Until we find the API for reality, many of these decentralized projects are hopeless.

That was nicely put. I see so many of these projects promising to end with banking, bureaucracy, but forgetting that at some level the bits and bytes have to be input or acted on by a human.

Another question is if things like this will poison the well and scare people away permanently.

Vastly oversimplified (and possibly wrong), but if you want to know more, do some searching for "yield farming".

The point is that they want to keep their BTC because they think it's going to go up, so they take out a loan with their BTC as collateral rather than directly spend their BTC.

Um, what?

If I take out a mortgage to buy a house, the loan amount is not going to be larger than the value of the collateral (the house).

If I take out a loan to buy a car, the loan amount is not going to be larger than the value of the collateral (the car).

What kind of loan are you thinking of?

Pray tell of these new cars whose value does not plummet the moment they are driven off the lot.

E: woah! .06 seconds to the first downvote to a Dow thread comment on a two day old post! I’m out.

If you put up $X in FOO_COIN as collateral and FOO_COIN starts tanking in value, the contract is supposed to auto-liquidate once it hits a certain point. But there is absolutely no guarantee that this can find a buyer. So the "guaranteed" collateral recovery is not exactly guaranteed.

When the market starts making big moves downward the liquidation bots have a keen eye on which positions are at risk, watching and predicting the oracle updates, and within a block or 2 (~30 seconds) of a position being vulnerable have the deal all closed out. It can even be all done in a single transaction bundle that calls the liquidation function, pays back the debt, takes the collateral, and sells it on a dex, all in one go.

The market price for the collateral would have to drop more then 20% in the span of that 30-seconds for it to not be profitable for the liquidator.

That's not to say it's impossible for this to fail, the biggest and sharpest dumps happen during liquidation cascades. But a failure is in the category of 'black swan event', and not something that is seen with regularity.

If it happens, it's not a black swan event.

Black swans are rare but actually exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

The term predates the discovery of black swans;

> However, in 1697, Dutch explorers led by Willem de Vlamingh became the first Europeans to see black swans, in Western Australia.[9] The term subsequently metamorphosed to connote the idea that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century, John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.[10]

Evergrande almost went belly-up as the prices of their real state fell sharply because they sold so much of it to cover their credits.

The financial crisis from 2007 was because the collaterals were nowhere as sound as they were sold for.

Don’t get me wrong I think it’s mostly a house of cards but crypto finance is just traditional finance on steroids IMO.

There are a lot more backstops. Traditional finance can have this problem, but we can install human systems to limit the blast radius of things. As you say, it is traditional finance on steroids.

Crypto enthusiasts seem to think it is the opposite. People tell me that defi loans are "zero risk" because of the automatic collateral systems and I just laugh and laugh.

Everybody who claims there's "zero risk" is either lying or blind to the risks. You can't get those large yields with zero risk.

You can get upper-class rich, seven figures rich, comfortable house, vacation home, early retirement rich, but you can't get Private Jet Rich, Masters of the Universe Rich, Look At Me Rich.

If you want to be Rich you need to to resort to something like playing the lottery, or starting a unicorn startup, or exploiting large numbers of people for your own profit, or crazy "technically it's not a pyramid" schemes like crypto and DeFi.

SWE at the staff level will get you low to mid eight-figures rich [0] by the time you're old with safe, traditional investing. Sure you aren't Masters of the Universe Rich, but you're still filthy rich.

And how many crypto people are going to beat low-to-mid eight figures? Maybe if you put $100k into bitcoin in 2013, but I'd bet there are more SWEs making $500k+ than there are people who put that much into crypto early enough (and weren't already filthy rich).

[0] Low-to-mid eight-figures in today's dollars. Nine figures in future dollars. Assume $500k income, putting half away from 35 to 65, getting 7% (4.1% after 2.9% inflation).

I think this is a deal-breaker for get-rich-quick types.

Nobody should have the power that having a billion dollars gives you

Let's pretend for a moment that I agreed with you on this. Your proposal to address the situation is to take all that money, which is currently at least somewhat distributed, and concentrate it in a single organization which already claims a license to steal, kidnap, and murder. I really don't think you've thought this through…