News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Report on Stablecoins [pdf] by tremarley on Monday November 01, 2021 @08:35PM (#29075353)
The only people that have no issues with centralisation are the people who are benefiting from it.

World Bank estimates 31 percent of people globally do not have a bank account. Decentralisation helps these people.

When you deposit money into a bank account, it is not your money. It is the bank's money. You aren't allowed to use it, or spend it how you like without the permission of your bank. Crypto doesn't have this issue.

There are financial tools that only people with net worths of over $100 million have access to, such as market making, arbitrage, liquidations, insurance lending etc. Crypto solves this.

99.9% of banks in traditional finance run their systems on outdated, closed source, barely maintained and bug ridden software. Contracts, money and agreements than can happen in seconds in crypto, takes weeks and months in centralised finance.

If centralised finance had the potential to be more efficient, there should have been more innovation decades ago. Centralised finance needs to catch up.

Re:Report on Stablecoins [pdf] by arcticbull on Monday November 01, 2021 @09:59PM (#29075967)
> World Bank estimates 31 percent of people globally do not have a bank account. Decentralisation helps these people.

Banking helps these people. Remember a fully-realized BTC transaction fee (pricing in electricity and mining hardware) is right around $250 each. That's a non-trivial amount of the GDP per capita of a lot of these countries you're alluding to.

Poor folks are also the most vulnerable to the massive volatilities of this so-called currency.

Real, centralized solutions help these people. Solutions like M-Pesa [1]. And Postal Banking, which a hundred years of legacy solving exactly these problems. [2]

> There are financial tools that only people with net worths of over $100 million have access to, such as market making, arbitrage, liquidations, insurance lending etc. Crypto solves this.

It certainly does not haha. It makes them less efficient, which is why not a single crypto-powered business in the last 14 years is competitive with any centralized solutions except in the areas of regulatory arbitrage or by throwing risk models out the window.

> If centralised finance had the potential to be more efficient, there should have been more innovation decades ago. Centralised finance needs to catch up.

It's obviously more efficient, and pretending otherwise doesn't change that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system

Re:Report on Stablecoins [pdf] by ryan_lane on Monday November 01, 2021 @10:08PM (#29076030)
The lack of a bank account doesn't have to do with centralization, for the most part, and decentralization doesn't matter if you can't spend the decentralized "money" without turning it into the local currency, because to do that, you need to have a bank account.

Crypto doesn't help bank the unbanked.

Re:Report on Stablecoins [pdf] by bluecalm on Tuesday November 02, 2021 @02:06AM (#29077637)
I personally know people who were running a HFT market making fund when their net worth were below one million. It's true it's not the easiest field to enter but that's the case for many others as well (medicine, law, competitive bike racing etc.).