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Tether Critical Announcement

532 points by benpink 9y ago

kytwb 9y ago
Grab your popcorn, this is just the beginning.
ktta 9y ago
Here's the text since it seems to be overloaded (italics theirs): #Tether Critical Announcement Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether treasury wallet through malicious action by an external attacker. Tether integrators must take immediate action, as discussed below, to prevent further ecosystem disruption. $30,950,010 USDT was removed from the Tether Treasury wallet on November 19, 2017 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address. As Tether is the issuer of the USDT managed asset, we will not redeem any of the stolen tokens, and we are in the process of attempting token recovery to prevent them from entering the broader ecosystem. The attacker is holding funds in the following address: 16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r. If you receive any USDT tokens from the above address, or from any downstream address that receives these tokens, do not accept them, as they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by Tether for USD. The following steps have been taken to address this matter: 1. The tether.to back-end wallet service has been temporarily suspended. A thorough investigation on the cause of the attack is being undertaken to prevent similar actions in the future. 2. We are providing new builds of Omni Core to the community. (Omni Core is the software used by Tether integrators to support Omni Layer transactions.) These builds should prevent any movement of the stolen coins from the attacker’s address. We strongly urge all Tether integrators to install this software immediately to prevent the coins from entering the ecosystem. Again, any tokens from the attacker’s address will not be redeemed. Accordingly, any and all exchanges, wallets, and other Tether integrators should install this software immediately in order to prevent loss: https://github.com/tetherto/omnicore/releases/tag/0.2.99.s https://github.com/tetherto/omnicore/releases/tag/0.2.99.s Note that this software will cause a consensus change to currently running Omni Core clients, meaning that it is effectively a temporary hard fork to the Omni Layer. Integrators running this build will not accept any token sends from the attacker’s address, preventing the coins from moving further from the attacker’s address. 3. We are working with the Omni Foundation to investigate ways that will allow Tether to reclaim stranded tokens and rectify the hard fork created by the above software. Once this protocol enhancement is complete, the Omni Foundation will provide updated binaries for all integrators to install. These builds will supersede the binaries provided above by Tether.to. After the protocol upgrades to the Omni Layer are in place, Tether will reclaim the stolen tokens and return them to treasury. Tether issuances have not been affected by this attack, and all Tether tokens remain fully backed by assets in the Tether reserve. The only tokens that will not be redeemed are the ones that were stolen from Tether treasury yesterday. Those tokens will be returned to treasury once the Omni Layer protocol enhancements are in place. We will provide further updates as they come available, and we appreciate the community’s patience, understanding, and support while we work to rectify the situation in the best possible manner to everyone’s benefit. The Tether Team
patio11 9y ago
If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters: Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times) about the level of involvement. The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for them to clear USD-denominated wires. Their clients have ~$400M of USD on deposit with Bitfinex. Their solution: issue a cryptocurrency which is claimed to be 100% backed by USD and say that it is redeemable 1-to-1 for dollars... we just can't actually physically give you the dollars. Incredibly, this has worked so far. Bitfinex has issued approximately $600 million in tethers, all but $10 million or so in the last 6 months. They're usable on a handful of exchanges, for the purpose of buying BTC and other cryptocurrencies. Tether claims that someone has stolen 5% or so of their $600 million tethers -- the digital claims, not the underlying dollars sitting at their totally-exists-we-promise bank account. They've made a technological change to the Omni client to disallow transactions on the stolen tokens, but there is no guarantee that they succeed in convincing all parties to use this. The nightmare scenario for them is 1+ exchanges say "Well, actually, we rely on your money actually being money to list it here, so pick: we delist you or we don't, but we don't have any incentive to apply that patch." [0] The thief immediately exfiltrates to Bitcoin, and suddenly 30 million hot tethers are contaminating the money stream at the exchange, and they cannot be conveniently disambiguated from clean tethers, because money is fungible. Hilarity then ensues, for values of hilarity which probably mean "bank run" on a bank which is structurally incapable of paying out most holders of money. [0] Why does Bitfinex care whether their cryptocurrency is listed at other exchanges? Because they need to launder money to support their exchange business. Tethers are institutionalizing a sort of crypto-hawala (or crypto-Liberty Reserve), allowing the physical transfer of real money to happen at legal remoteness to the cryptocurrency exchange. Bitfinex has an order book filled with something people want. A way to get access to that orderbook is to say "Bitfinex, I want some tether, how do you sell them to me if you can't accept a wire?" Bitfinex might say "Are you a trustworthy US VC? Spiffy. Move $20 million from your left hand pocket to your right hand pocket. The right hand pocket is now ours; here's $20 to $21 million in Tether, which are good for BTC at your favorite exchanges. At some time in the future, a trustworthy US VC other than yourself is going to ask you to buy some tether from them at par value. You will do that, and pay them from your right pocket. If a regulator asks you about this transaction, you bat your eyes and say 'Oh, sophisticated investors doing a cryptocurrency transaction, nothing to see here.'" Post-script: Is this good news for Bitcoin? Oh this is great news for Bitcoin. If you don't believe Bitfinex's $600 million in liabilities are worth a copper shilling, the only option for getting your value out of Bitfinex is to swap your liability for Bitcoin, which drives up the price of Bitcoin at the margin. This is exactly what happened in the final months of Mt. Gox.
quuquuquu 9y ago
Caveat emptor. It's like 1999 all over again. Yeah block chain is honestly such cool technology but honestly anyone who is playing with more than they can afford to lose is in trouble.
robjan 9y ago
Cached version: https://archive.fo/7XoKB https://archive.fo/7XoKB
pbnjay 9y ago
$30M here, $30M there... by all means, please keep proving to me how secure and stable smart contracts are! I'm indifferent on bitcoin, it's a cool idea but there seem to be a lot of these "hammer everything" types that are doing it a disservice across the board.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  Tethers are not smart contracts. It's a separate crypto blockchain currency from Bitcoin and it claims to have a near 1:1 ratio with the USD, hence the name...it's "tethered" to the USD. This is not unlike some foreign currencies.
  - pbnjay 9y ago
    Touché. But the Omni Core Layer mentioned in the announcement implements them.
    - unabridged 9y ago
      Omni layer wasn't hacked or exploited, this company just lost their private key
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Well, it is "supposedly" backed up by USD. A whole bunch of people have been questioning whether they ACTUALLY have that money, very recently, and surprise surprise, there just 'happens' to be a hack that happens right now.
    - askmike 9y ago
      Not sure if "a whole bunch of people" equates more than 5 extremely vocal people on twitter and reddit. Tether published an audit a month ago.
      - stale2002 9y ago
        And yet, here they are getting "hacked". What an amazing coincidence! It is almost as if people predicted literally this exact scenario.
knieveltech 9y ago
This week's installment of internet funbux drama.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nowarninglabel 9y ago
I came across this last weekend, which you may find helpful reading for more context on potential fraud with tether and Bitfinex: https://twitter.com/bitfinexed https://twitter.com/bitfinexed
tfha 9y ago
Isn't tether the one that screwed up? They are the ones who got stolen from, why do other exchanges have to bend over backwards and issue updates? If the attacker is moving fast enough, exchanges probably can't even respond in time. That shouldn't mean that they lose money. If tether reserves the right to delist coins at any time without much notice, why would you ever consider that a safe asset to accept?
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  Situation seems analogous to DAO hack. It was DAO who got stolen, Ethereum was fine, no Ethereum software had to bend over backwards to follow hard fork. Still, it seems post-ETH/ETC-fork ETH is doing fine, and sometimes even considered a safe asset to accept.
  - ErikHuisman 9y ago
    Problem is the tether is allready spent. So the exchanges where the tether is spent is paying it out their pockets, no?
- pmorici 9y ago
  Because there are two kinds of crypto exchanges. Ones that have banking and can deal directly with government issued fiat currency and those that don't. If you don't have that banking then your pairs are all in USDT. If the Tether/USDT scheme goes to hell those exchanges w/o banking lose out to a degree so I think it is in all their interest to cooperate.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  Because Tether can set the rules since they run the system? Perhaps they will use this as an excuse to claim everyone is tainted and force another haircut?
Jd 9y ago
Here's some more context: Tether was originally setup as RealCoin. It originally had a clear bank account relationship with a Taiwanese bank. It had about $30mm. Then the bank cut them off. Since then they've been floating without any announced banking relationship and they also changed their terms of service. Over the same time period they made a partnership with BitFinex and their supposed AUM has gone up over 10x. No one really knows how much of that corresponds to actual USD or if anyone can actually withdraw. A famous twitter account (https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed) points out every day the ostensible discrepancies between the supposed AUM and public amounts. I'm generally a huge fan of the goal of Tether (a stable USD backed cryptocurrency), but the proof is in the pudding (i.e the reserves) and your access to it, and both of these are rather questionable. Full disclosure: I know and am friends with some of the current Tether team and was recruited for RealCoin in the early stages of the project. They are working on a hard problem (asset-backed cryptocurrency on the way that gets the most traction in the market at present, not necessarily the way that inspires the most confidence.
- ActsJuvenile 9y ago
  Tell your friends they should shutdown the company immediately to avoid prison time. Using USD to back any token or digital asset 1:1 is a serious crime as demonstrated by Liberty Reserve.
  - chx 9y ago
    What...? Liberty Reserve was a money laundering operation and had nothing to do with 1:1 or whatever. If there's something in the US Criminal Code about that, you need to cite it but I believe there isn't.
    - ryanlol 9y ago
      Tether does seem to suffer from exact same problems as LR though, no? It’s structured in a manner that makes it trivial to establish third party exchangers with no KYC processes. There is no KYC for individual Tether users, who only need to generate a bitcoin address to get started. Only time they do KYC is when you want to exchange via Tether website directly, which is no different from what LR did IIRC.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
unabridged 9y ago
Tether is handling this completely wrong. They should not hard fork Omni and force everyone to blacklist addresses. Instead, tell everyone to halt on-chain trading, take a snapshot of the chain, then create a new tether token and send them to everyone holding the old tethers (minus the thief). I think the bitcoins Tether would have to pay in transfer fees would be a fitting punishment for their poor security.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago
  You can't just keep hard forking even time something had happens. The problem is inherit to digital assets: they can be hacked.
  - chrisco255 9y ago
    Banks can be robbed, museums can be swindled, even credit bureaus like Equifax can get hacked. There's no such thing as hack-proof. That some cryptos will hard fork and adjust shows that the system can heal itself and not be in a permanent state of disrepair. That's not a bad thing at all.
    - kobeya 9y ago
      It’s a bad thing to the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account. Why not just run it in your favorite RDBMS? That way we’d at least save a bunch of CO2 emissions.
      - unabridged 9y ago
        >the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account This is just giving sentimentality an economic value. Forking should constantly be considered, you should always be looking to maximize the value of your stake. Imagine two coins A & B with exactly the same distribution, except in coin A a real jerk has 10% of the coins and you know his addresses. You also know almost all of the holders also consider this guy a jerk who will not contribute to positively to the value of the coin (at least not 110%). Its in everyone's best interest to just erase this jerk from the ledger and choose B, everyone ends up with 110% of their original stake.
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
> $30,950,010 USDT was removed from the Tether Treasury wallet on November 19, 2017 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address And will you get it back? By design, no. This is the unfortunate reality of crypto currencies.
pmorici 9y ago
Haven't listened to this yet but audio interview with one of Bitfinex's and Tether's main detractors... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerIjELO7IY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerIjELO7IY
nikolay 9y ago
Bitcoin is crooks' playground! Inside theft, hacks, and everything possible happens as there are enough idiots who hodl and who keep buying at any price in hopes to become millionaires overnight.
ajcodez 9y ago
Twitter account @Bitfinexed [1] has been calling out Tether and Bitfinex for possible fraud for a while. Time for popcorn, see how this plays out. [1]: https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed
- iamthirsty 9y ago
  A lot of good reads on the Medium [1] as well. [1]: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed https://medium.com/@bitfinexed
foxhop 9y ago
The abstractions and tech which cryptocurrency works on is fragile in most of the same ways as the layers that came before it (credit cards/banks/etc). Try to look at all this holistically. How many people and resources do we dedicate on this planet to keep track of money, economy, mine the coins, cash the checks, swipe the cards, keep the lines working? All of these abstractions make trade faster and more liquid but honestly it really feels like dimished returns in the grand scheme of things. So many people make money by keeping track of money. So much resources. I can't even fathom it. Bankers, store clerks, amazon servers, politicians, Dunbar, Stock markets, its crazy. How much do we allocate to this cause, the cause of keeping track of "who owns what"? This is not rhetorical, If I had to guess, I would guess that 70% of our resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense. Just think we are mining coal out of the real ground just to mine these "valuable" ones and zeros. What the actual fuck? It all just seems like a waste. Use my empty clock cycles to mine and keep track of everyone's virtual coins? I was behind folding proteins and SETI, and all the other distributed computing ideas. It felt meaningful, like I could help change the world and help raise up the human condition... Thanks to this post, I just learned what "Tethers" are, and I have to say, I'm so fucking disappointed with this part of the industry. One of the early promises of cryptocurrency was to "sick it to the man and governments". Now its powered largely by greed and consuming our most important resources in breakneck speeds. I wish you all luck this this "investment", hopefully the planet will survive this next abstraction of "money".
- pjc50 9y ago
  > I would guess that 70% of our resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense I think that's a wild overstatement, even if you're including every kind of management and public service job in the world.
- 20after4 9y ago
  And then there is the whole "root of all evil" thing.
- hvk 9y ago
  Without making a comment on the crypto/tether aspect, I just want to express that it seems to me that the "cause of keeping track of 'who owns what'", as you put it, is precisely the singular technological achievement which has enabled the "human condition" to evolve to its current state. Money is literally the decentralized, asynchronous, dynamic, and continuous computation that has evolved to process the combinatorial coordination of signals/information on resources between 7+ billion unfathomably complex and independent agents. To me, the staggering thing wouldn't be that "70% of our resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense", but rather that the technology known as money is so incredibly efficient that it leaves 30% surplus (in this example) for society to further grow.
hw 9y ago
I'm super pumped and bullish about crypto and the whole idea of a decentralized world, but there's so much money involved right now (most of it speculative money, and arguably lots of illegal money), that there needs to be some real measures to ensure the security around it. Crypto has made it easy for people to essentially start a bank, without actually thinking too much about or knowing how to build a vault properly.
- ktta 9y ago
  Looks like you are l33t today
kunal88 9y ago
good
quickthrower2 9y ago
The advantages of centralisation. You can fork ... without a fork!
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
when you're anxiously waiting for tether to gox the whole market and their critical announcement is ... not that bad
- krisives 9y ago
  Basically clicked it expecting to read what you're describing. I'm not "disappointed" but at the same time I feel the writing is on the wall. I still expect to read something like a MtGox in the next few weeks/months.
dangero 9y ago
I released a paper earlier this year talking about how we can reasonably lock cryptocurrency to fiat, but unfortunately the space is still rather immature. A single provider of USD tokens is extremely dangerous. Best case scenario would be if there were many companies like Tether and you could spread your token purchases between them automatically to minimize counterparty risk. Stellar and Ripple are closest to solving this since they have fiat trading pairs for each trusted exchange on their network. In the future that could mean issuance from hundreds of banks. Here is the paper if anyone is interested: https://www.gogreenmango.com/whitepapers/Bitcoin-Volatility-Removal-via-Crypto-Token-Asset-Baskets.pdf https://www.gogreenmango.com/whitepapers/Bitcoin-Volatility-...
- ActsJuvenile 9y ago
  Ripple is a scam and Jed McCaleb has been dumping thousands of Ripples a day since forever. You shouldn't encourage new users to buy Ripples.
  - krisives 9y ago
    Ripple is a scam it also predates Bitcoin entire thing was a sever to server bank basically
  - Nemant 9y ago
    Could you elaborate more on this point?
  - alwaysnotright 9y ago
    Jed McCaleb left Ripple pretty early and started Stellar instead, which is probably why he is dumping Ripple.
  - dangero 9y ago
    Ripple the platform is closest to solving the counterparty problems with 1-1 USD tokens. I'm not encouraging people to buy Ripples I'm just stating -- the only way to limit the counterparty risk is to diversify. Banks are perfectly positioned to offer these 1-1 fiat tokens. Ripple is partnering with them.
SrslyJosh 9y ago
#buttcoin
- krisives 9y ago
  Use the chrome extension it automatically does it https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-to-buttcoin/gebbpaadmjjlgjnnljckibmmgkmckdng?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-to-buttcoi...
  - mavdi 9y ago
    Have all the fun :) While I steadily get rich. I hope they'll make an extension for "fiat money to food on table" when this whole corrupt financial systems comes crashing down (again).
dcw303 9y ago
Looking at the attacker's address in Omni Explorer: https://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r https://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPt... I'm finding this a little confusing as it looks like BTC blockchain addresses can also be Tether addresses. Is this correct? They are currently holding $30.9M USDT. If they transfer this to another USDT address, I assume it would show up here, like the 3 inbound tx from 31okFF1rUu8jjPEVuajycTRBp82Nteo4Mv that makes up their balance. But what if they want to cash out to BTC? If they bought on Bitfinex with their USDT would another transaction appear? And could it then be tracked to the BTC blockchain explorer? It was claimed that the stolen USDT could be mixed into the main supply of BTC, but I'm failing to understand how that would happen, as it seems traceable from the public addresses.
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  > I'm finding this a little confusing as it looks like BTC blockchain addresses can also be Tether addresses. Is this correct? Yes. Tether is so-called Smart Property (with Property ID 31) stored using Omni Layer. Omni Layer stores transactions on Bitcoin Blockchain. Transaction data is encoded as output script, which uses OP_RETURN opcode and zero value. OP_RETURN opcode allows 80 bytes of data. Omni Layer uses 4 bytes ("omni") of 80 as a prefix to coexist with other systems using OP_RETURN.
runeks 9y ago
> Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether treasury wallet […] > […] they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by Tether for USD. How will this ever work in real life? If I yesterday — right after the hack, but before the announcement — in good faith received $1m in USDT, and paid in Bitcoin, who’s liable? In effect, this policy just shifts the financial burden to innocent people, who may have paid e.g. Bitcoin in exchange for “fake” USDT in good faith. The issuer needs to take sole responsibility for this. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but because the USDT is useless otherwise. How can it be used for payments if the issuer can make a blog post saying “by the way, if you received USDT from this guy then you have nothing”?
- thethimble 9y ago
  Presumably the stolen coins have not been spent yet. > The attacker is holding funds in the following address: 16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r.
GreaterFool 9y ago
> As Tether is the issuer of the USDT managed asset, we will not redeem any of the stolen tokens Rip Tether. I'd expect everyone to stop accepting Tether transactions effective immediately. Tether just made their own security breach a collective responsibility. Now you have two types of coins: the clean ones and tainted ones that are useless.
- krisives 9y ago
  What they mean I think is that they have hard-forked their underlying blockchain technology (Omni in this case) and it has a Ethereum Classic style check in it not allowing a specific TX/wallet
By-Jokese 9y ago
The page is down, what a coincidence!
Kazamai 9y ago
If you have money on bitfinex, get it out now~
brentis 9y ago
It may be an issue. But $600m / $200b = tiny
brentis 9y ago
May be an issue, but $600m / $200b = tiny
Kiro 9y ago
How are tethers created exactly? Are they not mined? If so, how can they be a cryptocurrency?

532 points by benpink 9y ago

Grab your popcorn, this is just the beginning.

ktta 9y ago

Here's the text since it seems to be overloaded (italics theirs): #Tether Critical Announcement Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether treasury wallet through malicious action by an external attacker. Tether integrators must take immediate action, as discussed below, to prevent further ecosystem disruption. $30,950,010 USDT was removed from the Tether Treasury wallet on November 19, 2017 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address. As Tether is the issuer of the USDT managed asset, we will not redeem any of the stolen tokens, and we are in the process of attempting token recovery to prevent them from entering the broader ecosystem. The attacker is holding funds in the following address: 16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r. If you receive any USDT tokens from the above address, or from any downstream address that receives these tokens, do not accept them, as they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by Tether for USD. The following steps have been taken to address this matter: 1. The tether.to back-end wallet service has been temporarily suspended. A thorough investigation on the cause of the attack is being undertaken to prevent similar actions in the future. 2. We are providing new builds of Omni Core to the community. (Omni Core is the software used by Tether integrators to support Omni Layer transactions.) These builds should prevent any movement of the stolen coins from the attacker’s address. We strongly urge all Tether integrators to install this software immediately to prevent the coins from entering the ecosystem. Again, any tokens from the attacker’s address will not be redeemed. Accordingly, any and all exchanges, wallets, and other Tether integrators should install this software immediately in order to prevent loss: https://github.com/tetherto/omnicore/releases/tag/0.2.99.s https://github.com/tetherto/omnicore/releases/tag/0.2.99.s Note that this software will cause a consensus change to currently running Omni Core clients, meaning that it is effectively a temporary hard fork to the Omni Layer. Integrators running this build will not accept any token sends from the attacker’s address, preventing the coins from moving further from the attacker’s address. 3. We are working with the Omni Foundation to investigate ways that will allow Tether to reclaim stranded tokens and rectify the hard fork created by the above software. Once this protocol enhancement is complete, the Omni Foundation will provide updated binaries for all integrators to install. These builds will supersede the binaries provided above by Tether.to. After the protocol upgrades to the Omni Layer are in place, Tether will reclaim the stolen tokens and return them to treasury. Tether issuances have not been affected by this attack, and all Tether tokens remain fully backed by assets in the Tether reserve. The only tokens that will not be redeemed are the ones that were stolen from Tether treasury yesterday. Those tokens will be returned to treasury once the Omni Layer protocol enhancements are in place. We will provide further updates as they come available, and we appreciate the community’s patience, understanding, and support while we work to rectify the situation in the best possible manner to everyone’s benefit. The Tether Team

patio11 9y ago

If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters: Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times) about the level of involvement. The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for them to clear USD-denominated wires. Their clients have ~$400M of USD on deposit with Bitfinex. Their solution: issue a cryptocurrency which is claimed to be 100% backed by USD and say that it is redeemable 1-to-1 for dollars... we just can't actually physically give you the dollars. Incredibly, this has worked so far. Bitfinex has issued approximately $600 million in tethers, all but $10 million or so in the last 6 months. They're usable on a handful of exchanges, for the purpose of buying BTC and other cryptocurrencies. Tether claims that someone has stolen 5% or so of their $600 million tethers -- the digital claims, not the underlying dollars sitting at their totally-exists-we-promise bank account. They've made a technological change to the Omni client to disallow transactions on the stolen tokens, but there is no guarantee that they succeed in convincing all parties to use this. The nightmare scenario for them is 1+ exchanges say "Well, actually, we rely on your money actually being money to list it here, so pick: we delist you or we don't, but we don't have any incentive to apply that patch." [0] The thief immediately exfiltrates to Bitcoin, and suddenly 30 million hot tethers are contaminating the money stream at the exchange, and they cannot be conveniently disambiguated from clean tethers, because money is fungible. Hilarity then ensues, for values of hilarity which probably mean "bank run" on a bank which is structurally incapable of paying out most holders of money. [0] Why does Bitfinex care whether their cryptocurrency is listed at other exchanges? Because they need to launder money to support their exchange business. Tethers are institutionalizing a sort of crypto-hawala (or crypto-Liberty Reserve), allowing the physical transfer of real money to happen at legal remoteness to the cryptocurrency exchange. Bitfinex has an order book filled with something people want. A way to get access to that orderbook is to say "Bitfinex, I want some tether, how do you sell them to me if you can't accept a wire?" Bitfinex might say "Are you a trustworthy US VC? Spiffy. Move $20 million from your left hand pocket to your right hand pocket. The right hand pocket is now ours; here's $20 to $21 million in Tether, which are good for BTC at your favorite exchanges. At some time in the future, a trustworthy US VC other than yourself is going to ask you to buy some tether from them at par value. You will do that, and pay them from your right pocket. If a regulator asks you about this transaction, you bat your eyes and say 'Oh, sophisticated investors doing a cryptocurrency transaction, nothing to see here.'" Post-script: Is this good news for Bitcoin? Oh this is great news for Bitcoin. If you don't believe Bitfinex's $600 million in liabilities are worth a copper shilling, the only option for getting your value out of Bitfinex is to swap your liability for Bitcoin, which drives up the price of Bitcoin at the margin. This is exactly what happened in the final months of Mt. Gox.

quuquuquu 9y ago

Caveat emptor. It's like 1999 all over again. Yeah block chain is honestly such cool technology but honestly anyone who is playing with more than they can afford to lose is in trouble.

robjan 9y ago

Cached version: https://archive.fo/7XoKB https://archive.fo/7XoKB

pbnjay 9y ago

$30M here, $30M there... by all means, please keep proving to me how secure and stable smart contracts are! I'm indifferent on bitcoin, it's a cool idea but there seem to be a lot of these "hammer everything" types that are doing it a disservice across the board.

chrisco255 9y ago
Tethers are not smart contracts. It's a separate crypto blockchain currency from Bitcoin and it claims to have a near 1:1 ratio with the USD, hence the name...it's "tethered" to the USD. This is not unlike some foreign currencies.
- pbnjay 9y ago
  Touché. But the Omni Core Layer mentioned in the announcement implements them.
  - unabridged 9y ago
    Omni layer wasn't hacked or exploited, this company just lost their private key
- stale2002 9y ago
  Well, it is "supposedly" backed up by USD. A whole bunch of people have been questioning whether they ACTUALLY have that money, very recently, and surprise surprise, there just 'happens' to be a hack that happens right now.
  - askmike 9y ago
    Not sure if "a whole bunch of people" equates more than 5 extremely vocal people on twitter and reddit. Tether published an audit a month ago.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      And yet, here they are getting "hacked". What an amazing coincidence! It is almost as if people predicted literally this exact scenario.

knieveltech 9y ago

This week's installment of internet funbux drama.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

nowarninglabel 9y ago

I came across this last weekend, which you may find helpful reading for more context on potential fraud with tether and Bitfinex: https://twitter.com/bitfinexed https://twitter.com/bitfinexed

tfha 9y ago

Isn't tether the one that screwed up? They are the ones who got stolen from, why do other exchanges have to bend over backwards and issue updates? If the attacker is moving fast enough, exchanges probably can't even respond in time. That shouldn't mean that they lose money. If tether reserves the right to delist coins at any time without much notice, why would you ever consider that a safe asset to accept?

sanxiyn 9y ago
Situation seems analogous to DAO hack. It was DAO who got stolen, Ethereum was fine, no Ethereum software had to bend over backwards to follow hard fork. Still, it seems post-ETH/ETC-fork ETH is doing fine, and sometimes even considered a safe asset to accept.
- ErikHuisman 9y ago
  Problem is the tether is allready spent. So the exchanges where the tether is spent is paying it out their pockets, no?
pmorici 9y ago
Because there are two kinds of crypto exchanges. Ones that have banking and can deal directly with government issued fiat currency and those that don't. If you don't have that banking then your pairs are all in USDT. If the Tether/USDT scheme goes to hell those exchanges w/o banking lose out to a degree so I think it is in all their interest to cooperate.
MichaelGG 9y ago
Because Tether can set the rules since they run the system? Perhaps they will use this as an excuse to claim everyone is tainted and force another haircut?

Jd 9y ago

Here's some more context: Tether was originally setup as RealCoin. It originally had a clear bank account relationship with a Taiwanese bank. It had about $30mm. Then the bank cut them off. Since then they've been floating without any announced banking relationship and they also changed their terms of service. Over the same time period they made a partnership with BitFinex and their supposed AUM has gone up over 10x. No one really knows how much of that corresponds to actual USD or if anyone can actually withdraw. A famous twitter account (https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed) points out every day the ostensible discrepancies between the supposed AUM and public amounts. I'm generally a huge fan of the goal of Tether (a stable USD backed cryptocurrency), but the proof is in the pudding (i.e the reserves) and your access to it, and both of these are rather questionable. Full disclosure: I know and am friends with some of the current Tether team and was recruited for RealCoin in the early stages of the project. They are working on a hard problem (asset-backed cryptocurrency on the way that gets the most traction in the market at present, not necessarily the way that inspires the most confidence.

ActsJuvenile 9y ago
Tell your friends they should shutdown the company immediately to avoid prison time. Using USD to back any token or digital asset 1:1 is a serious crime as demonstrated by Liberty Reserve.
- chx 9y ago
  What...? Liberty Reserve was a money laundering operation and had nothing to do with 1:1 or whatever. If there's something in the US Criminal Code about that, you need to cite it but I believe there isn't.
  - ryanlol 9y ago
    Tether does seem to suffer from exact same problems as LR though, no? It’s structured in a manner that makes it trivial to establish third party exchangers with no KYC processes. There is no KYC for individual Tether users, who only need to generate a bitcoin address to get started. Only time they do KYC is when you want to exchange via Tether website directly, which is no different from what LR did IIRC.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

unabridged 9y ago

Tether is handling this completely wrong. They should not hard fork Omni and force everyone to blacklist addresses. Instead, tell everyone to halt on-chain trading, take a snapshot of the chain, then create a new tether token and send them to everyone holding the old tethers (minus the thief). I think the bitcoins Tether would have to pay in transfer fees would be a fitting punishment for their poor security.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago
You can't just keep hard forking even time something had happens. The problem is inherit to digital assets: they can be hacked.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  Banks can be robbed, museums can be swindled, even credit bureaus like Equifax can get hacked. There's no such thing as hack-proof. That some cryptos will hard fork and adjust shows that the system can heal itself and not be in a permanent state of disrepair. That's not a bad thing at all.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    It’s a bad thing to the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account. Why not just run it in your favorite RDBMS? That way we’d at least save a bunch of CO2 emissions.
    - unabridged 9y ago
      >the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account This is just giving sentimentality an economic value. Forking should constantly be considered, you should always be looking to maximize the value of your stake. Imagine two coins A & B with exactly the same distribution, except in coin A a real jerk has 10% of the coins and you know his addresses. You also know almost all of the holders also consider this guy a jerk who will not contribute to positively to the value of the coin (at least not 110%). Its in everyone's best interest to just erase this jerk from the ledger and choose B, everyone ends up with 110% of their original stake.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

> $30,950,010 USDT was removed from the Tether Treasury wallet on November 19, 2017 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address And will you get it back? By design, no. This is the unfortunate reality of crypto currencies.

pmorici 9y ago

Haven't listened to this yet but audio interview with one of Bitfinex's and Tether's main detractors... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerIjELO7IY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerIjELO7IY

nikolay 9y ago

Bitcoin is crooks' playground! Inside theft, hacks, and everything possible happens as there are enough idiots who hodl and who keep buying at any price in hopes to become millionaires overnight.

ajcodez 9y ago

Twitter account @Bitfinexed [1] has been calling out Tether and Bitfinex for possible fraud for a while. Time for popcorn, see how this plays out. [1]: https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed

iamthirsty 9y ago
A lot of good reads on the Medium [1] as well. [1]: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

foxhop 9y ago

The abstractions and tech which cryptocurrency works on is fragile in most of the same ways as the layers that came before it (credit cards/banks/etc). Try to look at all this holistically. How many people and resources do we dedicate on this planet to keep track of money, economy, mine the coins, cash the checks, swipe the cards, keep the lines working? All of these abstractions make trade faster and more liquid but honestly it really feels like dimished returns in the grand scheme of things. So many people make money by keeping track of money. So much resources. I can't even fathom it. Bankers, store clerks, amazon servers, politicians, Dunbar, Stock markets, its crazy. How much do we allocate to this cause, the cause of keeping track of "who owns what"? This is not rhetorical, If I had to guess, I would guess that 70% of our resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense. Just think we are mining coal out of the real ground just to mine these "valuable" ones and zeros. What the actual fuck? It all just seems like a waste. Use my empty clock cycles to mine and keep track of everyone's virtual coins? I was behind folding proteins and SETI, and all the other distributed computing ideas. It felt meaningful, like I could help change the world and help raise up the human condition... Thanks to this post, I just learned what "Tethers" are, and I have to say, I'm so fucking disappointed with this part of the industry. One of the early promises of cryptocurrency was to "sick it to the man and governments". Now its powered largely by greed and consuming our most important resources in breakneck speeds. I wish you all luck this this "investment", hopefully the planet will survive this next abstraction of "money".

pjc50 9y ago
> I would guess that 70% of our resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense I think that's a wild overstatement, even if you're including every kind of management and public service job in the world.
20after4 9y ago
And then there is the whole "root of all evil" thing.
hvk 9y ago
Without making a comment on the crypto/tether aspect, I just want to express that it seems to me that the "cause of keeping track of 'who owns what'", as you put it, is precisely the singular technological achievement which has enabled the "human condition" to evolve to its current state. Money is literally the decentralized, asynchronous, dynamic, and continuous computation that has evolved to process the combinatorial coordination of signals/information on resources between 7+ billion unfathomably complex and independent agents. To me, the staggering thing wouldn't be that "70% of our resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense", but rather that the technology known as money is so incredibly efficient that it leaves 30% surplus (in this example) for society to further grow.

hw 9y ago

I'm super pumped and bullish about crypto and the whole idea of a decentralized world, but there's so much money involved right now (most of it speculative money, and arguably lots of illegal money), that there needs to be some real measures to ensure the security around it. Crypto has made it easy for people to essentially start a bank, without actually thinking too much about or knowing how to build a vault properly.

ktta 9y ago
Looks like you are l33t today

kunal88 9y ago

good

quickthrower2 9y ago

The advantages of centralisation. You can fork ... without a fork!

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

when you're anxiously waiting for tether to gox the whole market and their critical announcement is ... not that bad

krisives 9y ago
Basically clicked it expecting to read what you're describing. I'm not "disappointed" but at the same time I feel the writing is on the wall. I still expect to read something like a MtGox in the next few weeks/months.

dangero 9y ago

I released a paper earlier this year talking about how we can reasonably lock cryptocurrency to fiat, but unfortunately the space is still rather immature. A single provider of USD tokens is extremely dangerous. Best case scenario would be if there were many companies like Tether and you could spread your token purchases between them automatically to minimize counterparty risk. Stellar and Ripple are closest to solving this since they have fiat trading pairs for each trusted exchange on their network. In the future that could mean issuance from hundreds of banks. Here is the paper if anyone is interested: https://www.gogreenmango.com/whitepapers/Bitcoin-Volatility-Removal-via-Crypto-Token-Asset-Baskets.pdf https://www.gogreenmango.com/whitepapers/Bitcoin-Volatility-...

ActsJuvenile 9y ago
Ripple is a scam and Jed McCaleb has been dumping thousands of Ripples a day since forever. You shouldn't encourage new users to buy Ripples.
- krisives 9y ago
  Ripple is a scam it also predates Bitcoin entire thing was a sever to server bank basically
- Nemant 9y ago
  Could you elaborate more on this point?
- alwaysnotright 9y ago
  Jed McCaleb left Ripple pretty early and started Stellar instead, which is probably why he is dumping Ripple.
- dangero 9y ago
  Ripple the platform is closest to solving the counterparty problems with 1-1 USD tokens. I'm not encouraging people to buy Ripples I'm just stating -- the only way to limit the counterparty risk is to diversify. Banks are perfectly positioned to offer these 1-1 fiat tokens. Ripple is partnering with them.

SrslyJosh 9y ago

#buttcoin

krisives 9y ago
Use the chrome extension it automatically does it https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-to-buttcoin/gebbpaadmjjlgjnnljckibmmgkmckdng?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-to-buttcoi...
- mavdi 9y ago
  Have all the fun :) While I steadily get rich. I hope they'll make an extension for "fiat money to food on table" when this whole corrupt financial systems comes crashing down (again).

dcw303 9y ago

Looking at the attacker's address in Omni Explorer: https://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r https://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPt... I'm finding this a little confusing as it looks like BTC blockchain addresses can also be Tether addresses. Is this correct? They are currently holding $30.9M USDT. If they transfer this to another USDT address, I assume it would show up here, like the 3 inbound tx from 31okFF1rUu8jjPEVuajycTRBp82Nteo4Mv that makes up their balance. But what if they want to cash out to BTC? If they bought on Bitfinex with their USDT would another transaction appear? And could it then be tracked to the BTC blockchain explorer? It was claimed that the stolen USDT could be mixed into the main supply of BTC, but I'm failing to understand how that would happen, as it seems traceable from the public addresses.

sanxiyn 9y ago
> I'm finding this a little confusing as it looks like BTC blockchain addresses can also be Tether addresses. Is this correct? Yes. Tether is so-called Smart Property (with Property ID 31) stored using Omni Layer. Omni Layer stores transactions on Bitcoin Blockchain. Transaction data is encoded as output script, which uses OP_RETURN opcode and zero value. OP_RETURN opcode allows 80 bytes of data. Omni Layer uses 4 bytes ("omni") of 80 as a prefix to coexist with other systems using OP_RETURN.

runeks 9y ago

> Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether treasury wallet […] > […] they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by Tether for USD. How will this ever work in real life? If I yesterday — right after the hack, but before the announcement — in good faith received $1m in USDT, and paid in Bitcoin, who’s liable? In effect, this policy just shifts the financial burden to innocent people, who may have paid e.g. Bitcoin in exchange for “fake” USDT in good faith. The issuer needs to take sole responsibility for this. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but because the USDT is useless otherwise. How can it be used for payments if the issuer can make a blog post saying “by the way, if you received USDT from this guy then you have nothing”?

thethimble 9y ago
Presumably the stolen coins have not been spent yet. > The attacker is holding funds in the following address: 16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r.

GreaterFool 9y ago

> As Tether is the issuer of the USDT managed asset, we will not redeem any of the stolen tokens Rip Tether. I'd expect everyone to stop accepting Tether transactions effective immediately. Tether just made their own security breach a collective responsibility. Now you have two types of coins: the clean ones and tainted ones that are useless.

krisives 9y ago
What they mean I think is that they have hard-forked their underlying blockchain technology (Omni in this case) and it has a Ethereum Classic style check in it not allowing a specific TX/wallet

By-Jokese 9y ago

The page is down, what a coincidence!

Kazamai 9y ago

If you have money on bitfinex, get it out now~

brentis 9y ago

It may be an issue. But $600m / $200b = tiny

brentis 9y ago

May be an issue, but $600m / $200b = tiny

Kiro 9y ago

How are tethers created exactly? Are they not mined? If so, how can they be a cryptocurrency?