alxcii

I get your point but I think there's a good chunk of people in crypto that wouldn't have considered crossing back into tradfi. Their choices during the USDC depeg would be something like: 1) Swap to BTC/ETH, take market risk 2) Swap to USDT, take the risk that it's not fully backed 3) Swap to a decentralized stable that lacks liquidity 4) Stay in USDC and hope it repegs After everything settled there were probably people who didn't trust centralized stables anymore and just stayed in the majors. Eventually maxis will realize crypto doesn't equal BTC. Not everything needs to have a monetary premium to be useful.

Why wouldn't bank failures and stable depegs be bullish for crypto? Where else are you going to hide out?

USDC will repeg, probably slightly off peg but it should be fine. Circle's withdrawal from SVB might not even be stuck as they initiated the wire before FDIC came in. I think the safe haven narrative for majors is going to take hold in the medium term. When banks are failing and stables are depegging, BTC/ETH seems like a good place to be.

Awesome detective work @thepupil, thanks for your wizardry!

Notable shareholder in JOE just released their annual letter: https://nitorcapitalmanagement.com/annual-letters. Any COBAF sleuths out there can figure out what they were buying in the last two years?

I admire you and @rkbabang's attempts to recalibrate the thinking of the crypto detractors on this board but I'm not sure it's a good use of your time. Like you said, it's been 13+ years now since the genesis BTC block and a ton of innovation in the space and still we are going in circles discussing the same basic things since this thread started 5 years ago. If people still think crypto will disappear soon, no amount of well reasoned thinking will change their minds now. The most anti-crypto folks are the ones that are least likely to have ever actually done anything on chain. I haven't met anybody who has earnestly taken the time to play around and learn about crypto conclude that there is no value in it. Anyone can use a fiat onramp, send transactions, self custody using a browser wallet, use AMMs and on chain order books, borrow and lend, trade on an NFT marketplace, contrast slow but high security chains like BTC vs interoperability focused ecosystems like Cosmos vs fast monolithic ecosystems like Solana - all this for less than the cost of a grande americano in gas fees. But it's still easier to conjure up their inner Charlie, denounce it rat poison and call it a day. There are so many brilliant thinkers on this forum, I often wonder what kind of alpha we could have uncovered if we actually got people intellectually honest about crypto. With all of our brainpower could have discovered broken mechanisms like UST and shorted it before the depeg. We could be discussing what color Ferraris to buy, but instead we are bickering about silly things like whether permissionless open networks that enable digital scarcity and new ways for human to coordinate have any "intrinsic" value.

Not sure if we're still talking about the same thing - The AAVE attack had nothing to do with stablecoin depegs or money laundering. Here's some background for those interested:

Just because a protocol is overcollateralized doesn't mean it can't take on bad debt if the liquidation parameters are insufficient. The LTV allowed could be too high, the speed of liquidation could be too slow and the liquidity available to clear the position may not be enough. Aave took USDC collateral for a CRV borrow. Curve pumped on some news they were building a stablecoin. To liquidate, USDC had to be sold for CRV on an AMM, which kept rising as liquidity decreased. There were some other shenanigans (this was part of a more complex attack involving some whales) but basically Aave ended up with bad debt as the USDC was not enough to cover the position.

If the internet was nothing more than an improved version of the postal service, it would still be a tremendous invention. If all we get with blockchains are uncensorable and transparent payment rails (like they are now), it would still be a tremendous invention. As we know now, thinking that the internet was nothing more than an improved version of the postal service would have been a colossal mistake. It turns out that a global messaging system can upend entire industries from transportation to hospitality. Could you have convinced the average person living in the AOL era that in the future it would be perfectly normal to take a ride with a random stranger to stay at another random stranger's log cabin in the woods? The internet's birthday is considered to be 1983 when TCP/IP was invented. What year did you get online? People don't realize just how early we still are - blockchains are still in their infancy. We haven't even coalesced around a standard protocol for blockchains to talk to each other, not to mention all the other infra that still needs to be built out. Stretch your imaginations just a little bit. Open, trustless, permissionless networks of value aren't going to zero.

If your mental model is that blockchain networks are like highways, blockchain companies are more like carmakers (for example, you need a car get on the highway -> you need a fiat off/onramp to get on the network) or construction firms (you need to maintain/build on the highway -> you need contract auditors/devs to deploy your app). If you want to own the highway (I would say you should since it's clear most of the value in crypto has accrued to the protocol layers) you should really own crypto directly.

https://mirrorprotocol.app/#/trade

Thanks for posting this Add another +1. Thank you. I'm heavily invested in Ethereum and yet I am having a hard time seeing where he is wrong. Sold my ETH and NEO for BTC today after reading it. First post. It seems to me he is using the equation of exchange incorrectly - P*Q should be total transaction volume on chain, not the value of computation behind it. It would be like valuing a fiat currency by the value of the government/police/gold/infrastructure/etc backing it, not the aggregate value of transactions.