I have a multi-stage water filter setup at home that pumps the water through mineral balls as the last step to re-introduce healthy minerals that were removed during the reverse osmosis process. Because it's true, RO water is not suitable for long-term human consumption because of the absence of healthy minerals.
'Yield farming' has been very popular the past few months. Compound Finance was the first to kick off the hype by giving away their governance tokens to people that used their platform. You can compare it to Facebook giving you some of their stock by being an active user.
The end game of those governance tokens is for them to control the whole platform, so absolutely no changes can be made to the platform without being voted in by the token holders. All of this is enforced trustlessly on the blockchain through smart contracts. As a token holder you really own part of the platform.
This is a very powerful concept, so a lot of people are interested in buying those governance tokens outright. So what you can do is put your money in one of those platforms, receive governance tokens and sell them to people that want to buy them outright. You can make quite good money doing this.
Now a lot of projects popped up that basically had nothing to offer, yet people were still buying their governance tokens, meaning you could still make money by putting your money in there and selling those tokens to those people quick before those tokens became worthless, basically an advanced game of chicken.
So what I'm saying is not all of those 'stake your money and receive tokens' are outright scams. There are some very legitimate projects being built that give away governance tokens. Uniswap comes to mind, the most popular decentralized exchange, doing over half a billion in volume yearly. There's of course a lot more nuance and not everything works as it should yet, but there's a lot of interesting stuff being built every day.
I'm a European and I just left Korea after living there for a month. I was absolutely shocked how addicted Koreans seemed to be to their smartphones. I had so many people bump into me because they were watching videos while walking around, on public transport pretty much everyone was staring at their screen, even older people were playing those mundane mobile games. Sure, pretty everyone around the world is addicted to their smartphone nowadays, but I've never seen it as bad as in Korea.
>Initially, the association (and validators) will consist of a geographically distributed and diverse set of Founding Members. These members are organizations chosen according to objective participation criteria, including that they have a stake in bootstrapping the Libra ecosystem and investing resources toward its success. Over time, membership eligibility will shift to become completely open and based only on the member’s holdings of Libra.
So it's not going to be Facebook's centralized servers, but Facebook + their friend's centralized servers. There are some vague promises, but this will start out just as centralized as Facebook Credits.
>The reserve allows users of the system to enjoy a relatively stable medium of exchange from the start. At the same time, it also represents a centralized function. For the network to be fully permissionless, the association will have to explore ways to further distribute and decentralize the reserve, including automating the verification of the assets in the basket and the process of minting and burning of coins. Increasing market competition in the custody and management of the reserve will also be explored to improve the efficiency of this service, and the costs it imposes on users and custodians over time.
So this coin will be backed by a centralized reserve, and you would have to trust Facebook that the coins you own are backed by real money, with no way of verifying this. Tether works the same way, and they are just creating money out of thin air without actual dollars backing them up. I'm curious how Facebook will decentralize this reserve, or if they will even do this in the first place.