In general people are critical of ideas that are new. HN has an especially critical user-base with technical skills, so attacks can be made on a larger surface area.
This is an interesting project. The big question for Maker is, will decentralized governance work across the life cycle of this product? The nightmare scenario for a stablecoin is volatility, and governance in this space have historically resulted in volatility.
>There's one remote reason I can think of that people would flip to stablecoins vs fiat if they had some tax view that that wasn't a constructive sale and it could benefit from some likekind kind of treatment since its a "crypto" and not a "fiat". It's obviously a silly argument and there's no way the IRS would fall for it (nor do they even accept it between regular cryptos) but i can't speak for other jurisdictions.
The IRS have already made explicit that crypto to crypto is taxable and treated as capital gains/loss. Some stay in stablecoin so that they can be more liquid in the ecosystem. Simply, there are more exchange pairs for stablecoins, and some stablecoin allow storage in personal hardware wallet rather than exchanges.
The few reasons to use blockchain at this time is to maintain an optic of trust: that even if you don't fully trust the provider of the token, you can trust the transparency provided by the technology. My judgment is that FB is positioning itself to be ready for when or if the space finds its "mosaic" moment. Otherwise, it is still an investment in a novel tech that is already proven useful for money transference; large sums of money have already been put up by the sector to mitigate and update regulatory risk and compliance.