Hey, remember Cryptoland? That trailer/promo movie that was completely bonkers?
The TLDW - That’s Kira summarizing the news about Cryptoland, which is that there is no news (i.e. the people running it have clammed up and vanished, which happened pretty much instantly after their terrible AMA back in January.)
Enidigm
2802
I will say there’s some fictional material to mine for anyone creating fantasy or scifi worlds with these Gen 2 crypto types - a society of shit eating grin bros all trying to out smug one another, built on a society of near infinite Ponzi schemes, with so many being schemes coming and going so quickly and so much paper capital always in circulation that it never actually faces the music, and so “works” and is sustainable like some weird leaf that never falls to the ground but is held aloft forever by pure hot air.
Watch the first few minutes of this Munecat video for some ideas along that line!
Charles Stross’ Accelerondo kind of does this. During the course of the book, the matter of the solar system slowly gets converted to computational power, which is inhabited by increasingly complex AIs (and it turns out this is a normal thing that happens to advanced civilizations- the galaxy is filled with them). It also turns out that since we are a Capitalist system, those AIs are fixated on increasiy complex financial systems, constantly trying to outdo each other, because money/power is everything. And us little meat-brains stand no chance. Good stuff.
That’s one of my favorite recent sci-fi novels, to be read along Peter Watts’s stuff for maximum despair.
Will Panama fare better than El Salvador?
I think it’s time to haul out an oldie, but goodie…
Panama being well known for its stringent AML controls.
Aceris
2810
Stuff has value if its valued on rigged exchanges and the controllers of the system can extract a fraction of that value as suckers put money in the box.
Tim_N
2812
The fourth biggest stablecoin in the market is depegging at the moment, will be interesting to see if it recovers:
Tim_N
2813
A formerly top 10 coin called Terra or LUNA is -53% in its 24 hour price movement (at the time of writing):
JoshL
2814
Wow, I hadn’t been aware of Luna before. Tether’s stablecoin claims to be stable because there’s an actual USD behind each $1 coin (obvious BS, since there’s $83 billion of Tether outstanding, but at least that’s their rationale).
Luna says this:
One thing that sets UST apart from other stablecoins is that it is an algorithmic stablecoin. This means the network uses automated mathematics to constantly adjust the UST supply, keeping prices at $1. To achieve this algorithmic equilibrium, the supply of UST and LUNA are linked. Adjusting the supply of one crypto to be bigger makes the other crypto’s supply smaller, and vice versa.
So… there’s no reserve, just a promise that they’ll devalue their other coin if the stablecoin goes down. So, the stablecoin went down, which means the other coin has to go down. Brilliant. Apparently they’re buying bitcoin to create a reserve so the whole thing doesn’t spiral to zero, but… haha, bitcoin has lost like 25% of its value in the last month, so… I bet that’s going well.
Tim_N
2815
Yes, putting stablecoin reserves into btc has got to be one of the stupidest things I have seen in crypto (and that’s saying alot!).
I’m watching with popcorn to see what happens. If BTC keeps tanking then they could be in real trouble. Of course it’s sad to see scammed people lose serious money, but it’s always great to see ponzi schemes die.
Thrag
2816
It’s like a ponzi scheme made of other ponzi schemes.
I’m not sure how Tether expected to get away with it. Having to hold cash on a 1-1 basis is a huge undertaking.
What could possibly drop worse than Bitcoin’s price?
