Absolutely not a crypto person but I've been following this team called noice.so, so far I think they've been doing the right thing in the space, pretty new and think they are operating at the right level of abstraction.
This article is here to tell us that stablecoins give us what we wanted all along: a faster, more convenient, and more secure value transfer experience.
Those things are nice I guess, but if you had asked me in 2021 what people wanted out of Web3, I'd not have listed those things. We wanted an economy based in types of value which better align with our values than fiat does.
Stablecoins are just a fresh coat of paint on the same problem as before: Money that is issued by a select few in furtherance of schemes that will make that few richer, with no reason to expect that those schemes will benefit the masses--masses who are expected to value that money just because we're told to.
I don't disagree but it's a bad take. For most folks who are American, they've never had monetary choice of any kind. That's why most Americans still even don't understand competing currency, while the rest of the world does. It's a serious IQ handicap for USA. Stablecoins will, at very least, introduce the concept in such a way that doesn't threaten our delicate minds. Also, as proposed, licensed Stablecoins will be under the US Treasury, representing movement away from the Fed.
Stablecoins do provide some choice regarding which (or, who's) money you want to use. The accounting is better. It's a new financial system. Stablecoin performance makes payment networks we are using today look stupid. Consider that you can open for business today. Wifi is all you need. No proprietary equipment or special approval. Don't have to talk to anybody at any bank. And you can be receiving payments.
Obviously there are efforts to mitigate Stablecoin performance, and not just network performance, but all the way around. For example nearly all the (apparently) most popular phone "wallets" are slow as fuck now. They must be purposely bad. It's difficult to mess up crypto unless you're trying. They have been able to mess up BTC, but there are still good projects out there which haven't been compromised. (Laser eyes and insults and dumbness culture are not really part of BTC, those are its capturers.)
The real problem with stablecoins is the enforcement regime that will be constructed to bully the users of it. We can rest assured that under Democrats the enforcement regime will quickly turn into Stasi all over again, just like it did under Operation Chokepoint 2.0, with Obama/Biden and their FBI JTTF and international criminals committing most of the crime in crypto, and persecuting you for it. It will be VERY easy to frame people for somethign like money laundering, whichis of course the crime of not telling Bank of America how you did that.
I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing.
There is not a mention of that in the article.
Is it actually supposed to just be microtranscations paid with cryptocurrency? Where's the "decentralized" part of that?
Anyway, instead the best I can see this article seems to be talking about how it turns out people aren't using blockchain for buying things, and makes the (apparently) shocking conclusion "the one thing people always wanted: money that just works."
Stablecoins can, when interest rates are reasonably above zero, support themselves with the interest on the money. That could potentially work. The industry tradition, however, is the promoters stealing the money.[1] Usually by investing it in something risky, with the intent of keeping the excess profits but dumping any losses on the stablecoin holder.
Trump has a stablecoin, "USD1". It's partly backed by Trump's memecoin, "TRUMP" Really.[2] What could possibly go wrong?[3]
The article brings some valid points. There's a lot to talk about in Web3 UX (as well as AI UX) and this is where the hatchet is buried.
Having said that, to me this article seems written with the help of ChatGPT. That is not bad per se but I feel it should be mentioned (eg. Venkatesh Rao's Sloptraptions)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 39.4 ms ] threadNot an endorsement for “web3,” which seems to be a sort of centralization of the decentralized technologies at this point in time, unfortunately.
Those things are nice I guess, but if you had asked me in 2021 what people wanted out of Web3, I'd not have listed those things. We wanted an economy based in types of value which better align with our values than fiat does.
Stablecoins are just a fresh coat of paint on the same problem as before: Money that is issued by a select few in furtherance of schemes that will make that few richer, with no reason to expect that those schemes will benefit the masses--masses who are expected to value that money just because we're told to.
Stablecoins do provide some choice regarding which (or, who's) money you want to use. The accounting is better. It's a new financial system. Stablecoin performance makes payment networks we are using today look stupid. Consider that you can open for business today. Wifi is all you need. No proprietary equipment or special approval. Don't have to talk to anybody at any bank. And you can be receiving payments.
Obviously there are efforts to mitigate Stablecoin performance, and not just network performance, but all the way around. For example nearly all the (apparently) most popular phone "wallets" are slow as fuck now. They must be purposely bad. It's difficult to mess up crypto unless you're trying. They have been able to mess up BTC, but there are still good projects out there which haven't been compromised. (Laser eyes and insults and dumbness culture are not really part of BTC, those are its capturers.)
The real problem with stablecoins is the enforcement regime that will be constructed to bully the users of it. We can rest assured that under Democrats the enforcement regime will quickly turn into Stasi all over again, just like it did under Operation Chokepoint 2.0, with Obama/Biden and their FBI JTTF and international criminals committing most of the crime in crypto, and persecuting you for it. It will be VERY easy to frame people for somethign like money laundering, whichis of course the crime of not telling Bank of America how you did that.
I thought web3 was supposed to be some kind of decentralized compute, where rather than run on your own hardware or IaaS/PaaS you could make use of compute resources that vary wildly day-to-day in availability, performance, and cost, because they were somehow also mining rigs or something? But it's "decentralized" because there's not one entity running the thing.
There is not a mention of that in the article.
Is it actually supposed to just be microtranscations paid with cryptocurrency? Where's the "decentralized" part of that?
Anyway, instead the best I can see this article seems to be talking about how it turns out people aren't using blockchain for buying things, and makes the (apparently) shocking conclusion "the one thing people always wanted: money that just works."
Trump has a stablecoin, "USD1". It's partly backed by Trump's memecoin, "TRUMP" Really.[2] What could possibly go wrong?[3]
[1] https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/
[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/usd1-the-cryptocur...
[3] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/
Having said that, to me this article seems written with the help of ChatGPT. That is not bad per se but I feel it should be mentioned (eg. Venkatesh Rao's Sloptraptions)
Disregard HTML, CSS, JS and other nonsense; Embrace RISC-V machine code.