Notices by Matt Corallo (matt@mastodon.bitcoin.ninja)

@mmasnick it appears they mostly offered to buy long-dated bonds at face value (ie substantially overpaying). That’s most of the money and should cover all the banks in question here - they’re all underwater *today* with long-dated securities and notes that would put them at par.

@jimcarroll @jerry I firmly believe that they will eventually implode for one reason or another and encourage folks not to use it, but I do cut them a bit of slack because they were the first - when Tether was founded any lawyer and any bank would happily tell you operating a stablecoin was outright illegal and people have gonna to jail for it (see, eg, liberty reserve).

Thus, tether was stuck on shadow banks, other people’s bank accounts, etc, etc. problem is they haven’t been able to outgrow that perception and so they still have trouble getting good banking and other relationships.

Still makes them sketchy, but at least it explains the why without resorting to unsubstantiated claims they’re outright frauds (I’ve met the founders, they’re super nice people!).

@jimcarroll @jerry I mean sure if more banks go under, but the impact of these things hurts a ton of normal people trying to pay rent more than tether…

@jimcarroll @jerry tether not impacted at all…

@lain Proof-of-Botnet :p. This is why PoW for email never took off, the economics actually don't work, botnets have more horsepower than normal folks, by far.

@lopp as if bitcoiners needed to be *more* isolated from other groups…

Open Source only works if the licenses that it is based on provide developers protection against lawsuits, including SLAPP suits. In this case its been made clear that they do not, at least in the UK, which should be incredibly frightening to all OSS devs.

https://laanwj.github.io/2023/02/06/regrets.html

@crumbcake https://web.archive.org/web/20230206215930/https://laanwj.github.io/2023/02/06/regrets.html there’s a larger explanation on lwn but it’s not public yet.