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.
If you believe the statement "if someone is promising you consistent above-market returns it's either a scam or there is unknown or undisclosed risk" it might be true that you don't understand DeFi to some degree. DeFi isn't a single market, it's millions of micro markets that are accessible through what amounts to a single API.
So when you have millions of markets with different returns that can be traded in every imaginable way (and some you probably haven't imagined), throw in an insane amount of dumb money, people willing to borrow at high interest rates (relative to the real world), and a laundry list of factors that introduce inefficiencies into the market, it's quite easy to find pockets of above-average returns if you're smart. I have no idea if Stablegains was actually smart, but it's more than possible to achieve above-market gains in DeFi without exposing yourself to outsized risks.
Millions of micro markets that produce what, exactly? Last time I checked there has to be at least something on the other side of the calculation what a coin is worth.
You think crypto coins magically make people work harder, better, faster, stronger?
That's not how the constraints of the physical world work.
You seem to be asking me to defend the merits of crypto, which is beyond the scope of this conversation. But generally speaking, most of the coins people actually buy are tied to protocols that are attempting to do things that interesting to at least some part of the population.
But, the ability to prove the provenance and ownership of any asset, whether physical or digital, has value. The ability to move value across borders instantly, cheaply, and reliably, has value.
In a world where so much has been made of fake news, imagine if you could know with absolute certainty that a given quote you read from someone in an article is authentic and given to the specific outlet you are reading it at, not taken from somewhere else, perhaps out of context. Imagine if Google integrated such information/quote verification into its search results, and could use it to prioritize sites with real quotes or information. SERPs wouldn’t be full of trash, and small sites that manage to scoop large ones could get instant #1 rankings. Authenticity verification has value.
The possibilities are endless.
This assumes that 100% of the ecosystem is already some form of blockchain.
And guess what: It isn't and it never will be due to the democratic nature of the proposed system architecture.
The flaws of every coin I've seen is that there are too many assumptions about markets, and dependencies of the markets in the sense of goods and/or services that are just "assumed" to migrate to their blockchain at some point. That's not how incentive proposals should work, as they will (logically) lead to exit scams because a couple of people cannot write and reinvent an ecosystem from scratch.
Look at how long IPFS took to mature. Look at how long DAT was refactored in a backwards-incompatible manner. Look at how long it took to write the hypercore protocol stack.
Systems like this and - especially markets like this - need time to evolve, which means that the proposed DeFi assumptions about rapid growth bullshit are anti-market proposals, and literally the same way hyped and unverified bonds in the legacy financial systems lead to market crashes.