Hi @markbarendt,
First of all, thanks for being so active and engaged on this forum (and the many others that I know you’ve been involved in). I definitely understand your concerns and when you phrase it as “stealing” everything over $1000 I’m sure no one would want to be involved with something like that.
I still need to better understand the idea that @diwu1989 is suggesting, but my point about focusing on regular consumers and not crypto whales was not to discriminate against the whales, but rather I wanted to look at other concepts that exist in traditional financial systems and see if there are any lessons that can be applied.
And one such idea is deposit insurance, which in the US currently has a cap of $250,000 per person per depository institution (although there are some complicated loopholes that make this figure higher depending on the assets held). That cap was originally set at about $1000 back in the 1930’s when the insurance was first created and has grown as the market for deposits has grown.
I’m not sure it’s fair to say that any deposits over the cap (whether it was the original $1k or today’s $250k) would effectively be stolen from that individual. In fact, banks do effectively say that we will “protect the first $250k you put in” so I’m not sure how this would be any different – though of course the size of protection would be much smaller at first.
By the way, when I was first thinking about this idea I started looking at data and more than 90% of all addresses that held Tether or USDC had less than $1000 in that wallet. Now of course, it could be that people have multiple wallets so a more thorough analysis needs to be done, but it was a useful first step. Additionally, the average amount of cUSD that a wallet address holds is only about $300 so having a limit up to $1000 could effectively help the vast majority of holders.
Now again, as it pertains to the Celo-specific idea that has been put forth in this forum I need to better understand the specifics. I certainly don’t want to discriminate against anyone, but I would like to find a solution that helps build trust in the system.
For anyone interested, here is a link to the full article that was just published on this idea: How to insure against the risk of stablecoin runs - OMFIF