These past few days I've been looking at LST/re-staking, and the more I look, the more I feel that the question of returns is really about "who's paying the bill": either someone genuinely needs a security endorsement (and is willing to pay), or it's just subsidies + sentiment pushing the numbers up.

The risks are also pretty straightforward, not just the big disasters like contracts being hacked, but more often it's the chain being too long: staked, re-staked, used as collateral for other things... if any link in the chain has a problem, it could all come back to your certificate in the end.

If I had trusted less in the idea that "the community says it's stable" back then, and had looked more into whether the source of the returns was vague or not, I might not have been stuck in some "seemingly decent" pool for so long... Anyway, now my first reaction to high yields isn't excitement, but to ask: where exactly is this money coming from?
By the way, the recent debates over privacy coins/mixing and compliance are also quite fragmented; it feels like the same issue is judged by completely different moral standards in different groups, which is pretty surreal.