I really wish someone would make a stablecoin not pegged to some currency but to a basket of goods. A CPI-coin, if you will. How would that work? Maybe similar to the programmatic way DAI works, by collateralizing other assets in a way that make DAI some desired price.
How cool would it be to have a decentralized coin that has zero percent inflation.
Problems with pegs are that someone has to take other side. And that side is often losing one. You peg something to current amount of goods, but you have to be able to stand behind that whatever happens to value of those goods... The value drops, you made profit, the value massively increase. Now everyone is wanting to redeem and you need to be good on promise or whole thing collapses...
"zero-percent inflation" relative to some particular basket of goods. If efficiencies and demand change to make that basket relatively less expensive than other things you care about (like land), you'll expect positive inflation in real terms. Negative inflation is possible the other way (e.g., if other baskets of goods wind up being more amenable to automation and the demand curve isn't too inelastic).
On a long enough time scale, this is bitcoin, with an additional NGU (number go up) characteristic which will persist until it achieves saturating global adoption
Bitcoin is the purest form of fiat currency valued solely based on social consensus, which is why it’s so volatile. Anchoring something based on real-world commodities would be bad for speculators but much more likely to see real-world adoption.
Bitcoin is pegged to the cost of electricity and is already a decentralized coin with zero percent inflation.