Like anyone on Leo, I also jumped the gun and gave the Cub Finance ecosystem a try in the last 24 hours. There are already a ton of very good tutorials on how to get the best out of it, including adding liquidity, farms and dens, so I'm not gonna write about this.
Instead, I'm going to write about something more subtle, something that I was able to discover only in this context - namely in the context of Cub Finance.
You see, I'm not unfamiliar with DeFi, I have a bit of liquidity added to some pools in the Ethereum ecosystem, and words like Compound, Aave or Uniswap aren't strange to me. On the contrary.
But this Cub Finance thing opened me to the Binance Smart Chain ecosystem. Which is exactly like the Ethereum, minus the ginarmous gas fees. Make no mistake, these gas fees are low on BSC, because we're dealing with a centralized chain. On Ethereum, we're dealing with a fully decentralized chain (even if some of you may argue that there are still whales who are making the games, it's a decentralized game, those whales are keeping each other on their toes, so to speak).
And this entire centralized finance ecosystem on BSC, or CeFi, as I named it, made me think about something. We invented the crypto space, we invented Bitcoin and Ethereum, to get rid of the middle man. To make sure we're not at the mercy of a single switch. This system is affordable, in the sense that (almost) everybody can run a crypto node, and be part of it, but it's very expensive to maintain (think miners and their electricity costs).
In other words, to avoid the potential corruption of the middle man, we created something corruption-proof, but more expensive.
The assumption that the middle man is corrupt is almost as expensive as the middle man being corrupt, only we spread this cost from the very beginning, on top of all the participants. Because it's spread, we perceive it as low, most of the time. But it is expensive.
And the obvious question is: what if the middle man is honest? Then the expenses will be small, as they should be, while the stability of the system will continue to be high. BSC is a centralized blockchain, which, until now, has been proved to be honest (this may change in the split of a second, I'm well aware of this, I'm just theorizing). Because it's centralized, it's cheap to run transactions on it. Because it's cheap, individual actors can actually make profits by providing liquidity.
So, it turns out that, at the end of the day, we're still way better by being honest. Maybe crypto is not the ultimate answer to the world's finances, with its decentralized expensive approach. Maybe it's just a hedge, a constant threat to the crooked and corrupt middle men, keeping them on their toes and forcing them to be correct. Otherwise, the price of their corruption will be again perceived as high, and people will migrate to expensive, but fully decentralized solutions.
And, just FYI, while I was pondering all these, I made almost an entire Cub.
I'm a geek, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Hive you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
Wanna know when you're getting paid?
| I know the feeling. That's why I created hive.supply, an easy to use and accurate tool for calculating your HIVE rewards | |