It's not decentralized if there's a trusted oracle.<p>So many schemes in the "blockchain" space fail to understand the core problem Bitcoin solves. Bitcoin solves trust. You can transact Bitcoin with anybody and you don't have to trust a single person, even the sending party. If someone sends you Bitcoins and the transaction is 6+ confirmations deep in the blockchain, you can be certain that you own those Bitcoins and nobody else can take them from you without your private keys. Not a bank, not a government, not a miner, not a "core dev", not a full node operator. The only necessary assumption is that 51% of the hash power is not conspiring against you.<p>Whenever you see a new "blockchain" scheme coming out, ask yourself who you need to trust for it to work. If the answer is not "nobody", then it is not worth any more of your time.
> The tokens have been continuously sold off in small batches by the Dai Foundation. Currently about 55% of the total supply has been distributed, with the foundation still having another 45% for future fundraising.<p>And here where the "Scam" alarms go full retard, basically panicking the whole building I'm living in. The concept is yet to be finalized, let alone functioning and yet these guys started selling "tokens" a la "DAO".<p>I wonder when regulators are going to strongly hammer the ICO (or the crypto equivalent of IPO) by a 15 year of jail and catching bad jokers inland and overseas.
I don't see stability as a goal right now with leading cryptocurrencies (ETH, BTC). In fact, promoting cryptocurrency as a storage of value right now seems off
too: one day, not today.<p>More people will store more wealth in cryptocurrencies as the number of applications grow. Being able to pay for my Chipotle, or renew domain names, or buy stock in companies, or run a website all make me more willing to keep more of my wealth in ETH. Eventually stability will come as the relative utility of a currency pushes volume up.<p>The last thing I want is stability as a believer in the Ethereum platform. I want the price of Ether to go up pursuant with the growing utilities Dapps provide.<p>In the interim, solutions like Bitpay that pay merchants in USD over BTC are brilliant. They allow merchants to buy into cryptocurrency without accepting the volatility risk until it's low enough.
So this is trying to create a currency that is democratically controlled by the "MKR" holders - I don't really understand how this is fundamentally different than something like the US dollar. Sure, the central bank controls a lot of the system, but they are also 'democratically controlled' by our ACTUAL democracy.<p>Now, I am sure there will be an argument made that the central bank is beholden to special interests, who use their wealth and power to control our democracy... but won't that same thing happen with these 'MKRs'? The wealthy and powerful will have more control over them, and will certainly use that power and control in their own benefit.<p>It seems like a common flaw in all of these 'alternative' systems people create to replace large scale institutions; they might seem different than what we have now, but when you scale it up to match the size of the current system they are aiming to replace, you end up seeing that the systems are nearly identical in practice.
I think one of the difficult things is that volatility (and speculators) do play a role in a coin succeeding, as speculators make the 'network effect' problem of altcoins easier to overcome.<p>There's next to zero reason for a random merchant to accept an altcoin unless there are people using it, and unless that coin is known. Speculators and volatility are very big generators of noise that gets the coin noticed and helps bring in actual for-the-sake-of-the-coin holders, which then makes the coin itself more attractive to a merchant (as there are people who wish to use the coin).<p>As much as coin purists may like to speak derisively of speculators, I believe that altcoins would be nowhere without those who have come in to the game to try to earn money off of the volatility.
I think it was Ven that was the concept I liked where you build a currency on a bunch of commodities targeted toward stability. Clive Robinson on Schneier's blog had previously described that as the best solution then I stumbled on Ven.<p><a href="http://www.popsci.com/worlds-most-stable-currency-is-backed-by-carbon" rel="nofollow">http://www.popsci.com/worlds-most-stable-currency-is-backed-...</a><p>So, my scheme was to put something like Ven in a sane country such as Switzerland under a nonprofit/foundation with strict rules aimed at preserving stability, security, innovation of ecosystem, and cap on admin overhead. If that works out pretty well, we can try a decentralized version of the same thing. Meanwhile, centralized can already work very well. Just eliminate as many incentives to mess it up as you possibly can to make it better.<p>The big brains haven't explored this option enough since they want a crypto/algorithmic solution to hard problems instead of using the well-understood systems of law, accounting, and safe investments. There's also a strong preference for decentralize stuff highly-likely to fail vs centralized stuff way better than what we have. I think that's ideological or even youth-related.
A better whitepaper than the one linked in the article, <a href="https://github.com/makerdao/docs/blob/master/Dai.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/makerdao/docs/blob/master/Dai.md</a>
,,While the volatility of Bitcoin has decreased significantly since it launched in 2009, it is still not a good unit of account or a stable store of value. ''<p>I will gladly accept his BTC from 2009 and give him USD from 2009 for the 2009 price.<p>Sorry, but stability is not holy grail in itself. I would prefer constant supply to it for long term store of value