Not a paid advertisement but a Sizzler is organising a Melbourne screening of a documentary about banned books in the US, the Librarians. Sounds fun!

The News

A crypto company briefly made enough money to pay off all world debt… but in a bad way

A PayPal-linked crypto currency minted $426 trillion in a supposedly asset-backed cryptocurrency this week, before deleting it all and apologising for their mistake (Decrypt). Crypto issuer Paxos created 300 trillion PYUSD tokens on Wednesday, which is a PayPal-branded stablecoin by mistake. 20 minutes later, the company burned them, which means to send the tokens to a non-existent recipient so they cannot be used. Paxos soon apologised and said that it was an accident, not a hack.

The Sizzle: You might ask why you should give a shit about some crypto bro making up more fake money because that is essentially the modus operandi of the entire crypto industry. But this is a bit different — and a big ❌ against the claim that crypto has professionalised as it’s been integrated into the mainstream financial system.

A stablecoin like PYUSD is supposed to be pegged to another asset. In the case of PYUSD, every token is supposed to have a corresponding US dollar held by the issuer. You don’t need to understand all the reasons behind that, but the point of a stablecoin is that you can trade it like a cryptocurrency (i.e. essentially no rules) while also knowing that it has the stability of a real asset (i.e. something protected by actual rules and actually, y’know, exists) whenever you want to trade it in. It’s kinda like the best of both worlds.

Why does it matter that Paxos had a finger slip and fixed it less than half an hour later? Well, if a company that says it only hands out enough tokens to match the amount of dollars it holds and then issues more tokens than the entire world’s GDP, then you might start to wonder “even if this was a little whoopsie, maybe their system doesn’t have safeguards to prevent creating tokens without those actual underlying assets.”

And then that makes you wonder whether any of those PYUSD tokens have underlying assets.

And then you sell all your PYUSD, just in case they’ll run out of actual money to give PYUSD holders. And everyone else does that, too.

And then you go and withdraw all your money from the banks, and everyone else follows too.

And then the banks run out of money — which isn’t real anyway, as everyone knows — and the global financial system crashes and we all go back to caves.

Well, that didn’t quite happen, but you can see why it’s a problem if people aren’t confident that a company like PayPal’s stablecoin isn’t a big fat phoneycoin.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Turns out the FOI system can handle receiving one email every five minutes

IT staff reassured public servants that receiving an email with an FOI request every five minutes “isn’t a concern at all from an IT perspective”, according to emails obtained about the government’s case study for its FOI weakening-reforms (Guardian). A parliamentary committee is reviewing the Albanese government’s plans to restrict FOI requests because of fears that “foreign adversaries” and “AI” are abusing the system. One of the examples cited by the Attorney-General Michelle Rowland as why the reform is needed was when the eSafety Commissioner’s office received 600 requests in a short amount of time. But this case study didn’t include AI — it was essentially an automated mail template — and internal emails show that the office didn’t have any technical issues handling the requests.

The Sizzle: It’s one thing to try and make government more secretive. It’s another thing to come up with the most dog-shit, hare-brained excuses that you can’t even cherry-pick an example to prove. For example, the eSafety case study wouldn’t even be avoided under the new rules which exempt personal requests (like those made using the template) from further restrictions. Dumb dumb dumb.

Also if you’re interested, from 1PM today I’m live-streaming myself filing as many FOI requests as I can for Crikey.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

The Sizzler Say: Fuckqantas.com, M1 and don’t blame Deloitte grads!

As always, if you wanna get involved (or even be able to read what’s on Slack) you can join the Slack server and forum via these links.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Won’t someone please think of the Cybertruck owners

I’m just going to present this without comment: Spit On, Sworn At, and Undeterred: What It’s Like to Own a Cybertruck from WIRED.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

The End

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