Why illicit?
Tell me more about flash lending, I've seen interesting things being done with uniswap and I find defi fascinating!!
The reason I say it verges on illicit, is that the most profitable flash-loan trades I've read about usually depend on some form of market manipulation and special knowledge about price oracles. They're not illicit in their own right, and can be a great tool for arbitrageurs I imagine.
https://www.coindesk.com/defi-exploits-flash-loans-industry-...
I still don't get it. Can you point me to some actual examples?
Do you mean people are front running contract using data provided by oracles? I would not see that as illegal, just as removing friction coming from oracles that have too much latency.
If I know how an oracle calculates a price for a pair, I can probably alter the oracle's value for it (with a lot of volume from your flash loan), without affecting other exchanges value for it. This lets you create arb opportunities for yourself: https://www.trustnodes.com/2020/02/15/hacker-makes-360000-et...
Here's an explanation I just googled for that includes oracle manipulation: https://hackingdistributed.com/2020/03/11/flash-loans/
Again, there are certainly legit applications of flash loans, the market is still learning. This looks like a legit triangle arb: https://medium.com/@kentmakishima/the-43k-defi-magic-trick-f...
I think these exploiters giving some of the money back to their victims testifies to the shadiness of their tactics: https://www.longhash.com/en/news/3407/Why-Do-DeFi's-%22Flash...
Front running is a whole other beast :)
Other ideas:
- Crypto lending/staking (risky)
- Build blockchain based games (e.g. https://roobet.com/)
- HODL (seriously, a lot of the money made is from buying and waiting)
- Community-building (YT Channel, newsletter, blog, meetups, etc.)
- Arbitrage (success stories are not googleable)
- Flash-loan strategies (this verges on illicit, ymmv)
- Build a fund. If you have a wealthy network that's not techy, there's probably interest.
- Crypto-art (NFTs etc, budding community)
- Mining. This is profitable if you have access to free/cheap power
- Build technology that actually leverages blockchain -- streaming micropayment-based business models, truth estimation via prediction markets, distributed computing (Filecoin/RNDR/Codius/GNT), idea X where crowdsourcing is key to success. I agree that most of this stuff can be built with a centralized model, but that doesn't mean there isn't money to be made going the crypto route. In some cases the crypto aspect might be the interesting thing that builds your top of funnel and makes users actually use it. After all, real crypto enthusiasts are wanting for valid use cases.