People hold dollar-backed stablecoins because they believe the US dollar to be the most durable unit of account on the planet.
All the proof you really need for that is that most crypto users outside the US still consider the value of their crypto tokens in terms of how many US dollars it’s worth.
The author of this article talks about this being a “parasite” to the US monetary system, but it’s hard to think of a better thing that could’ve happened for the US. Not only has it reinforced that dominance… it’s also driven hundreds of billions of dollars of US treasury bills purchases from providers like Tether and USDC.
Stable coins are mostly backed by Treasuries, so it’s engineering instability: a run on coin redemption triggers treasury sales which raises interest rates which triggers a run on any asset backed by treasuries like coins, and so on.
It’s like the 2008 crash: people speculating because they think housing never goes down, except a market-scale drop can trigger an uncontrollable rush for the exit. With banks and companies permitted to hold coins as assets, the impact is broad but impossible to regulate ex ante, and difficult to model monetarily.
It’s what I would do if I were Putin and Xi, frustrated with the western controls on the banking system (that have mostly enabled us not to have to go to war).
Keep in mind stablecoins aren't a product built for Americans, they're built for people outside the US financial system to give them access to some of the benefits of the US's relatively solid money.
If it's a fraud, then it's one with a working product.
In 2022 when confidence in stablecoins plummeted after the Terra collapse, $20 billion in Tether was liquidated in a month - $10 billion of that in a single day: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/tether
Through that black swan event Tether did its job, processing redemptions for collateral dollar for dollar.
I can’t really think of a better, more concise pitch for cryptocurrencies than “ideally you could just have a foreign bank account that your country cannot touch.”
I'm sure you forgot that your country can send a uniformed guy to seize said foreign bank account on a whim. Or you think you'd keep it for long, while being roughed (or simply stored) in a dark cellar?
You are misinterpreting his comment. He is saying that the idea that you need to store your money in a foreign bank account to keep it safe is an argument in favor of cryptocurrency, because that way you don’t need to rely on a foreign bank at all.
As someone from the US who's traveled all over the country for fun, I can assure you there are loads of delightfully unique places and rich communities that think and act quite differently from each other.
But yes I could see how work travel only could make them feel like carbon copies - both from the mindset you'd be in and from the types of places you might only go for work.
Places you go for work are mostly corporate parks in the suburbs. Of course they all feel the same. I had the same experience and that was why - rarely did I get to visit the big cities. I went to places which had Chili's and Target and Outback Steakhouse.
On the odd times I visited DC or SF or Toronto - really amazing and different experiences.
Both the DC and SF metro areas have Chili's, Target, and Outback. Can you articulate what made DC and SF "really amazing and different experiences" from one another, beyond vibes? Asking as an American who's pretty sure it's all the same here (and has traveled internationally to places where it's not).
You can get just about any kind of food - because just about every culture in the world is represented. You can find some of the more home-y type menu options too for the same reason. For example, Greek restaurants where I am at don't generally have Taramosalata (carp roe dip). Due to the shorter flights to Africa, the is a much larger African population in the DC area. One trip, I bought some Nigerian movies at a gas station. Then there's all the historical stuff - tomb of the unknown soldier, Vietnam wall, Air & Space Museum, etc. As I wandered around town on one of my early trips there, I keep seeing things I thought were very familiar - and it turns out at least some were because Bethesda (HQ'd nearby) had done an awesome job recreating apocalypse versions of them in Fallout 3 (which I played a lot of).
SF:
I went cycling a few times with a friend of mine. We went over the Golden Gate bridge, which was amazing. Also to the top of some mountain (big hill?) overlooking the city. What a view! I like to fish, and dropped a line near my hotel and caught a leopard shark. I saw an old Japanese homeless man wheel a little red wagon on a pier near the Mozilla HQ (near the many-billion dollar company I was visiting), and catch a pile of Jacksmelt using a spark plug as a sinker. There is a lot of excellent Asian-influenced dining options - my personal favorite is Lilo Lilo Yacht Club. I got to see a tent city of what appeared to be techies - all really nice huge family-sized tents, well dressed and apparently happy and well fed. One time, I was having a drink in a bar in SFO, and chatted up a guy who had just come from an executive meeting with a bunch of VP's and CTO's of Sony, where chewed them out about their usage of Kubernetes. I saw a shirtless man walking around with what appeared to be pony boots? I assume part of the gay scene.
Now - you may not like all that, but you are not generally having those experiences near suburban corporate parks. Yes, they have Outback Steakhouses, but they have rather a lot more going on.
Hmm, thanks for going into detail. My point wasn't so much that you can experience everything a city has to offer in a corporate park. It was more that most US cities offer roughly the same things.
I know I can get Greek and Asian food in both St. Louis and Denver. I just confirmed that both cities have Greek places with Taramosalata; I know from dating a Chinese girl for a year that both of those cities have extremely authentic Asian places. I've seen gay men walking around in at least Denver and Calgary (not even US).
Now, being able to browse and buy a Nigerian movie at a gas station instead of needing to get it online is something that might qualify if it's truly exclusive to DC. The techie "tent city" in California is probably unique to California, you've got me on that one.
Having visited plenty of U.S. history/military/science/etc museums across several midwestern/western states, those could probably be argued either way. On one hand, of course every museum will have different artifacts/exhibits/etc that mean it's not quite the same at every one, and there are individual facts that you could learn at one but not another. On the other hand, I think the likelihood of coming across something in a US museum that noticeably expands my human experience is lower than the likelihood of that happening in another continent's museums.
Well if it is the unique things, there is still many unique things in the big cities. If you are discounting the vibe, I guess I understand why you are disappointed. The vibe is a big part of what makes big cities feel so distinctive.
If you think DC is samey, maybe your expectations around uniqueness are higher than your average person's. Lol. I have not gone out drinking (much) there, but I would wager it would not take long to end up with insane stories about people you read about in the news.
> If you are discounting the vibe, I guess I understand why you are disappointed. The vibe is a big part of what makes big cities feel so distinctive.
The reason I'm "discounting the vibe" is because "vibe" doesn't mean anything. It's a non-word. You need to say something specific to argue that a place is unique. What makes up the "vibe?" The fact that you heard someone playing music on the street, which you assume is indicative of the entire city and no other city? A style of graffiti that may or may not be special? Saying you got a "vibe" from a place tells me you had some experiences there that you associate with it. I only drank root beer while I visited Texas and now I remember my trips to Texas when I drink root beer, but that doesn't mean the root beer I drank and Texas would have anything to do with each other for anyone but me.
(That's why I said "beyond vibes," as in "in more depth than vibes," not just "aside from vibes." Because you could be right, the vibes could be different, but the word "vibe" is no way to explain it to someone who doesn't already know. So I can't know if your idea of a "vibe" is really unique or not without knowing what you actually mean by that.)
> I have not gone out drinking (much) there, but I would wager it would not take long to end up with insane stories about people you read about in the news.
I don't drink alcohol at all. Trying to see politicians act irresponsibly is probably something that's easier to do in a place where lots of politicians live/work, yeah.
There are actually no Chili's or Outback or Applebee's or most national chains you can think of in San Francisco. You said "metro area", I have no idea what this means in this context given most people like the city itself, not the sprawling strip mall towns on the peninsula which is not San Francisco. The city limits are pretty well defined here.
My saying "metro area" was in reference to the fact that your artificially drawn tax border defining "city limits" do not mean you live in a vacuum separate from the surrounding area or that your city has a unique culture just because it doesn't have one chain or another within its tax border.
If you want to celebrate your birthday at the moment earth reaches the same spot around the sun as when you were born, then we’d all have the same issue - we’d have to celebrate it 6 hours later every year, reseting every 4 years.
February 29 is very much a new day… which simply doesn’t exist on non-leap years.
there's a (small) chance that the moon landing was the first time a living organism successfully chose to visit another celestial body in the entire history of the universe.
"basically a photo op" is such a strange way to think of that.
I think you're confusing store of value with medium of exchange... most people don't really store value in currencies long term - usually they just keep enough to pay near term bills.
Stores of value are things like stocks, bonds, treasuries, real estate... and yeah commodities like gold and bitcoin. People don't care so much about volatility if they're planning to park their value there for a long time.
I’m not saying fiat currency doesn’t store value… just that, of the functions of money, it’s better as a medium of exchange + unit of account where you care way more about price stability and liquidity.
A good store of value is scarce, durable, transferable and divisible - and I think most people agree that you compromise scarcity to get price stability.
We don’t have to take anyone’s word on this though you can just look at what endowments and wealth funds hold to see what people believe are the best stores of value: https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/investments/#/
We pretending miners and exchanges can't be legislated out of existence at a scale that would render use of said coin virtually impossible? Edit: Apparently someone is, in fact, pretending just that. Nifty.
> We pretending miners and exchanges can't be legislated out of existence
Yes? I am assuming you are either not very technical, or do not know a lot about how cryptocurrencies work.
Disclaimer: I am not a proponent of cryptocurrency, I don't own any cryptocurrency, and I am only arguing the technical issue.
If you're talking about banning the hardware, it's probably possible to essentially stop the production and sale of ASIC miners since they have no other purpose, but that's only one type of hardware. People would still be able to use regular CPUs and GPUs to mine.
If you're talking about completely banning the participation in a blockchain, this would be impossible to detect as long as the traffic is encrypted -- if you constantly look for IP addresses and keep a blocklist up to date, you could essentially null-route them (breaking DNS is not enough).
If you do all of the above, which is a lot of work and already completely untenable to sort out on an international level, you still haven't solved the issue of darknets, like Tor or any similar solution.
Take the Silk Road for example, probably one of the most famous darkweb marketplaces for illicit drugs ever. We can only guess how much money and time the FBI spent building a case, and even when they managed to find him by bending every opsec weakness they could find, they still had to ambush him in a library and catch him with his laptop unlocked.
My point here is that nobody claims darknets will protect you completely, but it raises the bar immensely for the amount of necessary work to catch you. If blockchains (currencies) were made illegal globally, it's a pretty safe bet this would accelerate technology for doing the exact same things as before, just in an anonymized fashion.
Then what? Do you illegalize writing code that facilitates cryptocurrency? Illegalize darknets?
Just saying "make it illegal" is naive. It chooses to ignore the massive violations of our rights that would have to be made to not even succeed, but create the appearance of succeeding.
If you have a concrete proposal on how it would be technically possible to ban miners and exchanges, without also banning encryption and anonymity online, I'm listening.
Sad news friend. I am extremely technical and was mining btc 18 months before Starbucks would let you buy a cup of coffee with it so yeah I know how it works. What modern internet funbux aficionados consistently fail to grasp is there isn't a coin in existence that cannot be trivially decoupled from the larger economy through nothing more complicated than removing market-makers incentives to accept them as value tokens. Go meditate on the xkcd where a crypto geek gets worked over with a wrench for his password until enlightenment is achieved.
Ahhyeah I see now it only has a few upvotes - there must've been an algorithm glitch because it was the #5 story on the front page when I clicked on it.
The topic is relevant, but the format of long Q&As with a lot of info on the people and the company, which to me as a random HN reader feels irrelevant, plus the click-baity title, made it look out of place on the front page.
This comes up near the top when you search "Google Maps My Saved Places" and now a random list with 1 saved place - the USDA Cereal Disease Lab in Minneapolis, MN - has a whole bunch of views.
People hold dollar-backed stablecoins because they believe the US dollar to be the most durable unit of account on the planet.
All the proof you really need for that is that most crypto users outside the US still consider the value of their crypto tokens in terms of how many US dollars it’s worth.
The author of this article talks about this being a “parasite” to the US monetary system, but it’s hard to think of a better thing that could’ve happened for the US. Not only has it reinforced that dominance… it’s also driven hundreds of billions of dollars of US treasury bills purchases from providers like Tether and USDC.
https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports