There's nothing wrong with doing an old thing in a new, more automated and efficient way. In this case, taking something that's normally done by national banks, and doing it instead on a peer-to-peer network, implemented by a handful of developers.
> taking something that's normally done by national banks, and doing it instead on a peer-to-peer network, implemented by a handful of developers
It's not.
A currency board tied to the U.S. dollar holds U.S. dollars. A board--or ETF--pegged to the dollar holding rubles (or pegged to gold holding dollars or vice versa) is stable under a specific set of conditions. Outside those conditions, in the real world, it's trivially defeated.
Yay, we've "discovered" currency boards [1].
(The thoughts on negative rates are genuinely interesting, given their relation to present thinking on the subject.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_board
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282613501_History_o...