Time and time again, low-substance high-hate articles about cryptocurrencies rise to #1 spot. This is not healthy. At this point I think it would be good to discourage all cryptocurrency discussion: I don’t think we are yet capable of having them.
We have a lack of curiosity and skepticism, and too much passion. There is quite a bit of echo-chamber effect going on, entrenching current view. Suppressing an emotional topic might help later on. Hopefully in 5-10 years cryptocurrencies will either be boring or dead: either way passion will have died out and we can properly discuss it.
Hi, I'm not the GP but I have a couple thoughts here.
I can't speak to the first point because I do not know enough about that statement on inflation to either confirm or refute it.
- The author singled out UST as their primary example of "stablecoins are anything but stable". This dismisses every other stablecoin out there which has not had issues, USDC being the main one I'm thinking of. Were they to make the claim that "algorithmic stablecoins are not stable" I would 100% agree with them, especially considering what may happen with USDD in the near future.
They also bring up Tether in this section, which as far as I am aware was not at risk of being insolvent at the time.
I do not like Tether. I find Patio11's take on Tether to be convincing enough and I would never consciously choose to hold any Tether.
But to claim that Tether was close to collapsing a few weeks ago is, using Hanlon's Razor, a minsunderstanding of what happened during that time. There was fear that Tether would lose its peg, it lost its peg on exchanges for a few hours, and the company which issues Tether continued to process cashouts honoring the peg.
If Tether Limited were to begin putting obstacles in the way of withdrawals, I would be incredibly worried. As of this time, it has not happend. And because it has not happened, this section was not factual.
- The author stated that the claim of "no one can regulate cryptocurrencies" has been broken, but presented one example of mining being banned in one country and intended (but not enacted) legislation in another.
This does not present enough evidence in my opinion to form a valid statement.
- The author makes several claims about the presentation of smart contracts, and refrences a category of protocols and projects which had fatal flaws in the coding of their contracts.
I agree that poorly written contracts and/or overlooked bugs have caused a lot of financial damage. But this point is made with the implication that all code should be perfect and flawless is a very odd approach to take. To be clear, I do expect better from the engineering efforts that come out of these DeFi protocols which get compromised.
However, there was always going to be someone writing the code for the smart contracts being deployed and that means that bugs were always going to happen.
Perhaps if there was more rigorous regulation in this space we will have protocols in the future staffed by hundreds if not thousands of individuals all working to ensure regulatory complicance first, just like big banks. But even then, I would never expect them to deploy code with zero bugs.
I can't speak to the intended definition of the term "smart contract" nor the author's suggestion that the implication of having the word "contract" in the term would betray trust in users, that's just not a can of worms I'd like to try my hand at.
