Bitcoin, Blockchain, Battlestar Galactica

Kelvin would never let that happen.

If they used F = (°C × 9/5) + 32, they would have made way more money.

Losers.

 

There's something new going on in Bitcoin. I didn't post about it before because it wasn't a big deal, but it's starting to become one. It's something called an "Ordinal".

You all know about NFTs. They are placed on more advanced blockchains like Etherium because they need to signify a particular token as unique and non-fungible.

Bitcoins are fungible. You can't make an NFT there because any token is the same as any other token. They are like stock - any share of stock is the same as any other share of stock. If you owned one share of Weyland Yutani and someone took it and replaced it with another share of Weyland Yutani, the action is meaningless. Nothing changed.

Except... if you ever sold stocks and did taxes, you know this isn't strictly true. If you bought one share of Weyland Yutani at $100 and another share at $200, and then you sell one for $200, do you report a $100 profit or zero profit on your taxes? Which share is which suddenly matters. They are non-fungible now. They have identity, and you can differentiate based on the time they were created. And you can likewise keep track of when a tiny fraction of Bitcoin was created.

Ok, so you can have "unique" Bitcoin tokens. But Bitcoin tokens can only be Bitcoins, right? Well, that was true until recently. But the last big update introduced a quirk that allows you to store data in a token - up to the size of the transaction block (4mb). The quirk appears unfixable. And unlike chains that are made for data like Etherium, you are not changed an arm and a leg for storing large amounts of data.

That means a new thing to do in crypto. It is the new hotness. 40% of Bitcoin transaction bandwidth is now Ordinals. Which kind of shows how useless Bitcoins are because if the bandwidth of Visa went down 40% we'd all know about it. And unlike traditional NFTs, the images (or whatever) are on the blockchain itself. They are permanent and unerasable and everywhere. If you are thinking "well, what if they" yes they did.

 

Looks like something Gritty would use to wipe his ass.

 

Good to see the Kroft aesthetic making a comeback.

 

I've seen the Stanford band many times (mostly from their "Battle of the Bands" display in Redwood City's 4th of July events) and while I hate Stanford on principle, I like the band and especially the frequently changing tree because it mocks the entire idea of marching bands and school branding and Stanford itself. I like how the musicians can't really play and the dancers can't really dance and how they make a uniform out of not wearing uniforms.

 

Some of them can play. My HS friend was admitted because he played a mean trombone.

 

I'm sure they can play well individually. It's just that as a band... I'm sure they can play well individually.

 

All of it

 

There's news that might make a certain Jitty Slitter happy.

In 2019 New York State investigated Tether to see if they were sufficiently backed and run properly. The settlement included a (not big) fine and a restriction from doing business with anyone in New York. But New York didn't release the evidence they found. In 2021 the Coindesk news site petitioned New York to get a copy of that evidence under the Freedom of Information Law. A judge just denied Tether's attempt to block it.

This isn't the end of the delaying tactics Tether can do, but the writing is on the walls now. Tether's internal information - at least as of 2019 - is going to be released. That will be a fun day.

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/202...-reserve-records-dismissed-by-new-york-court/

 

Some interesting things are going on at the world's largest and crookedest crypto exchange Binance, and it's connected to an even larger bomb the Feds might be dropping soon.

I've talked before about stablecoins. These are crypto tokens that represent some other unit of money, like the dollar, and are stable during trading because if they become disconnected from the dollar you can just arbitrage and that brings it back in line (like if a dollar-backed stablecoin is trading at 95¢, then I can buy it on the open market and trade it into the stablecoin people for a dollar, and the pressure of people doing that brings the token back to $1). These are extremely useful in places where crypto touches the world, like in onboarding suckers I mean customers.

Binance has their own stablecoin because everyone does. Theirs is called BUSD. It's backed by US treasuries, and is run in partnership with a US company called Paxos. Paxos mints coins based on the number of dollars and treasuries they have and they are put on the Etherium blockchain. This seems on the level. But Binance also wants the stablecoins on their own Binance blockchain so they can do shady finance-type stuff with it. So they bridge them over (write a program that locks up a coin on Etherium as long as the coin on the other blockchain exists). Confusingly enough (purposefully so), these Binance-world stablecoins are also called BUSD.

But you see the great risk of stablecoins. If they are worth real world $1 each, and you can mint a billion out of thin air with the click of a mouse, you start clicking like a monkey hooked up to a cocaine machine. And since Binance controls the blockchain and the bridge, they can make it hard (although not impossible) to tell the coins come from cocaine monkey or Paxos.

So why is this important now? Because NY State just ordered Paxos to stop minting stablecoins. Binance has been getting a lot of hard looks from regulators, who have been shutting down their connections to US companies. Binance funny money only has worth because people pretend it's the same as the Paxos stuff, but if there's no Paxos stuff, the Binance stuff is worthless. Binance customers certainly didn't like it - over $2.7 billion was withdrawn in the last few days.

And what's coming may be new Federal rules against all stablecoins as unregistered security trading. They've sent letters to all US companies asking them to stop all activity. There's still a bunch of lawyer talk to go, but I suspect asking will turn to telling soon enough.

 

The Etherium blockchain hosts lots of third-party tokens, and there is one being minted right now called Blur. No big deal, except they are using so much of the bandwidth today that to make any transaction on Etherium requires a fee of between $250 and $500 to get completed.

I can't imagine the future of money involves paying an extra $500 just to buy some yogurt because Wells Fargo wants to make some new financial instrument. At least I hope not.

 

Which they did this week.

It's weird. In my description above, you can go to stablecoin operators (like Paxos) and redeem the token for the dollar. But you can't actually do that for Tether. There's only like 5 people who are allowed to do that. Tether have to be wizards to keep it pegged to the dollar so long. They don't have arbitrage, they only have price manipulation by the exchanges.

If BUSD goes down, Binance is probably going to go even more heavily into Tether.

 

Pretty harsh on Hobbits there, man.

 

One can never be too harsh on Hobbits

 

Nor Harfoots!

 

I miss being a technical writer.