The story about BIS authorizing banks to hold 2% of reserves in Bitcoin was dramatically misreported. This was actually placing a limit on their holdings, to 2%, which is down from no limit previously.
This is not a new idea -- it's a whole field of infrastructure called "Payments Orchestration". It probably doesn't make sense for small startups, but companies that process more than about $10M+ USD per year can (and do) definitely benefit from multiplexing transactions across multiple providers.
Bitcoin. It can easily be confirmed as valid (zero chance of counterfeit), and is otherwise a bearer instrument with no further settlement, and impossible to reverse (like cash).
The opening of that Borders was a tragic loss of an art house theatre (the New Varsity) and the arrival of a corporate behemoth that drove most of the rest of the bookshops (one next door!) out of business.
The permit for that building required that it be possible to turn it back into a live/film theatre. A friend of mine and I looked into turning it into a nightclub but in the end it was too much of a hassle (and Palo Alto is no longer the kind of place that has nightclubs and porno theatres (not the New Varsity!) downtown).
The semicolon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. That makes your example 5-10-5 words instead of 5-5-5-5. Try using a period instead of semicolon and hear how it sounds.
What difference does it make? They are multiples of five. Are they okay to him? I doubt that is so. He dislikes chunks of five. He was not prescribing semicolons. That would still bother him.
I think you might be missing the forest for the trees, here. It's not about five-word sentences; it's about the repetition making the paragraph as a whole monotonous and robotic - something you demonstrated very well in this very comment.
The OP primed you to read it robotically. I'll admit my sentences seem somewhat contrived though.
I was delighted when I first read the short, punchy, and somewhat dislocated clauses of The Stranger by Camus. Actually, a more pertinent example is the first page or so of Molloy by Samuel Beckett. Maybe the reader is supposed to be bored; I find it refreshing.
