re a previous suggestion on stabilizing funding: I advocate keeping a treasury in stablecoins and control it as a DAO, because XMR volatility seems to kill willingness to participate in development. buy if you do this, refrain from dai. its collateral basket has a high ratio of USDC (bank-deposit-backed stablecoin), see daistats.com/#. some of it is backed by assets like home improvement loans, or dai itself (=unbacked).

Maker also has a huge governance overhead. a more viable option is Liquity's LUSD, which is purely ETH-backed, has no governance and, apart from the oracle, everything in the protocol is properly decentralized.

s/buy/but/

If you're going to do that, just open a bank account with a large bank. You're at the mercy of some third party, but at least you're insured (to some extent) against the bank crashing.

Better than some shady third party who gives you IOUs.

*Shady non-bank third party

expand on that please?

Banks usually have insurance. If they go bust, you get refunded, up to some max amount.

And they have some minimal regulatory limits to make them not too likely to go vust.

If they scam you, they're (the scammers inside) are probably more likely to be found/punished, hence less incentive to.

So if you're not going to have the benefit of a cryptocurrency, might as well not have the drawbacks.

and when the bank or its regulators think keeping funds for Monero development is bad, they will just freeze the account and give you the middle finger. you should move away from relying on the legacy monetary system, not back into it

s/think/decide/

Leaving it for something where some random promises to give you your money back ? I'll stay with the legacy monetary system.

I'd much rather the monero funds don't get stuck in that. Your money, your choice though.

moneromooo: no, open source smart contracts are the opposite of random promises. they give everyone the opportunity to study the conditions and verify whether what is stated on the label is true.

Smart contract do not give you your money back, just more IOUs.

Unless they do include things like bitcoin or monero via atomic swaps etc ?

If it's random shite like other "stable" coins, then no, it's just IOUs from randoms.

And even if it was bitocin or monero, it would not achieve your aim of being stable.

what do you mean by "giving your money back"?

I mean getting back the money you put in.

AFAIK the only reason these stable coins have value is because whoever came up with each one of them tells you you'll get the money back they hold somewhere.

Sometimes not even money, as you mentioned.

That money is out of the reach of any smart contract.

Nevermind though, this is not the right channel for this, I'll stop.

agreed, maybe this fits better in the Lounge channel