Kalzumeus Software: Recent Episodes
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Tether's November 2022 attestation, even if believed, strongly suggests it blew up (again) during the recent crypto route.
Tether's March 2022 attestation, even if believed, shows that it became insolvent during the May 2022 crypto downturn.
Apple's App Store is reforming their guidelines about taking out-of-band payments. This will be very interesting for developers, especially in the games industry.
VaccinateCA, the non-profit I have been running, expanded nationally to Vaccinate The States. Here's what we've learned in the last 100 days.
I joined Stripe to work on building financial infrastructure for the Internet. Time flies. Here is what I've learned in the first four years.
A history of an anomaly in the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic, an independent research project about it, and what we need to learn about our next steps.
There exists an idiom called “dropping a hash” which is widely understood in the security community and not widely understood elsewhere. Somewhat surprisingly, there does not appear to be a canonical explanation. I have dropped hashes before and wrote this up to explain the significance of it to non-specialists.
Author’s note: This is a copy of the white paper of the Working Group, a group of four pseudonymous professionals in Tokyo. I, Patrick McKenzie, was the primary author. It was distributed quietly during the week of March 25th, 2020. I have written an essay describing how this document came to be and demonstrating its provenance.
Tether is the internal accounting system for the largest fraud since Madoff. That is a robust claim, I know, but the evidence for it is overwhelming.
Discount brokerages are accused of making their money via payment for order flow. This is wrong; it is actually mostly net interest revenue. That so dominates their business that selling trades for commissions is irrational; better to give away the trades to attract assets.
I joined Stripe to make starting an Internet business easier, mostly by work on Stripe Atlas. It continues to be a fun adventure. Here's what I've learned so far.