Quote from: The Sceptical Chymist on Today at 04:49:00 PM

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on Today at 09:44:09 AM

Change the word "Abra" to "Celsius" and that entire story could have been copy and pasted from a year ago. I am 100% certain we could post the same story this time next year with a dozen other platform's names substituted in instead.

Yep. This is de-fi if I'm not mistaken (and please pardon my ignorance, but I never got past all of those extremely attractive advertised yields), and I've always figured that the market for crypto lending is based on pure speculation, i.e., people aren't borrowing it to finance houses or cars or whatever but to trade with. And if that's the case, it doesn't seem like a sustainable business model to me--or a sustainable investment vehicle for the lenders.

But take a look at how many members we have on this forum who are desperate for money; desperate enough that they'll either scam for pennies or join some of the scammiest bounties in the hopes that they'll be rewarded with worthless tokens. If you take that into account, it really isn't surprising that when a newly-formed company offers returns so much higher than the stock market (or any other market for that matter), they pounce on it. It's understandable but unfortunate.

And while everybody is chasing these outrageous returns and the companies eventually go bust, what happens? The regulators start taking notice and crypto comes under high scrutiny. It's ultimately not good for any of us in the long term.

I would like to point out that even thought it makes sense that the most of the lending volume of those platforms can be purely speculate, I still have hopes that in the future more people would move from centralized debt towards decentralized debt or at least crypto related loans.

It is something I have made before, I asked a relatively small loan (using Bitcoin as collateral) and I did not used it to gamble on shit-tokens but rather I bought a tablet I wanted to buy for a while. Paid back my debt and interest and end of the story. That is what it should be if we wished for the cryptographic ecosystem to start getting some of the market pie off the hands of banks.