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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • It would reduce the settlement time from multiple days to likely minutes.

    When you trade a stock today, it’s not actually complete for 2 or 3 business days as it has to go through the settlement process. Generally, it doesn’t cause problems for retail traders as exchanges act like its completed, but even for us it can introduce real issues sometimes and delay you from making a trade.

    For example, in Canada, the cheapest way we can convert CAD<–>USD is through a process called Norbits Gambit.

    You buy DLR.TO (CAD) or DLR.U.TO (USD) and then your have them journal your shares from one to the other for free, or a small fee like $10. You don’t pay an exchange rate fee, however, because the trade hasn’t actually settled when you buy the shares for 3 days, they can’t journal them. So for 3 business days you’re exposed to any fluctuation in the exchange rate. Generally that’s cheaper than what a bank will charge you and it’s the risk you take. It’s also a 1 way risk, I can’t recall if it’s USD -> CAD or CAD -> USD, but one of them is locked in, and the other is exposed. (Edit: It’s DLR.U.TO that exposes you. Holding either is like holding USD, so when you buy DLR.TO you already bought the USD value in CAD)

    At WealthSimple, when you sell some shares, you can’t actually transfer the money to your bank account on the same day. The balance isn’t available to transfer.

    I’m sure it can cause more problems for professional traders and institutional stuff, and even other ways it impacts us that I don’t know about.








  • The money required to double the bitcoin hash rate and maintain double is immense. It’s specialized hardware that would need to be manufactured (lead time while network continues to grow, plus who even has the capacity to do that other than TSMC or Samsung) and the network would see it coming and have a chance to do something about it.

    It was a risk when it was smaller, but the ability to pull an attack off like that now and maintain the attack isn’t practically in the realm of possibilities. (Edit and that’s not even getting into where they’d get the power to power the network which is estimated at 173Twh a year and the need to keep expanding that power to maintain the attack in adversarial conditions.)

    Attacking the network in other ways via corrupt laws with multi government cooperation would be far easier.