PS. This post is not a proposal, it is a way to get your perspective on LUNC’s future and your long-term vision after this crisis. I’m a rather insignificant LUNC investor, and here are my 2 cents (or my 1 USTC, if you pardon the dad joke).
Progress goes in circles.
Regular electronic money that we have in our regular bank account is not backed by cash money. In EU we still have a lowerbound; a bank must back at least 1% (if I remember well) of electronic EUR with cash EUR. But, for example, in US and UK, there is no legal requirement of this kind. So there is no actual hard relationship between electronic USD and USD, or electronic GBP and GBP.
It is also not so rare for banks to spiral to death as recent history shows. Like a big P0nzi scheme, it theoretically suffices that a big enough number of accounts try to cash their electronic money out at the same time to start a spiral. Nevertheless, the peg between electronic money and cash money is mantained with no oscillation.
Why?
I think a main reason is to be sought in the use common people make of electronic money and, consequently, in the value they confer on it. Trivially, people treat it as cash, hence, it is worth as cash. It is not about faith in the banking system, but it is faith in the fact that other people will give electronic money the same value. A common hallucination. A fixed point. An unwritten agreement that is held up by people’s need of stability, necessary condition to plan for the long term. Electronic money is worth something because it fills a need, and it has therefore a value that is at least partly endogenous.
Algorithmic stable coins take a totally different approach to stability. They treat value as exogenous, and try to control it. From the point of view of a control scientist, they are very fascinating examples of feedback control, and it is amazing to see how robust stability actually was for terra, given the high uncertainty of the process that was under control (people).
What I found less appealing (actually, very disappointing), was instead the reason why people were buying in. For the biggest part, it was mere speculation. As a result, the value of UST or LUNC was not much tied to the use one can do of them, like for electronic money, but just to the profit they may lead to.
Profit in USD. Not in LUNC.
It is thus not strange that, while electronic money does not lose peg after a bank collapses, UST did. In the first case, the value is endogenous, in the second it is exogenous.
I think that we are now in quite an interesting situation. In a twisted way, this may also be an opportunity, not only for LUNC, but for crypto in general. I think that we have to move forward from speculation and create value for all the people and all everyday business.
We have to make the value of LUNC endogenous, and stop reasoning in terms of USD value, or how much USD we can gain from it, but start reasoning in terms of the value LUNC may have for people. Taking the “slogan” from Terra Station for Everybody :
1 LUNC = 1 LUNC
Meaning that the value of LUNC should only be defined by the use people make of it.
Clearly, this opens a question that is often eluded:
what is left if we take speculation off?
Speculation does attract people. But it cannot be a driving force forever, especially after two or three speculation bubbles and a death spiral. It also does not pay in the long term if one has other visions for crypto, as nobody will take it seriously.
But if you read here and there about the value of blockchains beyond speculation, you read of financial freedom, of web3, of decentralization. You read of global communities and of internet services with no intermediary. In the same spirit of the tv show Silicon Valley, you read of a web where you own your own data. You read of a revolution that will not take place before all this is made accessible and usable by everyone for every everyday stuff.
You may say that dapps are already out there implementing some of these functions. Yes, but we need something that is usable and useful to the masses, and for all their everyday business. I think @ZeZya idea (Terra Station for Everybody) was in this direction. And I think this is the right direction.
While I may not second @ZeZya plan as a whole, I think it contains nice core ideas. For instance, what pays facebook now is your data they sell to bring you ads. What would pay a “decentralized facebook” is user’s LUNC. As @ZeZya said, you shall pay to post or to like. That may seem outrageous. But, if you want to own your data, you obviously need to be the one that pays. And if you are the one that pays, you retain control.
Nowadays people may still prefer to post for free and give away their personal data. But this is changing, and we must be ready. If you think about it, also at the dawn of web1 there were many people, also very eminent, saying that the internet was a lost cause.
Progress goes in circles.
Thoughts?