… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.
Before I start, just a little bit of background on me so you can understand how biased I am (😅): I’m a 16 years old programmer and I won a few crypto hackathon/funding rounds and I made a lot of friends in the field. It allowed me to get quite a bit of ETH/XMR along the way!
I see cryptocurrencies getting a lot of hate, rightly so for the number of scams, shitcoins, NFTs bullshit, “governance”, DAOs and all those often useless & snob terms.
However the founding ideas of decentralisation and freedom with your money are very appealing to me. Smart contracts are really interesting for creating your own banking operation and tokens can represent anything! It’s a world of possibilities to play with, and you get to build something useful for people!
I’d just like to add a bit of nuance tho: I see a lot of apps being built and what’s really making me laugh is the lack of open-source, decentralisation and auditing on privacy. Granted, there is a lot of fake promises, but it’s like everything, you have to find the talented people to follow.
I find it fascinating to build unstoppable, decentralised, user-first apps. I just hope that web3 stays true to its founding principles.
Hope it was interesting, tell me what you think!
EDIT: title+typos+the game is not comfortably played in Act 2
The concept of decentralized finance infrastructure without outside regulation and governance is interesting in a vacuume.
In practical reality, it's by definition, a return to the century+ old unregulated financial wild west. Scams and stupidity were rampant. We had to create all the regulations and restrictions we're used to now, for people to be able to use the system instead of their mattresses to keep their money.
Is using the mattress such a bad thing? Nobody is going to care as much about your money as you will. If you fuck up and lose everything you are devistated. If the CEO of Wells Fargo looses your money they have no need to care because the government will force their slaves to make it up to you, or not. At the end of the day they can choose not to help you and you can do nothing about it.
Edits: spelling
Even if the CEO of Wells Fargo loses your money, you will still get at least $250,000 of it back (assuming you had deposited that much) via the FDIC.
The FDIC will honor their obligations because to do otherwise would be to risk a massive bank run, of the sort that started the Great Depression. This wouldn't just screw you over, it would screw over the ultra-wealthy too, and we can't have that.
At the end of the day, someone can just not take your mattress money and you might be out of luck. Your mattress can burn down and all that money is gone, which is far more likely than Wells Fargo taking your money and then the FDIC not giving you anything.
The FDIC only has enough to "insure" ~0.7% of all bank deposits under $250k. They pray that there is never a huge bank crisis. With the failure of SVB and the other 4 banks earlier this year the FDIC would have been totally out of money several times over already. The only thing that stopped that was the bigger banks like JPMorgan being told to buy them out. The FDIC is a house of cards just waiting to collapse. They only have enough money to convince everyone that they will be safe when in truth a few banks failing at once wouldnt even leave the couch to look for pennies in.