It’s easy not to have sympathy because these folks are the ones railing against the banks and the government and the establishment and police - confident they don’t need them because they’re all in on a system the vast majority doesn’t understand the first thing about. But they’ll demean and criticize anyone who suggests their magic free money machine might not be all it’s cracked up to be. They’ve been warned so many times. Like the anti-vaxxers turning to ivermectin. It’s honestly just an episode of r/WinStupidPrizes.
Even now they’re rationalizing - US banks offer 0% interest and took $12B in overdraft! See how much worse that is? Well except the $12B is out of $18T in assets so DeFi hacks cost 1400X as much per user.
In fact 10% of all TVL in DeFi was stolen this year. That means if you’re not making a 7% return for inflation and a 10% return for risk loss, you’re losing money in real risk adjusted dollar terms invested in DeFi. 17% APR in DeFi is equal to 0% in real dollar terms.
"have fun staying poor," he said, clicking on the coin roulette, eyes never leaving his plugged in android tablet, physically hot to the touch from the max CPU load.
"i am going to retire in 5 years. have you heard of prove-your-steaks? its gonna change crypto. you can get 20% back, just lock up your starving kids Earned Income Tax Credit for a year, and you'll make $500!"
"have you heard of this new shitcoin? probably not - i know you retired from crypto! haha...anyway, it exposes you to upside leveraged of @PISSCOIN and is tethered to the stable-genius coin. its basically free Unisex-swapped tokens."
"hey. some guy on discord was helping me install a chrome plugin to manage my coins and now my $400 in life savings is gone...are you still good with computers?"
You cannot get margin called on a cash account, because you cannot make positions that are not 100% collateral covered, unless you have 25k. Then you can do that, and trade more than 3 times a week (and don't have to wait til settlement)
Pension funds don't deserve to go bust, but shouldn't be bailed out if they fail to diversify their portfolio.
There are a lot more safe-gaurds in investing, because all these games have been played before.
But those require consent too - with crypto, someone can, and will, irrevocably steal your funds without possible recourse.
.. and indeed the UK and other countries have banned the OTC sale of particularly bad ones, such as binary options. There is some effort to prevent people selling overly fraudulent or risky products to the general public, even if it's leaky.
Is that really a fact, that 10% of the value locked into DeFi was stolen this year? I would think that most of the TVL would accrue to the more blue chip protocols (Aave, Uniswap, Compound, etc.) and to my knowledge these haven't been affected much by these big hacks.
DeFi Pulse says there's just under $100B in TVL. [1] About $10B was lost and stolen this past year depending on where you look - $7.7B according to this article, but I saw $10B circulating too.
I don't think DefiPulse has everything. Here's a few more off the top of my head, though I'm sure there is more:
- $5.5 billion (TVL on Eth L2s via L2Beat)
- $4 billion (ETH 2.0 staking contract)
- $17 billion (Polkadot staking)
- $16.5 billion (Cardano staking)
- $36 billion (Solana staking)
The article's figures include the centralized Turkish exchange which made off with ~2.6B , so I don't think it's fair to consider it the same kind of thing.
> Rug pulls have emerged as the go-to scam of the DeFi ecosystem, accounting for 37% of all cryptocurrency scam revenue in 2021
So 37% of $7.7 billion is $2.849 billion.
> All in all, rug pulls took in more than $2.8 billion worth of cryptocurrency from victims in 2021.
> It’s important to remember that not all rug pulls start as DeFi projects. In fact, the biggest rug pull of the year centered on Thodex... In all, users lost over $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency, which represents nearly 90% of all value stolen in rug pulls. However, all the other rug pulls in 2021 began as DeFi projects.
The graph shows $2.6 billion was lost with Thodex. So that leaves $0.249 billion that was lost in projects that were rug pulls that began as DeFi projects.
I do believe the medium-term inflation goal of 2% will be reached, and that this is simply a function of supply chain disruptions. I was using the most recent CPI data. You can also get a 7% yield on treasury Series I bonds. [1]
The exact value of inflation this year is controversial and depends a lot on how you measure it, but you can replace it with 6 or 8 or whatever you think the correct value is without altering their point.
Even now they’re rationalizing - US banks offer 0% interest and took $12B in overdraft! See how much worse that is? Well except the $12B is out of $18T in assets so DeFi hacks cost 1400X as much per user.
In fact 10% of all TVL in DeFi was stolen this year. That means if you’re not making a 7% return for inflation and a 10% return for risk loss, you’re losing money in real risk adjusted dollar terms invested in DeFi. 17% APR in DeFi is equal to 0% in real dollar terms.