dmihal
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
335
Submissions
111
Member since
Mar 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
One project I'm following is Aztec Protocol. It's an Ethereum L2 (so faster & cheaper transactions, similar to Lightning) but it supports any Ethereum asset (ETH, USDC, WBTC) and is fully private.
Comment · 5 years ago
Fees are a function of supply & demand.
High fees means there's tons of demand to use the chain.
Yes, it sucks for small users who are priced-out, but scaling solutions such as rollups should be launching within the next few weeks.
Comment · 5 years ago
> What serious borrower needs to pay 10% to access credit?
People who can make more than 10% trading?
Lending protocols aren't doing anything different than what banks do: allocating inactive capital to those who can make use of that capital and are willing to pay for it.
Interest rates are high because of A: market volatility, professional traders can easily make more than 10%, and B: information asymmetry, large capital pools haven't allocated to these pools.
Comment · 5 years ago
The transaction flows aren't dependent on new holders, it's dependent on users.
If you somehow banned any new users from using Ethereum, existing users would continue to use Ethereum for the applications built on top of it.
Comment · 5 years ago
Flash loans themselves are not an application, it's a primitive that other applications can build on top of.
There's many applications like DeFiSaver that use flash loans to allow users to migrate debt between lending protocols without needing additional capital.
Comment · 5 years ago
People hate Robinhood after they blocked users from trading. Decentralized exchanges like Uniswap are impossible to shut down.
Comment · 5 years ago
The same reason that Bitcoin hasn't been displaced by newer projects.
Both have massive network effects. Marginal technology improvements aren't enough to convince developers to build on a platform that has no users, no application & no infrastructure.
Comment · 5 years ago
> it might make sense to borrow 900 in ETH with 1000 ETH collateral. Then you make your vote on the DAO with a power of 1900
No, you would vote on the DAO with a power of 900, because your original 1000 ETH collateral is being held by the lending protocol
Comment · 5 years ago
Exactly, Ethereum is a better Store of Value than Bitcoin, not only because it is scarce, but because it provides utility, which creates demand.
People need ETH for:
* Paying transaction fees to use the network. For example, Visa is now settling payments with card issuers using USDC on Ethereum, so Visa needs to pay these fees with ETH.
* Collateral in financial applications: Over 11 million ETH (over $24 billion) have been locked as collateral in various financial protocols
* Staking & validating: In the same way that Bitcoin miners must purchase mining hardware to earn money, Eth2 validators must purchase ETH to earn staking rewards
Comment · 5 years ago
The most innovation is happening in financial products. There's no way for a developer or entrepreneur to experiment building in traditional finance without the support from large financial institutions. But in DeFi, there are financial applications built by teams in India, Africa, SE Asia, etc.
If you want an example of one innovation, look at flash loans. Flash loans provide the ability to atomicly borrow infinite money for the duration of a transaction, with no collateral or credit. This money can be used for arbitraging or just to provide working capital for a complex operation. If the loan isn't repaid by the end of the transaction, the whole transaction is cancelled.
Better explanation:
Comment · 5 years ago
Which investment opportunities don't favor early adopters?
Comment · 5 years ago
And Proof of Work means those with access to cheap electricity rule over the network, which is why most mining happens in western China.
Comment · 5 years ago
FinTech is a new frontend for finance
Crypto & DeFi is a new backend for finance
Comment · 5 years ago
The protocol is still in the early stages of development.
The social contract is that the protocol & monetary policy will ossify after the transition to PoS & sharding is complete.
It's a crypto/blockchain podcast, but very technical, it's focused around the advanced technology that makes up the ecosystem (zero-knowledge cryptography, multi-party computation, consensus algorithms, miner-extractable value, new blockchain programming languages, etc).
Very technical, almost nothing about investing. The downside, some episodes may be a bit hard to jump into due to the technical nature.