Introducing WeiDai, a protective wrapper for Dai against inflation
To use the WeiDai Dapp, visit this link
A tale of scarcity
Scarcity. A concept that underpins the supply part of the market dance. Without scarcity, a good cannot be economized on, it cannot be priced and indeed it has no production value. Without scarcity, there is no economy. Without scarcity, there is no economics. Scarcity is not intrinsic. Air is almost limitless on Earth but is in short supply elsewhere. Hydrogen is difficult to acquire on Earth but almost limitless throughout the cosmos. Scarcity speaks to the difficulty of acquisition but says nothing about the nature of that difficulty.
Scarcity. It makes gold good money and sand bad money. On a planet with a golden crust and some rare, deep shafts of sand, perhaps the opposite would be true.
Scarcity. In the face of rising demand, the holder of scarce items grows richer while the borrower bears a growing burden. Scarce money births proverbs of thrift and parables of reckless spending. Scarcity shapes cultures and emboldens elders.
Scarcity. The bankers sought to destroy it in money so that the borrowers would reign over the savers and the profligate would dominate the provident. The death of scarcity in money gave us abominable words like “unbanked” and “financially illiterate” as though the poor should learn to kneel at the feet of the financial elite to collect meager scraps left over from the feast of inflation.
Scarcity. In the midst of banking’s greatest triumph, Bitcoin stamped its 21 million limit on the face of money forever. Finally we had a money that rewarded increased acquisition with more difficulty. No more would inflation corrupt culture and displace the frugal. The age of HODL had begun.
A tale of volatility
Volatility. At the height of our triumph, we fell from the Mount of Gox into the chaotic maws of volatility. HODLing is a perfect strategy for fortune tellers…
Volatility. Not long after fleeing Egypt into the desert of blockchain’s possibilities, we began to yearn for the old fiat gods to save us from the madness of volatility unleashed. In desperation we tethered our dreams to their power once more but in doing so we lost what made us free.
Volatility. An eccentric prophet from the Levant taught us that forced stability breeds chaos but that a little chaos brings strength and so in the chaotic seas of price volatility, MakerDAO was born. We took back the torch of decentralization to wave away the suffocating shadows of compliance and assimilation.
Volatility. Dai is the Chinese word for debt/borrow and indeed volatility cannot be destroyed, only transferred or borrowed. We now have a stablecoin. But we’ve lost price growth, we’ve accepted the dominance of the borrowers over the savers once more.
WeiDai
The sting of volatility for the holder is felt in the price drop, yet there is no shield against it. If you could magically remove price drops, a wild clamoring to buy would force the price so high that it would have to eventually drop (or crash). We are all instructed to be financially literate so that we can intelligently avoid the price drops and ride the price rises into old age. To do so, we have to understand risk profiles, hedging, economic fundamentals and a myriad of other concepts that elude all but the most well educated from being mastered.
What if you had a token that never loses value but only grows in value? What if the token cannot be pumped and benefits from dumps? What if the token was designed to transfer wealth from the impatient to the patient, from the reckless to the thrifty? It would allow you to stash away your wealth, knowing with certainty that when you cash it out, the value will either be the same or higher but never lower.
This token would be the token for HODLers who don’t watch markets, for the savers who wish to spend their lives living rather than poring over financial charts. This token would be more than a stablecoin because it benefits the provident. This token would be a thriftcoin.
WeiDai is the world’s first thriftcoin, a token collateralized by Dai but which can gradually gain value against the Dai without ever losing value.
To create WeiDai for yourself right now, visit the live dApp . You’ll need a Metamask wallet to use the dApp and if you want to create new WeiDai, you’ll need to load your wallet with Dai.
To learn about the underlying mechanics, check out this article.
If you’re a monetary policy nerd, you might enjoy this dive into what exactly a thriftcoin is and what makes it different.
If you’d like to experiment with play money first, you can switch your Metamask to the Kovan testnet and grab some test Dai.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on our Discord server.
Wei (卫) is the Chinese word for ‘guard’ and it was chosen because WeiDai guards the Dai from inflationary money printing. It guards the saver from volatility and it guards the latecomer from market whales. It was also chosen to honour one of the great contributors to the Bitcoin story, Wei Dai.
