Blockchain – ListedReserve

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Safe from shark attack

Quite the moment in time There have been few weeks as consequential in Bitcoin history as the last one. Perhaps the top five are the launch itself (2009), the Mount Gox hack (2014), the Fork Wars (2017), FTX (2022) and now the double dose of drama, ColdCard and BIP110. ColdCard we covered last week. It

31
Jul

Silence

Silent payments One of the main criticisms of bitcoin is, surprisingly, its lack of privacy. Assume I buy some bitcoin on an exchange, I provide my KYC documents and I send it to your address which houses some bitcoin you also bought on the exchange. It is a simple matter then to identify who sent

24
Jul

Website blocked

Risk We covered this a few weeks ago but it’s worth a reminder. SpaceX unlocks are incoming, the first is now confirmed as 6th August, two days after the Q2 earnings. Two things can happen, the first is that the earnings are spectacular and the stock surges, I think unlikely because all the trick shots

17
Jul

“They” want 4 days

World Cup Several trends have emerged from this soccer World Cup. One being that the wealth gap between America and everywhere else has grown enormously since the pre-covid era. Another is that the cost of attending these once in a lifetime events is now enormous. US$4,500 for the Olympic swimming in 2028 while the

03
Jul

Bacon sandwich

Microstrategy One of the things that normally highlights peak fear, or indeed the depths of a bear market, is rumblings about Microstrategy. Their monthly dividend product STRC has declined in price to $74 despite it being designed to operate at, or about par. The rough mechanism is this: The “Thermostat” Mechanism The defining feature of

26
Jun

The plot thickens

Z.ai Never heard of them mate. None of us had, and yet their latest effort, GLM 5.2, is rated as good as Opus 4.8. It also happens to be about 80% cheaper to use and is open-source. It’s a slightly strange world in which Anthropic is valued at $985 billion and you can download a

19
Jun

Currently unavailable

Oh dear Saturday morning Australia time and the greatest AI model yet was turned off at the behest of the US government. The story runs roughly like this. Someone at AWS (Amazon) reported to the USG that they had hacked the security controls of Fable (enabling it to penetrate IT systems or at least to

12
Jun

Anyone for a smoke?

SpaceX It’s the talk of the town and certainly sucking the juice out of the market. Valued at over 100x revenue and making a loss, it’s not terribly appetising, at least to me. Still, this is striking. Humans use 20 TW of energy each year while the earth absorbs roughly 120,000 TW of solar power.

29
May

Niche ideas for crazy people

Niche ideas I first encountered bitcoin on the now banned channel “Russia Today”. In principle, I watched it because they would say things about the West that were obviously true but nobody on the BBC would dare to say. So it was funny but it also did contain niche ideas. I consider a niche idea

22
May

What will it take to make you believe?

A matter of interest A reminder on the US legislative process (or for me, newly installed knowledge). A Sponsor comes up with an idea for a bill. Must be a sitting Senator or Representative. A Committee reviews the bill. They hold hearings and expert advice and then vote if it can proceed to a full