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HN is boomer central when it comes to crypto. Haven't had a single enlightening discussion about it here.

I see a lot of misconceptions about scams and pump and dump schemes carried over from the 2017 run, and complete neglect of the innovations created since.

If anyone wants a refresher, I'm always willing to chat. I will also write a primer to help get folks up to speed on what's the latest in crypto.




Go ahead, post them. I think there are _some_ and I think crypto is really, bigger than most people give it credit. But there is a lot of crap and hype out there.

But just posting them instead of threatening would lead to better discussion overall.


How can I be notified when you post your primer? Keen to read it.


Yea no I've seen plenty of you folks talking about recent innovations in crypto and I'm just not persuaded that any of it is remotely useful other than maybe store of value and certainly speculation.

I'm not a boomer, and I even own a decent position in BTC / ETH.


I'll give you an example.

The most "mainstream" revolutionary idea in crypto right now is automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap. These essentially allow anyone to create a "pool" to trade between two assets and earn fees from it.

You can tokenize any asset, pair it with a liquid token (such as ETH or USDT) and offer it to anyone to trade while you earn fees. Or you can join an existing, popular pool (such as between wBTC-ETH) and earn fees on any trades that happen on it.

Essentially, anyone can:

- Create a decentralized exchange economy

- Participate in existing exchange economies with any amount of capital and earn fees from it

The latter part is important because that's been the purview of banks. Countless trades happen between currency pairs daily. Banks earn all the fees because they supply all the liquidity. You can't participate in that market even if you wanted to (or unless you had tens of billions in capital).

AMMs turn that around. You could have $1 worth of liquidity but you can still earn fees on it.

This is the first time in the history of finance that creating and participating in exchange economies has been so cheap and accessible. I think that alone is revolutionary. It makes previously inaccessible financial avenues available to the little guy


Yeah but what would the decentralized exchange be used for, other than other crypto?

A bank can legally process a person who fails to come through on a loan. They can physically take stuff. A decentralized crypto network can't do anything to anybody. It can just take the marginal collateral and then the rest swallow the losses...

I feel like defi crypto types discount the power of the physical world.


You can tokenize anything in concept- right now it's just crypto + small number of stocks. It's slowly building out a distributed version of Wall Street. That is the value-add, and it doesn't need to do anything more than that for it to be revolutionary.

Loans in defi are over-collateralized right now meaning there's very little risk for the lenders. This will likely change as distributed identity/credit scores are implemented.

A couple examples of what's to come: https://cointelegraph.com/news/defi-s-critical-missing-piece... https://medium.com/minaprotocol/snark-powered-defi-teller-bu...




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