MicahZoltu

Eh, I wouldn't quite call it an index. While I agree that it isn't _actually_ 1USD (or whatever it is pegged to), it is backed by other assets (in the case of DAI today, it is backed by ETH) and the system is setup such that there should always be more ETH backing the DAI than necessary to make everyone whole.

As DAI gains trading volume and gets listed on more exchanges you'll likely see it stabilize. Any active trader who believes the price pressures will work has incentive to buy DAI when it is below 1 USD and sell DAI when it is over 1 USD as this is a low-risk trade (opportunity cost only). Right now, there isn't much volume so it is pretty easy for someone to come in and want a bunch of DAI or to liquidate a bunch of DAI and cause the market to shift suddenly. It will then take a few minutes for the market to correct, and with per-transaction fees the market is hesitant to correct small errors due to the lack of volume.

TL;DR: The more volume DAI has on public exchanges, the tighter it will hold its peg.

If what you want is "something that always is worth _exactly_ 1 USD then you are asking for the unatainable. As others have mentioned, it is _impossible_ in an open market to have a true 100% no variability peg. Markets work on supply and demand and the instant that one exceeds the other the peg will drift.

A good stable coin will have pressures that push that drift back toward the target, but it is impossible to stop the drift from ever occurring. The USD itself presumably targets some basket of goods, but it drifts away from that basket of goods. So even the USD isn't a "stable coin" by your definition.

The thing the author seems to be confused about is that when people talk about stable coin they aren't claiming that the market can't be irrational. They are claiming that over a sufficient period of time the coin will trend towards its target. In the case of DAI today, that target is 1 DAI == 1 USD. This means that while the market may irrationally buy/sell DAI for more or less than 1 USD, over time it will trend towards 1 USD.

For the vast majority of people looking for a stable coin, this is exactly what they want. They don't care so much that on a particular exchange DAI is worth more or less than $1, they care that in a week, or a month or a year DAI will still be worth "about a dollar" and not "100x USD" or "x/100 USD". DAI has the mechanisms necessary to make it profitable to drive the price of DAI back toward 1 USD if it loses its peg and those mechanisms have been shown to generally work in the wild so far.

I have personally made a few bucks when DAI transiently slipped its peg in the past. There are people actively authoring bots that profit off of DAI losing its peg and as those bots become more efficient and gain capital, I think we'll see DAI slip its peg less and less often.

Tether claims to be full reserve. The contention people have is that there is little to know proof that they are _actually_ full reserve. Also, there is risk in Tether that some government will seize all of their assets (there is lots of precedence for this).

I have pushed the change. Once caches are refreshed you should see ~11 template repositories without having to search GitHub.

I have written a handful of templates but only 3 are sponsored (which means they show up for everyone) and only one has 2 favorites (the threshold for something being considered "popular" right now).

This comment makes me realize that I should turn the "popular" threshold down to 1 favorite so more things show up for new users until the application starts getting some traffic.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll get that change pushed in a bit!

I will try to monitor this news article and am happy to answer any questions anyone has.

Please also feel free to use the feedback button on the page to report a bug or request a feature. I developed this application mostly in a vacuum to fulfill my own needs, so I'm sure I missed some basic features that are likely obvious to other people.