Note that "favorites" are public - I can view your favorited links and comments and you can view mine. (You like arthropod illustrations huh?) But your list of upvotes is private, so you can treat that like a private list of favorites.
I'm surprised people aren't connecting all these layoffs with their root cause: the increasing cost of capital. Naturally, projects that were economically profitable only at a very low cost of capital could turn unprofitable at a higher cost of capital, destroying value instead of creating value. Shifting resources away from such projects is the logical thing to do, but if you end up with a surplus of resources, the only other possibility is to trim those resources. Discussions about how much cash Google has on hand are completely irrelevant in my view.
MakerDAO is basically a community run central bank on the Ethereum blockchain. You can lock away assets you own (currently only ETH but eventually even your house will work as a collateral). By locking away your collateral you can withdraw DAI which will be generated based on your collateral. This is comparable to how banks worked in the past where they only printed money for which they had gold as collateral.
You need to at least have a collateralization of 150 %. If you fall below that, your collateral will be seized, the same amount of DAI that you own will be bought from the market and burned. The rest of your collateral minus 13 % liquidation fee will be send back to you.
At any time you can pay back your loan in DAI or add more collateral.
This mechanism keeps DAI stable at 1 USD.
The entire mechanism runs entirely on the Ethereum blockchain.
Know why is that cool?
1. You have a 100 % decentralized token that you can keep in any crypto wallet that supports ERC-20 token (Be your own bank)
2. You have a token that isn't volatile so it is safe to pay out salaries or buy groceries with it.
Stablecoins that are pegged to Fiat money like the USD still have one centralized aspect though. The currency that they are pegged to is still controlled by centralized organs (e.g FED, European Central Bank etc).
The cool thing is, this stuff is just getting started. MakerDAO is just a few month old and pegging to the USD is really just the beginning of a new era.
In the long term, imagine you have a stablecoin that is pegged to the purchasing power of North America or Europe or any other region of the world.
It's totally possible. The data feeds are the hardest part but there are solutions for that.
Imagine having a currency that is pegged to the purchasing power of your region without any governmental control. This is where we are heading.
Great explanation. I heard about it too but didn't understand it this way. May be I don't have finance background. Any resources you think are great to learn more about this ?
Price feeds provide the data. They get normalized (removing extreme values) and I think there's some parameters in regard to sensitivity that they can tweak. The trusted accounts for these feeds are voted by all MKR holders. The overall system is very much like a community run central bank.
Could this result in ETH splitting up into two currencies again, like it did last year? If so, there will be tax consequences / realized gains for those who sell out of the version they don't want to hold... further complicating things.
Almost certainly not. The expected outcome is that everyone will update their software, and the old fork will die.
Unlike last year this is not a controversial fork. It's just a planned part of the network upgrade process. No groups are planning to boycott the fork.
(It's futher enforced by code in the old fork that will cause it to die shortly, so even if a group of people wanted to keep running the old fork, they would actually have to hard fork it themselves to remove the 'ice age' anyway. So it would have to be a concious act, rather than just people forgetting to upgrade)
Slight hyperbole. Figures you'll find are on average as the deals are negotiated individually with each cable company.
Most are actually paying $20-25. At the cable company that I worked for, the regional incumbent provider for an area that served golf resorts and the surrounding community, I think it was roughly $36.
