The blockchain from which Bitcoin officially starts does not, in fact, contain this pre-genesis block, but rather another one that includes the famous phrase “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” from which it all started. And we note in the newsletter, “The discussion appeared highly varied and no clear conclusions were apparent from the notes”. Note that this reserve breakdown is an attestation, not audited like the December 2020 $4B cash number. In particular, the “cash & cash equivalents” section can include short term commercial paper, so USDC could be backed by up to 70%8 unnamed commercial paper! On the other hand, youtube.com USDC seems to have a more consistent redemption pattern. For more information, see the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club meeting notes about this PR. 13), there’s no implementation for it-not even a proposed implementation under review. This week’s newsletter describes a proposal for using fidelity bonds on LN to prevent denial of service attacks, summarizes a PR to address a fee siphoning attack that could affect LN channels using anchor outputs, and links to a proposed specification for miniscript. Erlay is a two-part proposal that first limits the number of peers to which a node will directly advertise transactions (default: 8) and, second, uses set reconciliation based on libminisketch with the remainder of its peers to avoid sending the txid of any transactions that the receiving peer has already seen.
The Chinese government limits capital outflows to $50,000 per year. Chinese Capital Control Evasion? Hackers are able to use this data to get control of the user’s digital currencies wallet and send the user’s funds to their own accounts. Include wallet addresses, times of transactions and any other information you think they might need to help speed up the process. Bitwage, a bitcoin payroll solution, is teaming with Casa and Edge Wallet to onboard companies to Bitcoin. Participants will be 1-2 engineers from SF Bay area Bitcoin companies. I would recomment to anyone in the area. By making it easy to redeem, USDC make it easier in bad times for its customer funds to see a panic selloff. We also know tether commingled funds with bitfinex in the past 3. It’s entirely possible tether pays redemptions with bitfinex customer funds. It’s possible FTX, who also offer ridiculously leveraged futures contracts, take up the “leveraged garbage” torch from Binance, who took it from Bitmex – but it’s not seen in the data at the moment. USDC clears the lowest possible bar: it’s not as shady as tether.
Following my piece on tether (USDT), some people have advanced that a similar stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC) is similarly shady. We know that the money coming from Coinbase is probably real, because Coinbase has legitimate USD banking. As put in USDC’s pitch deck risk section: “Our products may be used to facilitate fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and scams”. You can use the platform with one main account that gives you access to various services and products in the ecosystem. Use your receiving address to receive bitcoin. The pull request also improves test coverage, adds more documentation to the address validation code, and improves error messages when decoding fails, especially to distinguish use of bech32 and bech32m. This speaks well of USDC, but it also makes it more likely for USDC to see a bank run. This ease of use is good, but brings more serious bank run risks. In December 2020, there were $4B USDC and they were all backed by dollars in a bank account. If this theory is the case, USDC is an accesory to money laundering, which is, uh, an issue. Banks are pumping huge amounts of money into systems designed to prevent money laundering, but the blockchain could help by recording each leg of a transaction, making its ultimate destination easier to trace.
The bottom two rows are where redeemed USDT and USDC come from. What’s concerning is that USDC is on the same sort of “private MMF” model. Those same individuals are presently understanding that in the event that they’d recently paid in real money and clutched their computerized cash, they’d now have enough cash to purchase a house. Towards the end of 1810, the criollos (European descendant people born in the Spanish colonies) who had long been excluded from most real power in the colonies, wanted to overthrow the tiny elite of peninsulares (people born in mainland Spain) and the colonial administration. The share of the cryptocurrency that’s traded via China’s mainland currency escalated over the past few years, overtaking the US dollar as the dominant currency. A Bitcoin trading bot is simply a piece of software designed to analyze the flagship cryptocurrency in the market and place buy and sell orders on behalf of traders. Pump and Dump Schemes: A deceptive strategy designed to artificially boost the value of a specific cryptocurrency is known as a “pump-and-dump scheme,” in which false or unclear information is used to spread. All MMFs disclose everything they have, down to the specific securities identifier of what they bought.
