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Reserve – A flexible pool of stablecoins designed to reduce risk
- ignoranceprior 6y agoOh, is this what Leverage Research turned into? Interesting.
- ipsum2 6y agoInteresting. I see some of the same members from that organization, but it doesn't seem strictly related to it? For context, Leverage Research was this pseudo-science psychology woo/cultish org made by people related to the rationalist movement. See: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8j4zirwfhWhT8nwsc/a-critique-of-leverage-research-s-connection-theory https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8j4zirwfhWhT8nwsc/a-critique... for some background.
- throwaway4good 6y agoWhat is it running on top of (Ethereum, its own blockchain)? Is it similar to MakerDAO?
- isaacimagine 6y ago> Initially we are developing on the Ethereum Network but ultimately we expect two-way bridges to enable complete interoperability of the Reserve token across all major smart contract platforms.
- throwaway4good 6y agoThen it would be very similar to MakerDAO?
- krzkaczor 6y agoYes, in principle it looks very similar to MakerDAO but I think some details are different. For example DAI is pegged to one USD to make it as useful as possible but "The Reserve token will initially have a target value of $1.00, but is designed to go off of the peg from the US dollar in the long term.".
- max_ 6y agoIts on Ethereum (guessing from the metamask client). It's nothing fancy its like an SDR for cryptocurrencies[0] [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_drawing_rights https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_drawing_rights
- tornato7 6y agoIf it's running on Ethereum then users will see $5-20 transaction fees and >20 second transaction times. That's not a great experience for first time users
- fbrusch 6y agoIt is now possible to use so called layer 2 (L2) solutions like zkrollups, considerably reducing fees and increasing throughput (https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html). Loopring is already functioning on mainnet. (https://loopring.org https://loopring.org)
- nathias 6y agoNice, I hope it gets to the point when it can leave Ethereum.
- sneak 6y agoI'm surprised that being associated with Coinbase (of "we're NOT going to agree that black lives matter, so stop asking already" fame) and the giant scam that is USDT is not regarded yet by these people as reputation damage.
- vntok 6y agoA company wants to focus on their product or service instead of getting entangled into the clown festival of social justice politics, a topic that has nothing to do with said product or service.
- dannyw 6y agoThe people calling ‘USDT’ a scam probably haven’t used it. For the past 5 years, Tether has been the most amazing way for me to transfer dollars across exchanges, or just to hold during market drawdowns. The fact that it is unregulated, and weakly subject to AML/KYC is a feature for me, not a problem. My money, my business, not the governments.
- arcticbull 6y agoNo, the people calling USDT a scam know that it's backed by nothing, and Tether has no obligation whatsoever to redeem them, ever (it's in their T&Cs). Their banking partner, Deltec, in the Bahamas is chaired by the man who created the Inspector Gadget TV series. [edit] Tethers are chuck-e-cheese tokens that became so integral to the entire cryptocurrency market (90% of ETH inflow and 80% of BTC inflow are Tether, not dollars) that nobody can do anything other than pretend they're legitimate. Because if they're not - and they're not - then the whole thing falls down.
- Judgmentality 6y ago> Their banking partner in the Bahamas is chaired by the man who created the Inspector Gadget TV series. This sounds incredibly fitting for a cryptocurrency.
- sneak 6y ago
- Tepix 6y agoI had this rather simple idea the other day: Why not create an artificial index over the last X days and trade that instead? No matter how crazy the price changes of a crypto coin are, the X day average will always be dampened because today's changes will only be 1/X of the change of the average.
- Geee 6y agoThat's not a bad idea. Wrap Bitcoin 120 days moving average into a stablecoin. It could probably be done in a decentralized manner similar to MakerDAO/Dai.
- iSnow 6y agoSounds like it would break down real fast if it just says "we track BTC avg over X days" and has no means to defend it. Consider the following scenario: your index (let's call it BTCEMA) tracks BTC at $30k but BTC does a crypto thing and drops $5k in a day, so it's now below the index. A lot of traders would sell your BTCEMA tokens to buy more real BTC expecting a recovery or get into stable coins expecting a further drop. At any rate, the exchange price of BTCEMA would drop due to sell pressure. Your indicator has "broken peg" which is an ugly situation that threatens every artificial instrument in that space. The whole miracle mixture for algorithmical and asset-backed stable coins is to prevent such a situation to happen for a longer time. It's a bit too much to explain but they try to defend against this in different ways, e.g. reducing supply to hike price. In your case, you'd need to buy BTCEMA from the market to prop up price for as long as it takes the moving average to digest the sudden price jump. You'd find yourself in the situation of the Bank of England trying to defend the Pound in 1992 and only making Soros rich instead.
- Geee 6y agoWhen it removes the peg to the dollar, how it's supposed to be stabilized? "bunch of random collateral" isn't quite convincing. How are people going to trust that the collateral, like tokenized bonds, are actually valuable? I'm not going to trust such a system. Money based on trust is dead. The only purpose of this currency is to enrich those who invented it.
- arcticbull 6y ago> The only purpose of this currency is to enrich those who invented it. As is tradition in crypto. It's kind of implicit. [edit] I mean, think about this rationally. You're creating a new token, that doesn't have revenue, a business model, or any way of generating income. And yet it is "100% asset backed, and funded by top Silicon Valley investors." Those investors aren't in it for their health. They don't care about decentralization and trustless whatever. They want to make an ROI. How can you make an honest ROI if you don't have income?
- vntok 6y ago> How can you make an honest ROI if you don't have income? This seems like a very curious view of the world to me. Do you believe that people who buy houses and sell them at a profit 20 years later are dishonest?
- arcticbull 6y agoIf you're an institutional investor in real estate, you can use real estate to generate a nice steady income, via rental. People who aren't parking capital or laundering money tend not to invest in houses to keep them empty.
- WA 6y agoHouse price appreciation is a side effect. You can still collect rent. Or have a roof over your head.
- muratsu 6y agoI think the OP meant speculative. Most jobs create value, some don't. Some people just have a hard time digesting and wrapping their heads around making money without creating actual value.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoI want Monero but as a stable coin. Can someone just bring that out so we can have a crypto currency that is actually useful as a currency?
- arcticbull 6y agoMonero is on its way to being delisted from all exchanges, and outlawed.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoMonero exists in a global market. There are many many exchanges all over the world. On top of that, Monero can be trivially exchanged for other cryptocurrencies without the use of custodial/permissioned exchanges. The cryptocurrency genie is out of its bottle.
- bulgar73 6y agoNot all, and if, we also have DEX :)
- ajkdhcb2 6y agoPure propaganda with no evidence. Major exchanges like Kraken are still trading it even in USA. Even if it were banned it would have little long-term impact. Literally impossible to stop decentralized swaps unless they also cripple BTC. it would be very powerful actually for people to realise how unstoppable it is.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoWell, you don't have to have a standalone coin to get the features you desire. For example the AZTEC Network, which is a privacy protocol, can be used with any Ethereum-based ERC20 token, including algorithmic stablecoins like DAI, and soon Reserve. A demo a couple years ago showed AZTEC being used to conduct privacy-protected DAI transactions for the first time: https://twitter.com/avsa/status/1068536063470125056 https://twitter.com/avsa/status/1068536063470125056 Since then, AZTEC's privacy technology has become more efficient in terms of gas, and more effective at protecting privacy, going from protecting merely the privacy of amounts, to protecting the privacy of amounts transferred and sending/receiving addresses. AZTEC is also developing a zk-Rollup, which increases Ethereum's maximum throughput from 15 tps to 3,000 tps, so that these private stablecoin transactions can be done at scale (though not 3,000 tps, since privacy comes with a computational and state storage overhead, but still much greater than 15 tps).
- treelovinhippie 6y agoGuarantee they're breaking some rule for listing Sam and others on their website as "investors". If not, that's super dodgy that Coinbase Ventures allows their portfolio companies to do so.
- abalaji 6y agoSounds similar to basis. [1] I wonder how they are going to get around the unregistered security problem. [1] https://www.basis.io/ https://www.basis.io/
- ac29 6y ago"Furthermore, the Reserve network is, in a sense, a new kind of government. We are supplementing - and in some cases wholly replacing - the government function of money" From their Ethics page. Should go over well with regulators.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoRegulators work for us, and should be answerable to the people through their democratically elected representatives. Their job shouldn't be to protect and expand the control the state wields. It should be exclusively to further the public interest, whether that is through expanding state power, or relinquishing it to make way for new non-governmental mechanisms of socio-economic coordination. I understand your point from a practical perspective, but I think it's important to point out how far the situation of needing to worry about how regulators will react to decentralization technology is from the ideals of democracy.
- TheColorYellow 6y agoWhat proof do you have that decentralization technology furthers public interest? I'm sorry, but the institutions are in place today precisely because it is society that upholds them or tears them down. The gears may turn slowly when it comes to implementing change, but they very much are answerable to the public in democratic societies.
- CryptoPunk 6y agoMy point is regulators shouldn't be reflexively opposed to decentralization and the retreat of state power. Their agenda should be exclusvely to advance the public interest, and it's by no means established that centralization and state control is always and everywhere in the public interest. >>I'm sorry, but the institutions are in place today precisely because it is society that upholds them or tears them down. That's one theory. Another is that the institutions that are in place are there because that was the best we could do with the technology of the time. Representative democracy combined with a market economy was as decentralized as we could go 200 years ago with the communication/coordination technology available at the time. Another theory is that institutions are a trial and error process, and when they start to fail, people naturally form alternatives. A reflexive anti-decentralization position by a party wielding regulatory power is reckless and not in the public interest. And society holds up decentralized institutions just as much as it holds up state-based ones. The former could be argued to be an even more direct expression of society's will, as the maintainers of decentralized institutions are the users themselves, rather than delegates that form their own insitituonal interest groups.
- bastawhiz 6y ago> Crypto-as-money is still young. We have a lot to do. Do you remember Napster? Tether is kinda like Napster – it's taking off, people love it, it's a little sketchy, and it's probably not the design that will last. We don't want to make the equivalent of Kazaa – another blip in the history that ultimately doesn't ultimately work out. The challenge is to build a platform that's as robust as BitTorrent and as great to use as Spotify and Netflix. For something on an about page, this copy draws some extremely frank comparisons. > If users all have to go through a KYC process, this significantly limits the viability of the token to permit free movement of money across borders. KYC processes are, essentially, the law. Governments go out of their way to do this to cut down on financial crime. Regardless of whether you believe these laws are useful or just, I find it difficult to believe they'll have any success trying to work around these laws. Governments (in general) do not like it when folks try to create loopholes: I wouldn't bet on a project whose stated goal was to avoid complying with the law.
- bouncycastle 6y agoKYC laws essentially treat everyone like a criminal or a terrorist. They turn our financial institutions into surveillance centers. They are also ineffective, see https://www.regulationasia.com/aml-controls-are-ineffective-at-stopping-crime-says-policy-expert/ https://www.regulationasia.com/aml-controls-are-ineffective-.... Meanwhile, the real criminals pass through KYC with stolen ID.
- ddon 6y agototally agree.. once my account on Revolut was blocked, without explaining why, and was kept locked for 6-7 months. during these months they asked all sorts of documents, and then they closed the account and the rest of the money which was on that account were sent to some strangers :) and again, without any explanations. now, copies of my documents are sitting somewhere on their servers waiting to be hacked and distributed to criminals, who will use them to pass through KYC :)
- malux85 6y ago
- henning 6y agoI'd rather hold banks, regulators, and governments accountable so that I can safely and sensibly transfer funds rather than having to rely on bullshit nerd Ponzi schemes.
- stickfigure 6y ago> hold banks, regulators, and governments accountable Worldwide, historically, this approach seems to have a poor track record.
- rohannn 6y agoThey're not actually accountable for their actions. History shows this. Fwiw though, I think that stablecoins are pretty much only good for trading pegs and an alternative to international remittances.
- dang 6y agoPlease make your substantive points without calling names. Perhaps you don't owe "bullshit nerd Ponzi schemes" better, but you owe HN better if you're posting here, because that kind of downgrade causes threads to get significantly worse. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tptacek 6y agoThe web page for this project refers to Altman as the President of YC, but that's a role he hasn't had for quite some time; how up-to-date is this website?
- chx 6y agoRule of thumb: the old bro club + mention of crypto: run like hell.
- mastermojo 6y agoThe idea is very cool. The criticism against existing cryptocurrencies being too volatile is very valid. I can't help but wonder if this just contributes a "15th" stablecoin to the "14" competing stablecoin standards. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ My personal expectation is that the existing frontrunners, Bitcoin and Ethereum, will stabilize in price as the percentage of retail speculators decreases and the percentage of institutional investors + users increase.
- xalava 6y agoThere are many confusions mixed with stereotypical startup culture in the first video. A global stable currency is not : - Dollarization, that is an already relatively common phenomenon (Zimbabwe, Argentina...) with controversial effects. Definitely not a silver bullet for hyperinflation. - A payment system, that requires to work tightly on UI/UX, on cultural preferences, to adapt to local infrastructure... Exactly the reason M-pesa succeeded where many silicon valley startup failed. And then, there are the technology choices, the stability mechanism, the regulatory aspects ...
- pjc50 6y agoOne hilarious thing about Tether is that it implicitly acknowledges that the dollar is the source of stability for unstable crypto, and that crypto needs to be "dollarised" to deal with its volatility.