Best university courses for smart contract coding and defi
This is aimed at people actively developing smart contracts with significant user-bases: What courses at uni are especially helpful?
Posted Apr 10, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC
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On the economic side there is a plethora of information. For specific tokenomics I would start with the coin bureau on YT. For a more detailed on the currency check out their sub reddit and join their discord. Always keep in mind the volume of the coin, is it POW or POS, and who's working on it. Unfortunately the crypto world is supper shaddy so I recommend experimenting with small amounts 1st before you start dropping hard earn cash on a IDEA with no one to build it.
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Pay attention to your data structures class besides that not much is taught about blockchain technology. Honestly the resources your looking for most of it hasn't even been developed yet.
What about on the economics side? Is it pretty much all written down in the white papers? I know a lot of the dynamics can get tricky with the game theory. I mean, look at the FEI fiasco. I figure if the devs had more economics background they wouldn't have fucked up that badly.
The thing about economics is that nothing is ever certain since most of the time you're working off of models which inherently have errors. You can theorize how your users will interact with your tokens but until you implement it and release it to the world you can never be sure what will exactly happen.
With FEI im not sure if it's an economics problem. It seemed to me that most of the users who got burned didnt actually read what they were taking part in. They didnt understand that there were penalties for leaving the pool so they got burned even though that info was public. You can have the best tokenomics in the world but if your users dont properly educate themselves on what your protocol actually does then theres not much more you can do other than consider the idiocy of some of your users, and thats not really an econ problem.
With that said yes, game theory would be a big part of it. Basic economics concepts like supply and demand can help make sense of why certain coins move the way they do. Honestly tokenomics is actually something that i imagine video game economy developers would have a leg up on. Think about the economies of worlds like WoW. Designing an economy for a video game feels really similar to coming up with good tokenomics.
Plus good tokenomics will probably be more of a trial and error thing at this point. Ethereum is so large and has so much freedom for development that we're going to see so many different experiments in token economic designs. Many of them will fail but the most sound models will survive the purges that will come in the bear market.
So this explains why it wasn't just a problem with user education, by definition the tokenomics were broken: https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/1379762077624115203
Now I find his statement that this is completely new territory unlikely. New ideas are always refactoring and extension of current knowledge. With that in mind, someone well-versed enough in economics or game theory should have recognized the problem quickly. Like I can't do economics math, but the equation looks something like the balance between the increased supply by token burn using the penalty vs the decrease in utility of the coin to the buyer as a result of burning again when they sell. That equation will give you a solid answer why the burn mechanism won't restore the peg.