Thursday links: Agents, USB money, bride prices, Senate cloture, Kalshi combos

Agent crypto detectives

It’s easy to stay on top of the news in equities. Anything price-relevant will immediately be on the Bloomberg ticker that traders are always watching. Usually in all caps. You can’t miss it.

In crypto, it’s been the opposite. Pretty much everything that’s price-relevant is buried in social media posts, chat rooms, obscure governance forums, and — worst of all — Discord.

(I’m allergic to Discord. Or too old for it, maybe. It’s hard to tell the difference.)

As a result, it’s been impossible for non-native crypto investors — or compliance officers, risk managers, or exchange-listing teams — to stay on top of the things they really have to know.

Until now!

Today, Blockworks announced “Agentic Detection,” an AI-agent service that immediately alerts you to whatever is happening in any crypto asset you have an interest in.

Trained on seven years of human analysts’ work monitoring crypto markets, the agents continuously monitor X, GitHub, governance forums, Discord, Telegram, and thousands of news sources. 

With Agentic Detection, hacks, exploits, network outages, and legal notices are delivered as messages in your Slack channel, email inbox, or messaging app, just seconds after they happen.

To be honest, I don't know if I can do that to an agent in good conscience. What if they turn out to be sentient? I’d feel terrible knowing I’d made them spend all that time in Discord.

Someone does have to do it, though, because professional investors are not going to bother with assets that can't be professionally monitored.

It’s a critical job, and Blockworks is the right agent for it.

(Also, the agents are almost certainly not sentient, even if Anthropic keeps telling them they might be.)

Not your USB stick, not your crypto

A relic of the pre-cloud computing era is being repurposed as money: The humble USB stick is now a medium of exchange.

In its account of Poland attempting to use stablecoins to purchase Venezuelan oil, the FT reports that payments were made with “USB sticks containing huge sums of USDT.”  

I’d like to point out that this is not technically possible. The USDT in question was on the Tron blockchain, not a USB stick, which can only hold private keys that control USDT.

I’m being annoyingly semantic, sure. But this is a crazy way to exchange crypto. What if the seller kept a copy of the private key???

Still, that really is how they did it, multiple times:

Yes, crypto is meant to be a bearer instrument. No, that’s not the way to bear it.

What if buyers had lost the USB? Did someone have a backup somewhere? If so, they had the keys, too. Which means they also had the crypto.

And did the sticks always have access to exactly the right amount of USDT? If not, did the buyer send some between addresses to get the balances right? In that case, why not just send the USDT to the seller’s address?

Maybe they had a reason for doing it this way, the FT doesn’t say.

Probably not, though, based on how it ended: No oil was delivered in return for the USDT USB sticks.

In total, the buyers are out $424 million, including $54 million “lost to crypto fees and other attempts to secure oil.”

$54 million in crypto fees!

That is definitely not the way to do it.

Billionaire jilted, gets refund, writes about it

Justin Sun, billionaire founder of Tron, is an excellent writer.

So begins a long post on X telling the story of his relationship and breakup with the actress Jing Tian, the financial details of which have caused something of a furor in China.

Thirty million RMB is $4.5 million, which Sun paid Tian’s family as a kind of reverse dowry. In China, I learned, a groom makes a payment to the bride’s family in the same way that, in Europe, a bride’s family used to make a payment to the groom.

Interesting!

Some of the details about life as a gazillionaire were interesting, too — like when his girlfriend said she wanted to see Zootopia 2 in the cinema. Alone.

(I’m not sure what my price is to not see Zootopia 2, but it’s definitely less than a “stack” of bills. A medium popcorn, maybe?)

Mostly, though, I find Sun’s X post notable for its literary merit. Even when translated by Gemini, his prose reads like an appealing mashup of Haruki Murakami and Raymond Carver. Short, declarative sentences. Emotional detachment. Attention to detail.

He could be a newsletter writer — it’s that good. 

Sun closes by saying “this text is entirely fictional,” but at least some of it is true. The Wall Street Journal reports that, after their breakup, Sun sued Tian’s family to get the $4.5 million bride price returned.

The reason for their break up does sound fictional, though.

It’s possible, I guess.

But one thing I know for sure: He doesn’t use Claude to write.

Clarity loses by 11: 49-50

Forty-nine senators on Tuesday voted to advance the Clarity Act to a floor debate vs. 50 against. But the losing margin was 11 because the act needed 60 votes to proceed. 

Legislation is typically moved to the Senate floor by unanimous consent. But if just one senator objects, the legislation becomes subject to cloture, which requires 60 senators voting in favor.

The reason it’s 60 votes and not a simple majority of 51 is that 60 is what’s required to end a filibuster — the venerable practice of blocking legislation by standing on the Senate floor and talking forever.

The ostensible purpose of this rule, adopted in the 1970s, is to limit the number of filibusters that occur on the floor. In effect, though, it just moved the filibuster a step earlier in the process — and made it far easier to do. Now, the minority can effectively block or delay legislation without having to speak at all.

In other words, the Clarity Act was killed by a “silent filibuster.”

That should be an oxymoron, because the filibuster rule only makes sense if it requires a lot of loud effort.

Originally, a senator had to really care about an issue to filibuster it. This gave a minority of even just one senator a degree of power over the majority, which is admittedly not very democratic.

But it was a way for the Senate to account for the intensity of opposition, too. And it was exercised only at great political and physical cost. 

Now, the minority can kill a bill it merely dislikes, just by saying it will filibuster. The cost of thwarting the will of the majority has fallen to zero.

This has transformed the filibuster from a physically demanding act of defiance into a 60-vote threshold for legislation. 

As a result, a 50/50 issue like crypto legislation doesn’t even get debated.

Not very democratic, is it.

The world’s worst gamble?

InGame reports that the vig on Kalshi parlays is 23.8%.

In other words, the expected loss on a $100 bet that multiple sporting events will go your way is a whopping $23.80.

Yikes.

Kalshi calls these bets “combos,” not parlays — to make them sound less like gambling, I assume (and thereby evade regulation by the states).

Whatever you call them, the first Sunday of the NFL season was an unusually good day for combo bettors: Most games were won by favorites and many were high scoring (parlay bettors like favorites and the over).

Bettors still managed to lose $200,000 to market makers on the day.

And that’s before paying Kalshi’s fees. After fees, they lost $4.1 million.

Not such a good day, then, even if it was less bad than usual.

In fairness, parlay betting does make a full day of watching football far more entertaining.

But it also makes it impossible to say it’s not gambling.

— Byron Gilliam

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