DeFi

After witnessing a few (heroic, IMO) attempts and + more real-world examples of fiat’s shortcomings, I’ve come to believe that ‘Decentralized Stablecoin’ might be a misnomer.

Multidisciplinary software engineer. First Citizen of The Internet. Building @gandalf.

My opinion might stem from not being deeply embedded in the state-of-the-art (aka ignorance). 

However, the term “stablecoin” implies guaranteed stability. And if we’re really interested in PMF, the dollar is the currency to peg it to (first).

It just feels like you can’t get 100% stability without some centralised entity decreeing it so. 

In any case decentralised stablecoins will at least always struggle with latency issues. The algorithms designed to adjust supply and demand in response to market forces *will* lag behind real-time conditions.

And that's if its even possible to design a system that can react desirably to all market occurrences. It's like, even with auto-scaling applications (to respond to all manner of traffic conditions) - all the inputs are known, decision making & resource allocation is centralised, yet, it still fails every now and then.

This seems fine for sharing pictures. But is it fine for "world's most used digital currency"? Idk.

I can't think of any ways of reducing this lag without introducing some centralized oversight at critical levels of the stack. There's always a tension between decentralisation and speed/immediate consistency. 

Maybe decentralised ML? Idk. Maybe. But all of that is likely still very far off.

I don't think a world where we have centralised stablecoins and decentralised currencies (of varying volatility) is a bad one either.

- Centralised stablecoins >>>>> USD >>>>>> the fiat in my country.

- Sparks, Sats etc are cool too. People are already spending them, knowing fully well that their value fluctuates relative to all other currencies (which is how currencies have always behaved).

I’m increasingly convinced that what we’ll see moving forward are centralized stablecoins and decentralized cryptocurrencies with varying levels of relative volatility to all other currencies.