Does anyone think that Tether, or their alter ego at Noble Bank, has recently hired a small army of treasury professionals, sales reps, ops people, and backoffice required to make this happen?

It feels a bit questionable to me.
An interesting thing about money movement is that it isn't purely scale-invariant: a billion here, a billion there, eventually you start to run into things which aren't just "Write a bigger number into the same box you used last time."

More contras. More paperwork. More regs.
There's someone feverishly preparing at this moment to roll *checks notes* something like a billion dollars of paper on Monday, right? And then on Tuesday, Wednesday, etc etc?

Who is that person? Who employs them? Who manages them? Where is the infra required to do this?
"Do you think they're capable of just making up a baldfaced lie that their reserves exactly mirrors a Noble asset management fund without actually having the money in that asset management fund?"

This is a company of pretty bold people who have demonstrated a high risk tolerance
* Deltec; Noble was the previous bank-adjacent entity they puppeted until destroying it.

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More from @patio11

21 May
An interesting thing about watching video game streaming where streamers verbalize their logic as to strategy is that you realize that the population-wide distribution of analytical ability is wider than you remember it being.
Streamer: *articulates reason why Path A has 10X expected value of Path B*
Me: Got it.
Streamer: “Went down A last time so let’s see what is down B.”
Me: Wait no there is no hidden information here; you did the math right.
Streamer: Oh I died.
Me: Of course you died.
“I wonder how this mechanic works.”
“This core game mechanic which has been the same for the last 90 minutes? And was explained in tutorial?”
“I think *hypothesis*.”
“You could confirm that in approximately 5 seconds if the last 5 minutes hadn’t refuted it at least 12 times.”
Read 4 tweets
20 May
This is directly downstream of the difficulty of measuring capital accumulation, particularly for owners of a) real estate and b) small businesses, perhaps exacerbated by economists just not really experiencing reality of not being a W-2 employee that frequently.
According to basically every formal measure of wealth in the United States I was in the "poorest" 1% of the population for all but 2 years of my career.

"Ahh you owe $100k in unsecured debts and own a small business + a Twitter account; net worth -$100k." "Umm" "We are experts."
"You're a really weird case, Patrick."

OK, an easier case:

You owe $250k of student loans, have just finished your medical residency, and have an offer letter in hand guaranteeing a $300k per year salary as a surgeon.

You are a) in poorest 1% or b) richest 1%?
Read 4 tweets
19 May
I think 98% of uses of the word "algorithm" in popular press would be improved upon as "[Company] decided to..."
Sometimes your decision processes are opaque. Sometimes they're unfair. Sometimes you know these downsides, but they're cheap to execute, and to do business at your scales cheap to execute is a hard requirement.

OK! But! Still a choice! Was always a choice!

And conversely:
Sometimes companies will not do things that people want to do. If an "algorithm" or automated email delivers the bad news, sometimes various parties will say "No, that's unfair."

Sometimes sorting processes and decisioning processes are actually extremely, provably fair.
Read 4 tweets
19 May
Many money launderers and others in that value chain do not exactly appreciate the nature of why people are paying them money for their services.

There was even a thread on HN about this where someone thought they had a cool, profitable, legit hack on the financial system.
Citation: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7065142

My comment: “If you execute on this plan, you are probably an unlicensed MSB. If you don't know what that means, don't execute on this plan until you do.”
“This is just some statist nonsense though, isn’t it?”

The industry term of art for this guy is a “mule.” The thing he is selling is access to his social capital with his bank and the authorities.

The people purchasing it have e.g. popped accounts of uninvolved people.
Read 7 tweets
17 May
How it started and how it’s going:

I came to SF about four months ago to help out with VaccinateCA and then VaccinateTheStates.com

The work isn’t over yet (half the country to go!), but our part in it has stabilized enough for me to go back home.
Shoutout to Ruriko, who had been watching the kids solo for 4 months during a pandemic. When I told her there was a small chance a project I was working on was the most important thing I’ve ever done she says “Then you need to go.”
Now flying back into a city currently under a state of emergency and quarantining for two weeks, during which (to state the obvious) the work will continue.

At some point I’ll get back to writing again.
Read 4 tweets
15 May
Tether's new problem is the same as the old problem: bank account whackamole. The fundamental service sold is a bridge between assets outside US banking system and inside them.

Deltec no longer a functioning bridge, just like Noble, CCC, Taiwanese banks and others previously.
The strangeness on their balance sheet is directly downstream of "How do we avoid Compliance departments?"

e.g. "Fiduciary deposits" are likely assets Tether beneficially owns, probably abroad, titled in the name of someone who the Compliance department doesn't know is alter ego
Not a new strategy, either; previously it was USD held in a trust account titled to their General Counsel at the Bank of Montreal.

But eventually a billion here, a billion there, Compliance departments wake up and start asking hard questions.
Read 5 tweets

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