I also find this “incredible”, but in the old sense of the meaning as “not believable”.
[1] https://community-development.makerdao.com/makerdao-mcd-faqs
The problem with bad financial instruments is not that they don't work at all, but that they work fine for a period of time and then blow up.
I think the point your parent was trying to make is that the long term interest rate of any security has an upper bound of the growth rate of the economy.
I don't know of anyone who things the US economy has a real growth rate of 6%.
This is incorrect. Economists won't need it explained, but you're probably not one. Think about it like this - the growth of the economy is a weighted average of the growth of many different assets. By definition, a few of them will have higher rates of growth a few will have lower rates of growth.
What you should've said is that the higher rate ones are typically higher risk. So at the lowest possible risk, you probably cap out at the economic growth rate (also not a truism, but somewhat closer).
The 6% Dai savings rate is not static. Overtime, both the interest rate charged to those taking loans and the savings interest rate will need to be adjusted in response to economic conditions in order to maintain the peg. These adjustments have occurred many times and are part of the normal operation of the system.
That being said, MakerDAO has considered these scenarios and in the event that the peg can't be maintained, an emergency shutdown procedure occurs that gracefully shuts down the system. There's a separate token called MKR, and holders of the MKR token are the lenders of last resort. In the event of an emergency shutdown, MKR token is printed and auctioned off to settle debts in the system, devaluing the MKR token. Similarly, when a loan holder pays off their debts to the system, they pay that in MKR token and the MKR they paid is burned, creating scarcity of the token to reward MKR holders.
The risk adjusted return on whatever that crazy contraption is is almost certainly negative, and probably incalculably so.
The idea that any sane financial instrument could increase its return by two points by the holders of it voting to do so is... I haven't the words.
Raising the savings rate will also raise the interest rate that those holding loans must pay. If a loan holder doesn't agree with the new interest rate, they are free to close out their loan.
It's true that the interest rate can be arbitrarily voted up. Despite this, 1.46% of all existing Ether (currently valued at $210,036,816) is staked as collateral in the system, so it's not accurate to say nobody would do this.
Isn't this just a revolving credit line?
In another way, you're totally missing the point.
Net ROI hasn't been great for people who were earning x% interest on their ETH while it tanked 50%+.
But the _idea_ the animates DAI, the dream of a decentralized synthetic digital bearer asset, that's a worthwhile dream imo. It's not a simple idea to understand. And it's not simple to implement technically/socially. But DAI has been a beautiful experiment in attempting to create this new-fangled thing. and while the jury is still out on whether the model/architecture they've chosen will hold up, the experiment itself should, in my view, be declared a massive success - it has, for the most part, worked very well. And DAI opens the door to new experiments. And they'll come. A trickle at first. but in 10yrs, it'll be an entirely different landscape when it comes to complex financial instruments. They'll be available in the way stocks can be had on Robinhood. and more. bcs financial instruments that are currently too complex or expensive to be practical, will be within reach. The rabbit hole is deep. and it is real. You can dive in and start learning. Or yell at clouds until your boat gets lifted by a wave of innovation...
The people who built "that crazy contraption" are pioneers in an industry that is going to help lift hundreds of millions out of poverty via cheap, non-predatory financial services and create trillions in wealth by further unifying the global market.
I am somebody who spends hundreds of hours per year reading about Ethereum and blockchain. I could stop doing this whenever I want, I'm not bound by my employer or anything.
I keep at it because the underlying technology and things being built with it are amazing and valuable.
If you take one thing away from this thread, let it be that Bitcoin is the "Ask Jeeves" of cryptocurrency and the future is actively being built on Ethereum.
A 6% interest rate on USD would be a red flag, but Dai isn't USD. As far as I know, no banks allow you to use Ether as collateral for a USD loan, so the comparison isn't apples to apples.
Is this written in their documentation? Cos this is where the smart money gets out. The DAI competes against the USD. So all their transactions have to be in USD. No vendor for your products is accepting these magical tokens. No one in the economy except vanishingly small fractions accept digital tokens for trade.
Also, this is how the economy functions. All they've done is create a bank and sprinkled the fairy dust of "tokens" on it so the Fed stays away.
MakerDAO has a list of vendors who accept Dai today [1]. The list also contains a number of payment processors that enable businesses to accept Dai. It's true that it's not widely used now, but every product has to start somewhere. I don't think I'm going to be getting paychecks in Dai within my lifetime, but that's no reason to discourage its growth.
> All they've done is create a bank and sprinkled the fairy dust of "tokens" on it so the Fed stays away.
You say that as if creating an automated decentralized bank that generates an asset pegged to the US dollar is something that just anybody could do. Regardless of how Dai is ultimately used, creating the system and deploying it to the public is a successful proof of concept in itself.
Fair enough. If it grows, it grows.
> You say that as if creating an automated decentralized bank that generates an asset pegged to the US dollar is something that just anybody could do.
If you have 100% collateralised loan, yes, anybody could do it in this day and age. Money can actually grow in an automated fashion without a central authority if we accept the inevitability of economic crashes and depressions.
Here's my thought experiment - say DAI suddenly overnight replaces the dollar. I don't know enough about the system, but I know finance very well. Next, say the day after the economy starts crashing. Manufacturers cannot see any orders coming in, consumers don't want to spend money etc etc. Run of the mill crash. What would DAI do?
I'll tell you how this works out in an uncontrolled money system - the crash goes on for more than a couple of years. People lose jobs, companies close etc. The federal reserve's one and only job (the regulation part is hogwash, they can't regulate for shit) is to cushion such an economic crash. What happens without it? Will the benevolent DAI system controllers step in?
With that in mind, accepting cryptocurrencies is just a technicality and doesn't reflect any acceptance of it as a real currency.
Are there any vendors who actually price their products in a cryptocurrency?
As a currency sure, but it reflects acceptance as a means of exchange. There are actually big segments of the crypto community who find the latter much more important
As I said it seems like most of the DAI borrowing is being done by people taking out margin loans to speculate on crypto. Perhaps this might make sense for the limited use case of people trading cryptocurrency (which is its most popular yet pointless application), but I don't see it being useful or economically viable for general purpose loans.
EDIT: upon further thought since the loan has to be secured with crypto assets, its not comparable to a personal loan. The equivalent regular finance product would be for a portfolio line of credit. Those have much lower interest rates, fed funds + 1-3% depending on the source.
I agree with that entire paragraph, so the rest of your comment is moot in terms of debate. However, I was just saying that on its face, 6% inside the USA is a good rate for loans.
In the event that the value of their collateral doesn't cover the debt, the Maker system has a surplus account that would cover the difference. In the event that the surplus can't cover the remainder of the debt, MKR token is created and auctioned off to to cover it.
Since this devalues MKR, holders of MKR token are incentivized to ensure that the system always runs at a sufficient surplus to cover these events and that loans are liquidated early enough to prevent having to dip into the surplus.
In addition to this, interest on loans are paid in MKR token and destroyed when the loan is closed, which also incentivizes holding MKR.
> If you sell the Ether, you no longer have the Ether. If while you're holding the loan the price of Ether goes up, you benefit from that. Of course, if the price of Ether goes down, you're at risk of having your loan liquidated, but that's a requirement imposed by the system to maintain the Dai peg.
Their governance calls are open, you can join and watch them be money scientists.
Here's the link to the most recent governance call https://forum.makerdao.com/t/agenda-discussion-scientific-go...
Not necessarily. Our equivalent to a savings account (caderneta de poupança) had a return above 6% per year until a couple of years ago (it's down to slightly above 4% per year now). It's very easy to beat that (for instance, the 5-year prefixed federal government bond has a return of 6,39% per year at this moment). So a return of 6% per year would be considered normal around here, not a red flag.
This level of transparency is the very opposite of Madoff.
But we don't want financial transactions to be fully automated and immutable. We want escrow services to be subject to laws, we want a judicial undo and modify button. So if you remove the whole "no one can change history" bit because it's an anti-feature, it is unclear why we need blockchain in the first place.
I'll redily accept that my understanding of blockchain is limited, so I'm open to being told why I'm wrong. Consider this a strong opinion weakly held.
I don't know enough about the financial industry to know if a real actual problem is being solved here. I do assume that any bank in this industry is already required by law to keep a record of all transactions, and that it's all digitally processed and stored. You'd have to hire an auditor to verify the blockchain software too, and even on the ongoing basis, to audit the infrastructure to make sure it hasn't been improperly modified.
This is true, but it's not necessarily organized in a straightforward way, and standards can differ from organization to organization despite everyone attempting to follow GAAP. This is why entire firms exist to audit large corporations.
> You'd have to hire an auditor to verify the blockchain software too, and even on the ongoing basis, to audit the infrastructure to make sure it hasn't been improperly modified.
Not necessarily. Each transaction on the blockchain is cryptographically signed, so all you would need to audit for each transaction is that the claimed signatures verify. It's not possible, even through a bug, to forge a signature if you don't hold the private key.
No. You wouldn't.
And cryptocurrency does not provide immutability anyway. Remember the DAO Ethereum fiasco where they lost a bunch of money and decided to roll it back.
What did happen was a superset of users decided to create a new ledger to run in parallel, containing transactions up until but not including the loss.
The market determined the new ledger to be more valuable
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-have-froz...
pegged decentralized synthetic digital bearer assets.
That's a mouthful. Each word has a purpose and together they describe a hugely innovative and valuable technology. It is my belief that there are very, very few people who have an understanding of how important this innovation is.
And too few people understand the importance of the more simple digital bearer asset, of which bitcoin is the prime example. This still surprises me, especially amongst HN readers, who are certainly more insightful than the average bear when it comes to most existing and emerging technologies...
Surprises me. but also gives me hope.
There is so much room to grow. Long road. Massive upside.
We are seeing a flourishing system of financial experiments being built as truly anything goes in this new digital worldwide ecosystem. Not all of the experiments will work but at least they will be tried and the market will decide whether or not they are useful and valuable to this digital society.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/benjessel/2020/01/06/ernst--you...
https://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-total-cost-of-o...
Why not just vote to make it a million percent?
I've commented in the past here that the use of public blockchains to automate the functions of clearinghouses and escrow services will be a huge cost reduction for many industries such as finance. The technology as of today is not ready to handle that use case, but with the developments currently in the pipeline for Ethereum v2, progress is being made in that direction.
If you look at what MakerDAO is doing with the Dai stablecoin, they've proven that it's possible to create a synthetic asset closely pegged to the dollar purely through financial incentives, and they did it all just using Ethereum v1. A holder of Dai can earn 4% APY through a Dai Savings Account, and a vote is currently in place to raise the rate to 6%.
I personally find it incredible that an asset exists on the blockchain that's equivalent in value to USD, with a higher APY than you can get from any US bank. And because everything is on the blockchain, there's a public ledger of exactly how much is being collected in interest from those who are collateralizing their Ether for a Dai loan, how much of that interest is being paid to savings account holders, and how much is being collected by the system as surplus. It's the closest thing we have right now to a decentralized bank.
Whether or not you buy into the technology, it's improving by the day and more and more use cases and applications are being tried out and built. If all you see in blockchain is money laundering and speculation, you haven't been paying attention.