This opinion is based on the interview Sergey gave on RealVision
This is just a collection of reasons why I don’t think $Link will be the hugely successful coin in the future that its fans think it will.
First, there are no barriers to entry. Other chains will have other oracle solutions so there is no uniqueness to $Link.
Sergey talks about DeFi and gives the example of insurance against weather events for third world farmers. This type of event (a big thing that affects everyone) is is entirely different from e.g. insurance against a ship sinking (one small event that leaves most unharmed). There will be no universal weather insurance; ships sinking is not guaranteed to occur and if it does, premiums paid by ships that don’t sink will cover the loss and leave the insurer in profit. Whereas these weather events (volcanoes, earthquakes etc.) are guaranteed to occur and affect everyone. Premiums that generate profit for the insurer will be too expensive for the farmers to afford. The World Bank have been conducting studies on this for years without success.
He also equates mathematical certainty with risk elimination. They’re two different things; the link is information. Math based agreements are one thing but the leap to ‘proof of events’ is the leap I think is a long way off. He is talking about a fully automated system i.e. one with no intervention of human judgement. The guarantee that these systems won’t be gamed is faith based not math based. The easy solutions are market prices because these occur on exchanges with established verifiable data broadcast solutions or reserve assets because this could be confirmation of a balance at a blockchain address and these will be done by competitors too, eroding $Link’s advantage. But for all the difficult problems he starts introducing ‘probability’ as being one of the properties of ‘definitive proof’ and this then gets put into an SLA between the consumer and $Link. Not very convincing.
After talking exclusively about insurance for most of the interview, towards the end he starts to talk about lending and about smart contracts being used to generate interest of between 2% to 8% (this is around the 52 minute mark). If you have a finite supply crypto you can’t pay interest. E.g. I have 1,000,000 coins – total supply and lend you 100,000 at 10%. I now hold 900,000, you have 100,000 but owe me 110,000. That 10,000 will never exist. Interest is specifically from the domain of fiat and I really struggle to see how it has any role in ‘hard money’ crypto. So to me, the whole interview came across as a lot of waffle about things that can’t be done and for the simple things that can be done there is no guarantee that $Link will do it any better than anyone else.