money).

> the American monetary policy cudgel.

We're trading it for having the safe subset of crypto denominated in USD pegged stables. Less direct power over other countries but still keeps the world transacting in dollars.

>Not sure how you can use an asset whose price is fluctuating so wildly (and is correlated/anti-correlated to indicators and trends having little to do with your local government) as an effective hedge against incompetent/corrupt government.

The few legit / non-speculative uses of crypto are denominated in pegged stable coins like USDC, USDT, and some lower volume options denominated in EUR and other currencies. You can deposit these into crypto banks for a ~3-8% APY. A few of these options are even FDIC insured (e.g. Gemini's GUSD).

(this is unrelated to Bitcoin, which is more or less a volatile meme asset)

The security practice here is even worse than what you're describing, the company servers had been authorized to sign on behalf of the DAO, so only one compromise was required to get 5/9 validators.

They really don't cut you off if you put 10TB of FASTQs in there and let strangers download them?

I want to store a few dozen TB of genomics data in a publicly accessible way. Are there any better alternatives to S3 or Google Cloud Storage? I've been waiting for Cloudflare's R2 but the beta is not yet open yet and I'm not even sure it would work well for me.

So little memory?

The now outdated Mac Pro goes up to 1.5TB, only 128GB available here.