Why USDC?

That's what our customers requested

What chain are you using for receiving it?

Ethereum

Imo this is better

assuming the loan has already been registered, it's mostly good for the end user who may have a bit more time before a liquidation in the case of a massive drop in bitcoin.

as you can imagine, this is not great for the lender, so we have a lot of emphasis in our systems for redundancy

would love to work with lava and bring back dlc loans! back then there wasn't another offering they could work with, but times have changed.

Haven't looked into them enough to have a technical opinion. Very focused on what I believe has a chance of actually getting merged, which from my point of view is not either of those two.

100%

I spent a lot of time digging into the compliance ramifications of covenants not just in the US, but in what another nationstate could actually do with CTV+CSFS.

Magnolia is basically an exchange at the end of the day, so it's kind of our business. I need to refine and publish it, but no doubt many would find our findings very enlightening (pun intended).

Exactly. I'm trying to get feedback from anyone who might have some hidden usecase, or is scared because this upgrade is going to make their life difficult.

We're not going to know if no one asks, so I'm going around and asking.

We're talking about a potential upgrade for Bitcoin that works by fundamentally narrowing the functionality of a utxo.

Here's a great explainer site: https://covenants.info/

hey thanks for the reply. largely agree with all your points, however the trust assumptions on the infra provider mean that while you may hold keys, it doesn't mean you have unilateral control, which is something we value.

electrum spv, i think isn't the best example though there are others because there are many you can rely on, and you can rely on many at once (reducing the likelihood of being successfully sybil'd).

but pretty much safe enough in most circumstances even when dealing with big transfers worth millions of dollars.

I disagree, the main intention of these systems has always been to be a form of "free, ungovernable money". The introduction of all these centralized points allow for coercion by nation-states.

If that million dollar transfer is one that a nation-state, or even the centralized entity dislikes for whatever reason (say it represents a sizable gambling win from a subsidiary owned by the same parent), they have unilateral control on the transfer.

Such is the weakness of the compromise of these wallets designs.

damn, maybe i was an ai the whole time

nah no ai used here. i find it makes articles tough to read.

beep boop bop beep, i am not the bot you seek

Thanks for the ping!

Yep, so this is actually a well understood concern across all of crypto - we just haven't been exposed to it because bitcoin doesn't allow for these usecases.

Other crypto projects attempt to solve this problem by incentivizing many nodes to care for data over time with direct payments from tx fees. There are many other solutions, but this is just one.

Taproot Assets don't have an explicit solution baked in. The above could be a solution, enforceable by the Universe rules (all universe asset spends spend a bit into a treasury address).

But to be honest, if you want functionality in bitcoin beyond the simple send/receiving of bitcoin, you will be reliant on out-of-band data that isn't stored explicitly in the blockchain.

Even explicitly stored data like ordinals, runes, etc require specialized wallets to decode the info.

Taproot also works like this, with bitcoind implementing descriptor wallets backups that are far more complex than just the seed.

With USDT, it seems like Tether will run its own universe that will back up this data, but what's to prevent them from losing it?

Just to be clear, nothing. There are more decentralized stablecoins out there but none more utilized than tether.

Personally, I'm not sure if I'd be comfortable holding a significant quantity of Taproot Assets under this arrangement

To be clear, Tether is only utilizing the taproot assets technology. They are wholly separated. Tether also holds this functionality across all implementations of USDT

Doesn't coinbase support lightning now?

You would not be considered a money transmitter by running your own node. However, if you were to acquire investment in the millions to build a crypto business (which is the foundation of our bitcoin economy), you'd need to make sure you're good with the local law.

Or else your investors might be quite upset.

You're reading the room correctly. Folks who think the Biden/Harris administration is unfriendly to crypto are frankly incorrect. They've signaled nothing but acceptance - so long as crypto lives in an institutional landscape with high barriers to entry.

There are pros and cons to that, but the signals they've put out are "we welcome the old players to the crypto game."

However, it's pretty clear these regulatory tools are being utilized as favors. BNY Melon being granted an explicit approval by Biden is interesting in context when you realize the same admin recently veto'd a resolution to overturn SAB-121.

Basically, the White House quite literally said keep the moat but let this guy through.

I didn't really talk about what the status quo is (though I heavily implied it multiple times). It's just a really complicated subject, and I didn't want this article to detract from BitGo while maintaining it's simplicity.

Is that a topic y'all would find useful?