Comment by rspeele
4 years ago
> My yield on my investment (mostly infrastructure costs) is closer to 5,000%...per month.
As in, $100 in January becomes $500 in February, $2,500 in March, ... $976,562,500 in December?
Edit: actually I read that wrong, that would only be 500%. 5,000% per month (money x 50) would turn the $100 into $9,765,625,000,000,000,000 by December.
Unless by 5,000% yield you mean you get 50x your original investment on top of the original investment, like how 5% yield on a dollar gets me $1.05. In that case it would be more. But I think the 9.8 billion billion would be good enough for me.
No, sadly that return is based on my infrastructure costs, which I can't keep increasing and get the same return. But yes, I'm doing better than 50X my monthly infrastructure costs with this, which are my only actual risk.
Ah, ok, so this is more like a thing where you drive around looking for loose change on the ground, and you find enough to exceed your fuel and maintenance expenses. But you can't scale it up by hiring more drivers, because there is only so much loose change to be found.
Surely you see how even a 10% safe return on investment like these DeFi schemes offer is a whole different thing, when it's a compounding return. There's no way to sustain it. All the arbitrage opportunities in the world can't deliver the funds required to make investors' money grow exponentially.
You are correct, but all investments have a maximum size at which returns will stop. That said, even large banks are seeing returns considered impossible in traditional markets with DeFi strategies, often with lower risk. Arb bots like mine are now generating more than $1 billion per year in risk-free earnings, so the pie is not exactly small. Estimates are that statistical arbitrage bots, which do take on some small capital risk, generated over $5 billion in profits last year.
I agree with you that throwing money at anyone who tells you they can take an unlimited investment and offer compounding returns on it is a recipe for disaster. But in DeFi, intelligence and strategy translate directly to greater yield. Math has proven time and again that those things matter very little in traditional markets.
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