Ok, with XHV being listed on Bittrex and the general rise in euphoria, maybe it's time to get this post back to the front, where people can read and respond to it. To be clear, I am genuinely interested in a fruitful discussion regarding the matter and am not trying to fud the project.
Good analysis.
Sketchy "stablecoins" are, at best, a stop gap product...
Also, a shitcoin with a 7 figure cap cannot be "stable"...
Looking at you KRB devs who are legit, but have taken the XHV nonsense to the next degree.
The Haven Protocol is like having a "big spec miner with very heavy bags and 150K Twitter followers in your back packet".
So, KRB are basically trying the same thing XHV does, am I getting that right?
You know, I could just move on and don't even care about XHVs doomed efforts, but I think this is extremely symptomatic for the current state of crypto and altcoins. It is not that I think they are malicious or scammers or something like that. I think they started of genuinely believing that they'd find a solution for the problems at hand eventually. And now they are so deep in it that they can't really turn around and basically say "yeah, it's probably not gonna work the way we thought it would", because they'd have a bunch of angry, tikitorches and pitforks swinging "investors" looking for them then.
But the fact of the matter is that not only doesn't the whole thing add up, I have yet to see or hear anything more than *crickets* regarding the issues. Like, if you apply a simple example, you'll find that XHV is way too dependent on certain conditions to actually do what it's supposed to.
Let me state here that I think XHVD can work quite well for some time, given the right market conditions. Which sctually makes the whole thing even worse, because these types of systems tend not to give warning signals or anything, they just at some point flat out will stop working and people will be holding the bag. This is not a XHV specific problem, but can be seen all over the industry. How else can a sane brain rationalize the steps needed to go from BTCs approach to EOS's 21 validators? It's people getting into the market who don't realized and/or understand what Bitcoin was created for, which is, by western standarts, an absolute edge case. We are not surrounded by fiat money crashing left, right and center and for most of us, the banking system and Paypal work quite well. Bitcoin(and other blockchain projects) is primarily not supposed to be a better Paypal (fuck you, Roger), it is a system that is more resilient against catastrophic failure. And catastrophic failure is not a daily occurence, which is why people forget that it's a possibility. I could point towards parallels between this line of thought and the thought process of anti-vaxxers, but I digress.
Let's look at a simple example:
Let's say, XHV spikes to a marketcap of 100,000,000$. At this pricepoint, 2,000,000$ worth of XHV is offshored and 2,000,000 worth of XHVD are created.
Now, the marketcap falls for whatever reason. Let's say, it drops to 10,000,000$. There is still sitting 2,000,000$ worth of XHVD offshore, but instead of being 2% of the XHV supply, they now represent 20%. If they would be onshored and XHV would be created, you'd have to deal with an instant inflation of 20%, add to that the fact that there is no way that the orderbooks on exchanges are as thick as they were at a marketcap of 100,000,000. So, there are 2,000,000$ worth of XHV going into the market, completely crashing the price.
A counter argument could be that miners could not allow these 2,000,000$ to be onshored. This would effectively mean that they are not unconditionally backed with XHV, so one XHVD will not be worth one dollar, even if XHVD can be traded as its own asset.
This creates another question: What exactly is the price of one XHV? Are you going with the spot price, or are you taking orderbook size into account? I guess this wouldn't work, because this would effectively mean that the more XHVD is onshored, the more XHV per XHVD needs to be created to allow the holder to cash out.
Some may say that this is not how rational human beings act, that no one i their right mind would onshore their XHVD, then immediately sell their XHV in a thin market, losing money. Well, but what if they have to, maybe thy got sick and need the money right now, or something like that? Not only that, this is absolutely against the core premise of money itself: that the owner can do whatever the fuck they want with it. If you tie the value of money to a set of conditions that need to be met, this will be priced in.
And this is something that is extremely dangerous when it comes to crypto in general: you can't count on the predictability of human behavior, especially in a scenario in which you have to count constantly on humans behaving rationally or predictably. Because it only needs one moment, one unexpected turn to screw this thing up big time. And at that point, you'll have a bunch of panicking holders running to the exit, either onshoring their XHVD to XHV, inflating the supply even more, or selling their XHVD at completely low, "desperate to get out" discounts.
All this is amplified by the fact that XHVD is XHVs main selling point. If no one uses this mechanism, it just another Monero clone with not much else to show for it. And if a lot of people use it, it just creates a ticking time bomb. You might not even need a big swing in marketcap to make this a problem; a significant amount of XHV being offshored and then being onshored again might do the trick all by its own.
Look, I'm trying hard not to come off as a hater or fudster or anything nad I probably spent way too much thought on this project. But in all honesty, too much of crypt reminds me of the underpants gnomes from South Park(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zc4bGkU05o) and this is, sadly, a prime example.
