Happy Wednesday! Welcome back for some things I found interesting this week :))
A bit of inspiration:
“[I]f I had been appointed by you to sing in a choir, I would not have been wrong to refuse to join it until I could sing in tune.“
—Maximus of Tyre, Oration 16.2
A few thoughts:
This from Matt Levine is funny:
In crypto, perception is almost identical to reality: If people think a blockchain ecosystem is popular and active, they will use it, and it will be popular and active. Trading volume is not the only indication of popularity and activity, but it is a big one, because crypto’s most prominent use case is still trading crypto. So if you trade your own token back and forth with yourself, people will think that it is a popular token, and they will buy it, and then it will be a popular token. You can fake it until you make it, but the SEC won’t like it.
I guess network effects
This was super cool to see in Society’s Technical Debt and Software’s Gutenberg Moment:
The blog predicts the explosion of value creation through rapid software development.
SBF’s nemesis is now under fire too. I guess it takes two to tango, it takes one to know one, &c
and Martin Peers said this about Binance:
Here’s a business empire controlled by one person, Changpeng Zhao, which has no board of directors and no fixed headquarters. Its executives routinely discuss all sorts of business matters over Signal, “with its auto-delete functionality enabled,” the complaint alleges, “even after Binance received document requests from the CFTC.”
Even better: When a business partner wanted a compliance audit, Binance staffers hired someone they knew would do “a half assed” job, the lawsuit says, citing an executive. And as part of the audit, another staffer discussed writing a “fake” report for the nonexistent board of directors! None of this is the main point of the lawsuit, however. That would be the CFTC’s contention that Binance deliberately lured American investors to use its platform despite its failure to register with U.S. authorities, as is required by law. (Binance in turn called the complaint “unexpected and disappointing.”)
I mean this is to-be-expect crypto exchange activity (as Matt Levine would say):
Oh, and there’s also the small matter that Binance executives allegedly knew some bad people were using the exchange to move money around. That would include, the lawsuit indicates, terrorist groups such as Hamas. Executives knew Binance was ignoring U.S. sanctions by dealing with such people, but “Zhao desired to place competitive advantage over compliance,” Binance’s former chief compliance officer, Samuel Lim, said, according to the lawsuit. These are serious allegations. It’s hard to imagine this case disappearing like one of Zhao’s Signal messages.
Ahaha Martin Peers is actually quite funny
Anyways, that’s all for this week, I’m off to an office hours.
With love,
Angeline