Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):
Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.
"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."
Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.
Our money launderer may be engaged in layering, which we have extensive experience w... saw once on an episode of Breaking Bad and this unfamiliar jargon seemed surprisingly appropriate.
(If you haven't seen it, the prestige television scene most likely to be mentioned in a compliance department presentation: https://t.co/Qmz7UUUPKn )

More from Patrick McKenzie

I like this heuristic, and have a few which are similar in intent to it:


Hiring efficiency:

How long does it take, measured from initial expression of interest through offer of employment signed, for a typical candidate cold inbounding to the company?

What is the *theoretical minimum* for *any* candidate?

How long does it take, as a developer newly hired at the company:

* To get a fully credentialed machine issued to you
* To get a fully functional development environment on that machine which could push code to production immediately
* To solo ship one material quanta of work

How long does it take, from first idea floated to "It's on the Internet", to create a piece of marketing collateral.

(For bonus points: break down by ambitiousness / form factor.)

How many people have to say yes to do something which is clearly worth doing which costs $5,000 / $15,000 / $250,000 and has never been done before.

More from Crypto

Lots of people are sleeping on one the biggest things @quant_network is currently involved in-ODAP (Open Digital Asset Protocol).

So what is exactly #ODAP and why this makes $QNT one of the most significant and, regarding #crypto mcap, undervalued projects?

Time for a THREAD⬇️


1/ODAP is the protocol for communication between gateways, primarily with an enterprise focus.
So banks, central banks etc. would run a gateway in Overledger Network and ODAP would be the protocol for gateways to communicate with each other in a secure and trustless manner. $QNT


2/ #ODAP Interfaces are the open source connectors that will connect a gateway to #blockchains and any existing network / API. That is based on the standards from work done at ISO TC 307 which 57 countries are working towards.
$QNT CEO Gilbert Verdian is the founder of TC307.


3/We know from the submitted drafts via #IETF (the Internet Engineering Task Force) $QNT is working on #ODAP with:

✅@MIT

✅@intel

but, there’s more to the story as we found out from Gilbert that US Government, Juniper, payment and telecom companies are also there.


4/So how it all started with #ODAP?
Let’s go back to $QNT CEO Gilbert Verdian’s interview with Santiago Velez on #RealVision (October 14th) and try to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
I’ll forward his words ⬇️
I'm sure someone else has explained this, but it is just so cool and I want to explain how this works.


So Curve is awesome for swaps between similar assets, right? The fact that they trade very close to each other is a key part about how Curve works, using it's custom swap invariant function.

That's step 1

Step 2 is that Synthetix is awesome for creating "synthetic assets" (aka synths) which are assets that trade like other assets, that are backed by another, entirely different asset. Basically, a plastic banana that I can buy and sell like a real banana.

Synthetix has a feature that lets you swap between any two synths with zero slippage and a flat fee. That's because it is simply converting the sythentic asset into another synthetic asset, the backing for the synth doesn't change it just uses a different price oracle now.

This is important. Absolutely no slippage, at any size

Swap $1m sUSD for $1m sBTC? flat 0.3% fee

Swap $10m sUSD for $10m sBTC? flat 0.3% fee

swap $100m sUSD for $100m sBTC? Well, there isn't that many synths in Curve, yet but you get the point. The only limit is the pool depth

You May Also Like

This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".


The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.


Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)


There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.


At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?