And the Crypto Andys were all like "you just don't understand DeFi!" to which the retort is "No, you just don't understand finance".
Finance is the way it is for many reasons. There are thousands of years of lessons that have made the system the way it is. I get the innovator mentality of sweeping away the old but there seems to be a fine line between innovation and ignorance.
I'm just sitting on the sidelines watching people relearn all the lessons of finance the hard way, some because they think they understand finance because because they understand merkle trees and consensus protocols but really most just want to get rich quick.
I figured that if the system collapsed, I would be able to notice it early and withdraw, and that YC-affiliated investor money would help compensate me with more luck than if I had to liquidate out of the system myself.
I withdrew after seeing a friend on Cryptography Twitter send a message showing the destabilization; this turned out to be many hours before Stablegains announced "we will honor withdrawals before this announcement at 1:1", and I got all my money back out.
The YC brand worked here, I think.
Congratulations? You weren't one of those who lost all of their money to this YC supported scam. Scams and get-rich-quick or get-more-rich off of the backs of others: that's the YC brand here and increasingly elsewhere. Paul Graham started this accelerator to make himself and his wife rich. YC exists to enrich its owners not as your litmus test for trustworthiness. Money over morality is the motto here. Libertarian values, limited government, startups as silver bullets, founding workers working themselves to death to enrich venture capitalists, and Dunning-Kruger for days in the form of Paul Graham. Are you poor? 'Have you tried making a startup?' is Paul Graham's solution to poverty as with everything else. You might as well ask 'Have you tried not being poor?'