It took me awhile to appreciate the significance of stablecoins.
I wrote a post for the Odd Lots blog about why and how they're emerging as the true power players within crypto. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Back in 2016, when the DAO got hacked, Vitalik had some influence in addressing it.
These days when there's a big hack, the only entities that can possibly do anything about it is the stablecoin companies.
Their power and size is why, as my colleague @joelight has been reporting on, there's more and more scrutiny of them in DC bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
-- The economy right now
-- Whether inflation is broadening
-- How the Fed's new framework (unveiled at Jackson Hole is being put into practice)
-- What full employment looks like
-- Taper timing
-- Delta concerns
Ok. I have a question for folks like @felixsalmon, @matt_levine, @IvanTheK and others on here who tweet or write sometimes about Payment For Order Flow and other aspects of retail equity market structure...
@felixsalmon@matt_levine@IvanTheK So obviously retail traders are, for the most part, getting totally free trades (through platforms like Robinhood et. al.). But in theory, they could be losing out if stuff like Payment For Order Flow is causing them to get subpar executions.
But how big of an issue could this really be? $VIRT is one of the biggest players in the space, and it's market cap is $4.8 billion. Maybe Citadel Securities would be worth like twice that much if it were public? We're obviously not talking about huge cash cow sums here.
I wrote a review of The Blocksize War by @jonathanbier. A fantastic read on the period from 2015-2017, when the Bitcoin world split into two bitterly opposed camps over how best to scale the network bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
@jonathanbier Even if you're not really into Bitcoin or anything, you might still find the book to be fascinating, as there's tons in there about how group dynamics form and then harden over time in the presence of conflict. Just the sociology of it is worth studying. amazon.com/dp/B08Z18GWD6/…
I started paying close attention to Bitcoin in around 2016. So there was a lot that I already knew. But also a ton of stuff that was new and surprising to me, including the fact that early on many of the most ardent "small blockers" did actually favor some increase at some point.