This essay is:
- over 25K words long
- written by someone from a banking perspective
- written by someone who is not (by his own admission) a fan of crypto
And it's still absolutely worth reading if you're any kind of process nerd (and I think a lot of us are). Goes into HUGE details about how US banking and government policy interact, how he himself has been debanked (and why), the entire Silvergate process, the Canadian convoy and how the response was so distinct from previous ones, and just so much more. I came away feeling a lot smarter, and also that Nic Carter is a lot more insightful and honest than Marc Andreesen (okay, I probably felt that way going in).
Every other paragraph felt like something I wanted to share. Here's a small chunk on Silvergate:
Silvergate was not a competently run institution.SEN did not, in fact, have a robust controls environment. It, in fact (para 70), had functionally no transaction monitoring. Silvergate had bought a standard package that a lot of banks use for automated monitoring, but due a configuration issue, it was off for SEN transactions.Carter describes this state of affairs as follows: “Silvergate’s transaction monitoring system for SEN had gone through an upgrade and experienced an outage.”Silvergate was institutionally aware of the “outage” but unable to remediate it.I have an engineering degree, have founded five software companies, have worked in the tech industry, and in my entire career, I have never described an engineering investment I failed to make for fifteen months as an “outage.” After a day it is an outage, after a week it’s a human competence issue, but after a year it ferments into sparkling tech strategy.
Anyway, for the process nerds, well worth the time and the deep dive.