THE 2020 YEAR IN #BITCOIN

Ah yes, New Year's Eve. A time to reflect, look forward, celebrate, and throwback Long Reads Sunday style with the BEST BITCOIN TWEETS OF 2020.

Strap TF in, it's time for a thread!

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If you've been following DeFi or Ethereum over the past few months, you've likely heard the term "flash loan" mentioned again and again.

This new DeFi primitive has been at the core of a number of economic exploits and arbitrages.

A thread on the basics of flash loans - 👇

Most DeFi loans take place across days, weeks, or even months.

You can deposit Ethereum into Aave, then withdraw stablecoins for yield farming in Yearn, for instance.

On-chain loans have garnered much traction, with total debt outstanding moving toward $2.5 billion.

While popular, DeFi loans are not capital efficient: to account for custodial risk and volatility risk, you need to put up 130-150% of the value of your loan in collateral.

If your collateral slips below the threshold, you're liquidated, resulting in a fee anywhere from 5-13%.

Flash loans are much different than longer-term DeFi loans.

Flash loans are non-custodial, take place over the course of one block, and require no collateralization.

That's to say, the coins you borrow never appear in your wallet.

When taking a flash loan, you can direct the coins to any protocol and function, as long as you pay back the loan + interest fee within the same transaction.

So what the hell? What are flash loans used for?

More often than not, arbitrage.

1/ If you’ve been listening to @HiddenForcesPod over the last few months, you will know that I’ve been wrestling with many emotions as we’ve moved through the 2020 election, past the inauguration and towards the start of a new presidential administration.

2/ I’ve felt some combination of anxiety, nervousness, distress and sometimes even, anger.

I think these result from the threat I feel emanating from our broken society, as evidenced by not only the assault on the Capitol but by the larger forces that have led us to this moment.

3/ Rather than make an effort to bring our country together, our partisan media and talking heads on cable news outlets find every opportunity to tear it apart.

Likewise, our regulators continue to turn a blind eye to the systemic build-up of risk happening in financial markets.

4/ The celebrated rise of Bitcoin is a symptom of these broken markets.

People have such little faith in government that they'd prefer to hold their money in a database with the carbon footprint of a small nation than in government bonds or in their FDIC insured bank accounts.

5/ And this illuminates a larger observation, which has to do with the generational divide that we are experiencing—a divide which cuts much deeper than any political fissure currently tearing the country apart.

Once again, we can turn to Bitcoin for answers.