The Petrosat quickly gave way to just-another-dollar-substitute. Everything is good for the dollar, etc... even the things trying to kill it:

Very nice cypherpunk history here. The other Aaron (van Wirdum) can be proud.

For the first time, stablecoins have surpassed the Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments network in monthly transaction volume. According to blockchain analytics platform Artemis, stablecoins processed $7.2 trillion in February, topping the ACH’s $6.8 trillion. The ACH is the electronic backbone of US financial life, processing roughly 93% of salary payments, the bulk of direct deposits, bill payments, and interbank transfers. Stablecoins, an asset class that did not exist 12 years ago, just outran it.

Who's taken salaries or payment in stables? Noooot meeee (well, OK, once I took USDT from shitcoiners for editing some report; sue me.)

Here's to a current Bitcoin problem:

The intellectual godfather was David Chaum, a University of California at Berkeley cryptographer who in 1985 published a paper with the most cypherpunk title imaginable: “Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete.” He founded DigiCash in 1989 and ran the world’s first digital cash system — anonymous, cryptographically secure, untraceable by banks or governments. It failed in 1998, and Chaum later explained why with a sentence that deserves a monument: “As the Web grew, the average level of sophistication of users dropped. It was hard to explain the importance of privacy to them.”

Stablecoins are not that. They are dollar bills on a blockchain. More than 99% of stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar, backed one-to-one by US Treasury bills and cash equivalents, issued under US regulatory frameworks, overseen by institutions that comply with the very governments the cypherpunks wanted to render irrelevant. The largest stablecoin issuer, Tether, is now among the largest holders of short-term US government debt on earth — bigger than most sovereign nations.

"The instrument built to destroy the Treasury market is financing it.""The instrument built to destroy the Treasury market is financing it."

The cypherpunks foresaw all of these use cases with remarkable precision: frictionless cross-border settlement, aid disbursement without intermediaries, complex multi-currency transactions handled cleanly. They just assumed the underlying unit of account would be something anarchic and stateless. It is, instead, the currency of the United States federal government. Big brother.
The Argentine freelancer hedging against peso devaluation, the Nigerian trader protecting savings from naira collapse, the Turkish shopkeeper keeping accounts in USDT — all of them are financing the US government.

Did we get this wrong, fellow anons?Did we get this wrong, fellow anons?

Shite is this tragic:

Chaum was right that cryptocurrency technology would be transformative. May was right that it would undermine existing monetary arrangements — just not the ones he meant. Hughes was right that digital cash would cross borders that bank accounts cannot. What none of them anticipated is that the killer application of their life’s work would be making the dollar more durable and more widely distributed than any previous monetary arrangement in history.

archive: https://archive.md/R5wEu