Unlike much of the ICO stuff from a few years ago, I think that
some of the yield farming stuff may have long-term legs. There's a global search for yield, and the fact that you can get substantial yields through crypto is drawing a lot of interest. This may in fact be part of the reason behind the recent BTC price rise.
Even though the yields paid by CeFi services such as BlockFi seem insane, it's actually reasonable due to the high demand and low supply of liquidity, especially in BTC, but also in stablecoins. Your instinct may be to see 6% interest or more and immediately assume that it's a ponzi, but I don't think that this is likely, at least for the major services. I do think that the risks are often underestimated: you're trusting the service itself not to get hacked and not to make stupid trades and go the way of Lehman, and if you're holding stablecoins, you're also trusting the stablecoin issuer.
In addition to dealing in liquidity, some CeFi services are able to offer things like "60% APY" witithout being a Ponzi by implementing something like a covered call options strategy for you, allowing you to sell the unknown and possibly huge ???% upside in BTC's price for a guaranteed lump sum while still holding onto all of BTC's downside risk. They then just
market this lump sum options premium as a large "APY".
It seems plausible to me that you could do lending platforms and automated market makers in a decentralized way, and it's probably reasonable for these to provide pretty high yield in return for you providing liquidity. If these things could be done in a decentralized way, that would be very cool, very additive to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and important for Bitcoin's wider purpose of creating a separate non-fiat economy. However, I haven't looked into the current attempts much at all, and I don't know if anyone has actually achieved anything even approaching real decentralization here. In any case, there are huge risks that the collateral coins fail due to counterparty risk (eg. with stablecoins) or technical risks (eg. 50% attacks). The automation could also be flawed in some way which causes losses.
Staking on any cryptocurrency that is not already established for other reasons
aside from staking is super risky. That's basically a sort of ponzi scheme, because although you're going to get the promised
nominal amounts of cryptocurrency, everyone is just playing a trading game where everyone attempts to extract as much real value from everyone else participating, with no actual real value being added. (Often these are combined with ICO-type promises of ways that real value could actually be added someday, but in 99% of cases it's total nonsense.)
When I look at something like
https://harvest.finance, I'm very confused at how all of these tokens such as FARM and CRV work and interact, how decentralized each component is, what "governance" exists in the tokens, and what risks you're exposed to... My intuitive guess is that every component is actually pretty centralized even if it pretends otherwise, and the end result is quite risky, probably more risky than even the high yields warrant. But I haven't researched it.
If there are several fundamentally-sound, long-term-viable decentralized market making and lending systems, then I think that a DeFi section may actually be warranted, since this sort of thing could be important going forward. Maybe the section for this would go under Dev&Tech and be one of the more serious ones. Are there any actually-serious DeFi systems running? Separately, although I think that it's less valuable, there may be enough
buzz around "yield farming" that a section could be warranted for discussing that, maybe under "Altcoin Discussion" and focusing on all strategies for making money via centralized and decentralized yields, discussion of the various risks, but not including announcement threads for specific tokens/services.
I'm forced to take a second look at your profile...... And yes, you're the Boss...!
Many ppl have complained, some have sneered, others sweared at me for raising such a request but, yours is about the only carefully thought out response here on this thread! And thank you.
And in fact, I'm emboldened the more to state, without fear or favor, that we definitely need a DEFI SUB-BOARD.
You stated that ".....If these things could be done in a decentralized way, that would be very cool, very additive to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and important for Bitcoin's wider purpose of creating a separate non-fiat economy..."
Yea, that's it! The key to all things DeFi most people don't seem to grasp.
THE BITCOIN's purpose of creating a separate non-fiat ECONOMY!
You've said it all.
This is the real crux of the DeFi phenomenon. The real reason the global Central Banks (and their political overlords) are all flipped restless. They didn't pay us any attention during our ICO/IEO scam craze. No, they knew it won't last. So, why are they all jittery now? Simply because there's something in DeFi that challenges their power balance and comfort zone.
Let us not get carried away with the actions of some miscreants in the space, or undermine the enormity of the opportunity breaking before us.
And I repeat, BitcoinTalk is not just 'one of them' as far as the Bitcoin and blockchain advancement is concerned. This is where it all began. And we can see it clearly now that DeFi is the proper grandchild of the Bitcoin technology. DeFi belongs here, let's prepare a suitable home for her here (even if it means a substantial redesign and rethink of the entire space, she deserves that much),
let's bring DeFi home