Recently mentioned:
Defi is a wilderness—just like early Bitcoin was a wilderness of scams, Ponzis, and children’s games, but with added VC corruption. Early Bitcoin was an obscene shitshow from pirateat40 to Gox, to name only a few of the most notorious early-Bitcoinland embarrassments that remind me of defi today. If you venture out into defi today, put on your waders and prepare to get knee-deep in bull-excrement.
I disagree, at least regarding Pirate@40, it was
market manipulation which worked (for a while); pool a lot of BTC to one guy who makes
whale splashes at the biggest exchange,
at the expense of everyone else trading. When he went
insolvent due to taking on more than he could chew (in profit payouts) his former backers cried
ponzi.
A
large proportion of defi, in a nutshell. (
Some of the rest of defi has some awesome ideas, such as building no-KYC permissionless exchanges.)
P.S., how was pirate different than a16z,
et al. now? The latter are surely much more sophisticated, and “respectable”. I mean: If you peer through the layers of grand-scale financial manipulation, and set aside the implementation details, how are they
essentially different?
The main difference seems to be how we interpret the words, to me "scam" or "ponzi" is associated with original intent to take the money and run, not how a failed plan ending in bankruptcy eventually plays out.
I agree about the grand-scale financial manipulation, it's basically the same thing, the difference it's being sanctioned by the banking system.