Some of you may recall I was making quite the stink over the first iteration of the TCY calculator when it was first announced. Because what is the function of a calculator if not to crunch numbers correctly? Essentially the first website that was linked to the public was a calculator that said 6 - 2 = 2. Unacceptable.
The reason for this was pretty simple. Rather than calculate the liability of the network to the user, the website was calculating the liability of the user to the network. So, for example, I have 0.25 BTC trapped inside this boondoggle. I borrowed around $8000 back in the day (0.25 BTC worth $16k) and paid back $1000 right before it collapsed. The first debt calculator was saying I was going to be paid back $7000 (7000 TCY) instead of the correct amount.
Normally a mistake like this wouldn't have bothered me but we live in clown world now and there are millions of dollars on the line so I went a bit nuclear on X under the comments section. Why on earth would you ever put numbers out like this that are so blatantly wrong and make people who are already panicking about the whole thing panic even more that a bunch of clowns are coding the solution and getting it woefully wrong?
In the end I was told to chill out and that this was just a test-run and the UI of the website "looks good". Sure, fine. It did look pretty good and the affected accounts were accessible. But it was still a broken calculator giving the wrong number.
Today the calculator is much more official and appears on a popular blockchain explorer that shows a lot more information than just TCY calculations. When I type in my address I see I'm getting the correct amount: around 19k TCY. Pretty cringeworthy when I realize how much I was risking and how I might be down $19k simply because I refused to take the loss and pay back my debt before it all blew up. I saw the signs of struggle long before everything collapsed, just like I did with UST and FTX. This is the first time I've actually gotten caught in an insolvency. I have still yet to be rugpulled. Maybe one day!
TCY will start at a value of 10 cents, and if it reaches $1 this implies that all the bad debt was paid back (in dollars). The funny thing about this is that the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum used is the value of these assets during the insolvency... which is higher than today's prices. This is highlighted by the fact that I'll be given 19K TCY for 0.25 BTC minus $7k. Of course by the time the protocol actually goes live that could change dramatically. I'm sure some people won't want sell their TCY unless they can get back the underlying collateral they were owed. I'll consider myself extremely lucky if I can get 0.18 BTC back after everything is said and done.
If I actually had this money to spend right now I'd likely be buying Hive with it, making it extra annoying that I don't have access to it and I'm being bailed into a new shitcoin instead. Hive hit my buy target of sub 25 cents just the other day but I haven't been able to acquire much more. Weak!
Another random question I have to ask myself is if DEXes are going to be less valuable during "crime season" where every lawsuit against every exchange is being dropped by the SEC. Are DEXes less necessary when centralized solutions are not under constant attack by the regulators? There's certainly arguments to be made either way.
As luck would have it the biggest ETH hack of all time happened just two weeks ago. It was pointed out that most of these stolen funds were funneled through Thorchain, which created some bad press. Actually it was a pretty good trading opportunity because the heist generated millions of dollars in revenue for TC, pumping the price, into an immediate dump back to baseline after the bad press.
Now a whole new volley of "should we be regulating the DEXes!?!" is in full swing, with many of the node-runners not wanting to participate in the laundering of stolen funds. A solution was worked out where nodes that didn't want to participate could choose not to if they wanted to avoid scrutiny. There are a lot of people out there who'd rather not look like they're friends with North Korea.
Of course this discussion had a lot of fallout and sister-chain Maya has been getting absolutely wrecked lately. The market cap has fallen to $15M as of today (with lows closer to $13M). For context that means Maya is around ten times smaller than Hive at the moment... and Hive is already quite small at rank #375. I threw a couple bucks at CACAO in solidarity because that community is the real deal when it comes to grassroots crypto philosophy and cooperation (which is why the discussions to censor transactions created that much FUD in the first place). Plus they are also the ones who came up with the TCY solution as it mimics exactly how the MAYA token works (minus the bad debt).
I am definitely less excited about this whole bail-in situation, but it's a helluva lot better than getting flat out rugpulled. There's still every reason to believe that 2025 will end up delivering the gains that we think it should, and in that situation I think TCY will be just fine and I should be able to get a lot of my money back. All that needs to happen at this point is that Thorchain keeps getting the volume it needs to support itself and continue paying for infrastructure and debt like it's been doing for a while now.
