MicahZoltu (u/MicahZoltu)

MicahZoltu commented on MakerDAO’s “DAI” stablecoin is breaking, as predicted prestonbyrne.com/2018/01/... · Posted by u/matthewbauer

erikpukinskis · 8 years ago

A stablecoin isn't a store of value. It's an instrument for holding pretend Fiat. It's a way for holders to pretend they are the Fed, and say "Now I have USD! You can have it. Just sell it back to someone else eventually because it's pretend."

It's an index basically, not an actual commodity.

(Except of course in the sense that Everything Is A Commodity in the crypto world.)

MicahZoltu · 8 years ago

Eh, I wouldn't quite call it an index. While I agree that it isn't _actually_ 1USD (or whatever it is pegged to), it is backed by other assets (in the case of DAI today, it is backed by ETH) and the system is setup such that there should always be more ETH backing the DAI than necessary to make everyone whole.

MicahZoltu commented on MakerDAO’s “DAI” stablecoin is breaking, as predicted prestonbyrne.com/2018/01/... · Posted by u/matthewbauer

cornyNetHandle · 8 years ago

It may attempt to trend towards the dollar over time, but will it be trending that way during the time that you personally need it?

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", springs immediately to mind.

edit: Also, pegging a cryptocurrency to the dollar seems almost comedically perverse. What is it for?

MicahZoltu · 8 years ago

As DAI gains trading volume and gets listed on more exchanges you'll likely see it stabilize. Any active trader who believes the price pressures will work has incentive to buy DAI when it is below 1 USD and sell DAI when it is over 1 USD as this is a low-risk trade (opportunity cost only). Right now, there isn't much volume so it is pretty easy for someone to come in and want a bunch of DAI or to liquidate a bunch of DAI and cause the market to shift suddenly. It will then take a few minutes for the market to correct, and with per-transaction fees the market is hesitant to correct small errors due to the lack of volume.

TL;DR: The more volume DAI has on public exchanges, the tighter it will hold its peg.

MicahZoltu commented on MakerDAO’s “DAI” stablecoin is breaking, as predicted prestonbyrne.com/2018/01/... · Posted by u/matthewbauer

pjbyrne · 8 years ago

> They are claiming that over a sufficient period of time the coin will trend towards its target

This is not what the MakerDAO team, nor any other stablecoin shill, is claiming. They are claiming the system "ensures" that the stablecoin is "a money that will always maintain its purchasing power."

"Ensure" and 'always' don't mean "trend towards over time." They mean always, as in all the time. If their intention is to sell a different product, I can only suggest they make more representations which are a little harder to falsify.

MicahZoltu · 8 years ago

If what you want is "something that always is worth _exactly_ 1 USD then you are asking for the unatainable. As others have mentioned, it is _impossible_ in an open market to have a true 100% no variability peg. Markets work on supply and demand and the instant that one exceeds the other the peg will drift.

A good stable coin will have pressures that push that drift back toward the target, but it is impossible to stop the drift from ever occurring. The USD itself presumably targets some basket of goods, but it drifts away from that basket of goods. So even the USD isn't a "stable coin" by your definition.

MicahZoltu commented on MakerDAO’s “DAI” stablecoin is breaking, as predicted prestonbyrne.com/2018/01/... · Posted by u/matthewbauer

MicahZoltu · 8 years ago

The thing the author seems to be confused about is that when people talk about stable coin they aren't claiming that the market can't be irrational. They are claiming that over a sufficient period of time the coin will trend towards its target. In the case of DAI today, that target is 1 DAI == 1 USD. This means that while the market may irrationally buy/sell DAI for more or less than 1 USD, over time it will trend towards 1 USD.

For the vast majority of people looking for a stable coin, this is exactly what they want. They don't care so much that on a particular exchange DAI is worth more or less than $1, they care that in a week, or a month or a year DAI will still be worth "about a dollar" and not "100x USD" or "x/100 USD". DAI has the mechanisms necessary to make it profitable to drive the price of DAI back toward 1 USD if it loses its peg and those mechanisms have been shown to generally work in the wild so far.

I have personally made a few bucks when DAI transiently slipped its peg in the past. There are people actively authoring bots that profit off of DAI losing its peg and as those bots become more efficient and gain capital, I think we'll see DAI slip its peg less and less often.

MicahZoltu commented on MakerDAO’s “DAI” stablecoin is breaking, as predicted prestonbyrne.com/2018/01/... · Posted by u/matthewbauer

mtgx · 8 years ago

Wait, tether is fractional now? Wasn't one of their big promises that Tether is always backed up 1:1 by the dollar?

MicahZoltu · 8 years ago

Tether claims to be full reserve. The contention people have is that there is little to know proof that they are _actually_ full reserve. Also, there is risk in Tether that some government will seize all of their assets (there is lots of precedence for this).

MicahZoltu commented on 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack etherscan.io/address/0xb3... · Posted by u/campbelltown

int_19h · 8 years ago

Do you guys plan to address these at some point?

Actually, let me rephrase this. For better or worse, Solidity is a shipping product now, so you're constrained in your ability to make breaking changes. However, its status as the "official" blessed EVM language can be changed without breaking compatibility. So I guess a better question is, are you planning to replace Solidity with a language that has more emphasis on safety in its design (even if it's called Solidity 2.0 or whatever... clearly it would have to significantly break backwards compatibility).

Now, I know that most feedback that you hear is to just take an existing functional language. But after looking at Solidity and EVM specs, I also see why this is not necessarily feasible. And, as one of your contributors has pointed out in this thread, functional style can often be too high-level to keep track of the underlying opcodes and their gas cost.

But even sticking with the imperative approach, I think it's clear that there's a lot that could be changed, starting with adopting some key principles like "explicit is better than implicit", "don't pick a default unless it's absolutely safe" etc. Looking at the design of Solidity, it's clear to me that the primary inspiration was JS with a dash of C++. The one thing that's common to both is that they allow and encourage "clever" code. Perhaps looking at Ada, Eiffel, and even COBOL for inspiration would be more appropriate for this niche.

In any case, if you're interested in specific suggestions on how to redesign, I do have some thoughts, and would be happy to share them.

MicahZoltu · 8 years ago

There is an EIP that is slated to land in the upcoming hardfork that adds an EVM opcode for effectively "const" call that is enforced by the runtime: https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/pull/214/files

There are also proposals out for a number of the issues you have mentioned. I believe that people _do_ want to make Solidity into a better language for safe code authoring, but some things require EVM changes which requires a hard fork, and other things simply require time (discussion and engineering). The impression I get is that at this point there _are_ some voices of reason involved in the Solidity language process, but it will take time before those voices can enact all of the changes listed here.

Also, keep in mind that when Ethereum launched it did so like any scrappy startup, with an MVP that was "good enough" to move things forward. Now that Ethereum is a leading contender in the blockchain race it is starting to have to pay for some of those early decisions.

MicahZoltu commented on Show HN: RepoCreator – GitHub Project Scaffolding as a Service repocreator.zoltu.io/... · Posted by u/MicahZoltu

glrx314 · 9 years ago

Does this tool only replace the magic string from the source code or will it also replace directory names?

For example if I had a sub-folder in my project named "magic_ProjectName_magic/src" will it prompt me to change the name of the sub-folder?

MicahZoltu · 9 years ago

It will replace strings in folder names, file names and in any text file (as identified as text by GitHub).

You can see an example here: https://github.com/Zoltu/Templates.GradlePlugin.Groovy/tree/...

In that case, both the folder name and the file name have magic strings in them, so both will have a replacement prompt.

MicahZoltu commented on Show HN: RepoCreator – GitHub Project Scaffolding as a Service repocreator.zoltu.io/... · Posted by u/MicahZoltu

MicahZoltu · 9 years ago

I have written a handful of templates but only 3 are sponsored (which means they show up for everyone) and only one has 2 favorites (the threshold for something being considered "popular" right now).

This comment makes me realize that I should turn the "popular" threshold down to 1 favorite so more things show up for new users until the application starts getting some traffic.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll get that change pushed in a bit!

MicahZoltu · 9 years ago

I have pushed the change. Once caches are refreshed you should see ~11 template repositories without having to search GitHub.

MicahZoltu commented on Show HN: RepoCreator – GitHub Project Scaffolding as a Service repocreator.zoltu.io/... · Posted by u/MicahZoltu

amjith · 9 years ago

The site looks good. Landing page has good description about the tool.

I don't see many templates except that gradle one, do you have more or is that yet to come?

MicahZoltu · 9 years ago

I have written a handful of templates but only 3 are sponsored (which means they show up for everyone) and only one has 2 favorites (the threshold for something being considered "popular" right now).

This comment makes me realize that I should turn the "popular" threshold down to 1 favorite so more things show up for new users until the application starts getting some traffic.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll get that change pushed in a bit!

MicahZoltu commented on Show HN: RepoCreator – GitHub Project Scaffolding as a Service repocreator.zoltu.io/... · Posted by u/MicahZoltu

MicahZoltu · 9 years ago

I will try to monitor this news article and am happy to answer any questions anyone has.

Please also feel free to use the feedback button on the page to report a bug or request a feature. I developed this application mostly in a vacuum to fulfill my own needs, so I'm sure I missed some basic features that are likely obvious to other people.