I do enjoy the streams but due to schedule differences I'm really only able to catch them at the weekend, so it is nice to see you typing up some more long-form posts lately.
How has this bear market treated you, Steemians? Did you manage to get some good trades in?
The only good trades I've ever made were buying and holding. I suck pretty hard at "trading." I have powered up a fair bit of steem on the way down though. If it goes down more, I'll power up even more. I feel like that makes it a win-win. I actually kind of look forward to lower prices. They won't stay this low.
Did you trust Tether?
I think we can do a lot better than Tether. I don't think there is anything "wrong" with the concept of Tether other than it has a central point of failure which platforms like BitShares should have made unnecessary... but I don't really buy the conspiracy theory that Tether is not backed. I think enough evidence has been shown that they are solvent and the people who keep shouting about it are grasping at straws at this point. It's actually my guess that most of the people spreading Tether FUD are hoping that it will bring down Bitcoin and crypto in general.
Do you dislike SBD because it couldn't remain its peg?
I love SBD. It's a great concept. It needs a bit of work. Now that it has fallen to the ~$1 range, I think it would be a good time to take another look at some of the proposals to balance it and prevent another pump.
You can't prevent another pump. The only way to suppress prices is to create more of them, but because of their convertibility to steem this just creates more downward pressure on steem.
Also, bitshares didn't solve anything, and will continue to "work" as long as people believe it will, as far as the strength of the prices of some of the bitFiat go, because it's all rather circular and it's imaginary unbacked tokens backed by another unbacked token. Then again that's all modern currencies. The whole controversy over tether is not a question of whether they have the money now (okay, some of it is, a lot of it is, rather) but rather exactly how they acquired the money and what they have been doing with the money.
Well, I believe we can prevent it by changing the rules of the blockchain. One of the more popular suggestions is to allow STEEM to be converted directly to SBD at feed price, so that no matter how much SBD was trading for, anyone could buy STEEM at the current market price and mint SBD from it, effectively pegging SBD at $1.
One good thing about that is that your concern about creating downward pressure on STEEM is mitigated, since an amount of STEEM would actually have to be destroyed in order to facilitate the creation of SBD.
There are some concerns with this approach though. I've posted about it before but I'm not as concerned about some of the issues I brought up then, and I actually think it might be a decent idea to try it now... with a few other modifications.
I disagree. I read your position on Bitshares and I understand where you are coming from, especially with the "then again that's all modern currencies" part.
But I actually do think Bitshares solves an interesting problem; it serves as a decentralised "match-making service" to create matches between the risk-averse (businesses with operating costs) and the risk-tolerant (speculators and long-term investors).
I understand that it seems like smoke and mirrors on the surface, but I really don't think it's as placebo-driven as you make it out to be. I believe there's real value in the kind of decentralised risk-trading Bitshares makes possible, and I believe with more volume it would be a lot better. For now, Bitshares may not be perfect, but it definitely has the most stable decentralised pegs I know about.