getting some bot spam in the past hour from Cas Piancey (i'm blocked) who runs a podcast.

he just self-doxxed as Orson. in Cas/Orson's thread he twists the truth twice and doesn't mention he was charged with vandalism & theft (a felony charge), which is publicly discoverable. Cas told me his real name ~9 months ago and i never publicly mentioned it. i didn't even google it until the end of last year after i saw the Tether Truther gang turn into anti-all-coins mob. who's one of the guys leading that charge? and i still didn't tweet it then.

so much misinformation from prominent Bitcoin promoters regarding the NYAG settlement with Tether/Bitfinex.

putting aside the terms of settlement, these guys are using Whataboutery to deflect the fact that NYAG found principals at Tether to routinely lie about USD backing USDT: instead of falling for their Ron Paul-style rhetoric, DYOR: the Federal Reserve (and its branch) are independently audited each year (the findings are always made public).

for instance, see FR Board level:
federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/au…

and FR New York:

https://twitter.com/jp_koning/status/1364589754118000642

new paper: "Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare"

using the hashrate division method we dove into how much energy 7 different PoW chains currently consume.

ofnumbers.com/2021/02/14/bit… taking the lower bound, these seven proof-of-work chains in aggregate consume 55.1 TW/h per year, or roughly the footprint of Romania.

the lower bound is not realistic because the necessary amount of "efficient" hashing equipment has yet to be manufactured in bulk.

Bitcoiners 2009: we will burn banks to the ground

Bitcoiners 2021: with the help of a lame duck OCC commissioner we will now introduce chain splits allowing us to reverse bank payments for fun and profit

https://twitter.com/jerallaire/status/1346233132396257282

short thread on why this is bad from a systemic standpoint:

https://twitter.com/ofnumbers/status/1346240497732493312?s=19

if you're a cryptocurrency fan of any stripe you should memorize this tweet and thank Nathan (and those who wrote the PFMIs) for repeatedly stressing the point on systemic risk.

commercial bank-backed stablecoins add an unaccountable layer of risk on top a small group of SIFIs.

https://twitter.com/NathanTankus/status/1334408575444250625

i assume (wrongly?) that a non-negligble amount of cybercoin enthusiasts genuinely want to reduce moral hazard (eg taxpayer funded bailouts) and systemic risks that unfortunately occur during a financial crisis.

client pluralism (in Ethereum) is one way to reduce systemic risk.

congrats to the @fnality and @clearmatics teams on the hard work at turning USC into its own capitalized entity:
globalcustodian.com/utility-settle…

small thread below: i should probably put together a timeline so people could understand the significance of this development.

but in short: central bank reserves are held in a segregated account and tokenized so that they can be used for settling transactions.

this is not commercial bank money.

Breaking: yesterday the Stellar network went down for about 2 hours... only those who run validators noticed it.

no new transactions were added for ~2 hours.

network stats:
dashboard.stellar.org what basically happened was that a critical mass of nodes went down causing a cascading failure and so the entire network went down but because it isn't frequently used, few noticed.

this scenario was discussed in a new paper from @yongdaek et al. sites.google.com/view/stellar-a…

#XLM

someone asked for me to explain the math, so here is a short thread detailing a simple model using publicly known numbers:

the current Bitcoin network hashrate is around 50 exahashes/sec
the most common mining hardware is still the S9 antminer which churns out ~13 terahashes/sec

https://twitter.com/ofnumbers/status/1032350035701161984

thus the hashrate pointed at the Bitcoin network today is about 50,000,000 terashashes

this is the equivalent of 3,846,000 S9s... yes over 3 million S9s.

while there is other hardware including some newer, slightly more energy efficient gear online, the S9 is a good approximate

Yesterday a reporter asked me:

"Which US-based cryptocurrency-related companies had the highest legal revenue per employee."

I know there are a lot of headline numbers out there but the undisputed answer is this: OTC service providers such as Cumberland (DRW), Jump, Circle & others

- their trading desks are typically less than a dozen people including developers, traders, back-office
- minimum ticket is >$100k (weeds out retail)
- all counterparties KYC'ed (which results in less fraud)