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It's perfectly reasonable to assume $600 million has flown in via Taiwan. Note that that doesn't mean that local Taiwanese have personally bought $600 million.
by darawk 9y ago
It's perfectly reasonable to assume $600 million has flown in via Taiwan. Note that that doesn't mean that local Taiwanese have personally bought $600 million. Tether creates an arbitrage opportunity. If you have a Taiwanese bank account, whenever Tether gets out of sync, to say, 0.99, you can simply arbitrage that away and make a risk-free profit. That is what is happening. The demand isn't coming from Taiwan per se, it's coming from arbitrageurs (who either are Taiwanese, or are using someone who has a Taiwanese bank account).
- ActsJuvenile 9y agoNo one is going to deposit 600 mill in a hacked exchange via Tether crypto-Hawala using Taiwanese shell bank accounts. People with real money would instead wire the funds to Gemini or ItBit or even a terribly managed company like Coinbase. KISS
- repomies691 9y agoYou sound like you are living in the US, and everything is simple there and works as described. Which is probably true for you, as I understand those are exchanges catered towards US customers. However the mistake is that you assume that the rest of the world (majority) works the same way.
- ryanlol 9y agoSure “No one”, I don’t think the same necessarily holds for many.
- mancerayder 9y agoWhat's wrong with Coinbase? (I ask as a naive fool with a bit of money stored there).
- MrRadar 9y agoMostly that if anything goes wrong their support tends to be incredibly unresponsive. Also make sure you're not using SMS-based 2-factor authentication with them since there's a long history of people getting their phone numbers stolen and then their Coinbase accounts drained within minutes.
- ambicapter 9y agoWell, thank god their two-factor has always failed to setup for me.
- daxorid 9y ago> tends to be incredibly unresponsive Correction, there is no support. I have a bit of money permanently locked in a coinbase account because their support does not reply at all. At some point I will just have to convert it all to BTC and send it elsewhere. Caveat Emptor.
- pault 9y agoI had the same experience. Got locked out of 2FA, spent two weeks waiting for a reply from support, only to be told that I should just make a new account. Unfortunately I haven't found an easier option for buying BTC.
- massaman_yams 9y agoI had the opposite experience, though this was before Coinbase created/supported recovery codes for 2fa. My phone with the 2fa app bricked and it was a painless, one-message exchange with Support to work around it, completed in < 1 business day.
- mancerayder 9y agoNoted. On the account draining -- well, there's a latency in setting up new bank accounts there. So I'm surprised it's that easy to just yank money out. Although I did notice there's no account verification. For example, on Vanguard or other platforms they do a small deposit of a few cents and ask you to verify the payment amounts, a process which has a latency of a day or two.
- mancerayder 9y agoAh, so people just yank money out by sending it to some wallet. Makes sense. Are there any ways to make coinbase safer other than a very secure password?
- ActsJuvenile 9y agoBugs. I have discovered two bugs personally, reported them to Coinbase, and those are still unresolved. For context, I reported couple of bugs to MtGox back in the day, and even MtGox fixed them in under a month which is more than what I can say for Coinbase. I guess this is what happens when Coinbase speed-hired 100 people in one year with no proper team-building exercises.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoNever store money on an exchange. Once you are done trading, get it out of there.
- darawk 9y agoNo one person would deposit 600 mil at once, sure. But they don't have to. It's many people collectively depositing 600 mil over a long time.
- matthewrudy 9y agoI once wired $30k USD from my UK to Taiwan bank account. It worked fine, but had to go into the bank in person with ID to get the funds approved. Not sure what it'd be like if I moved $100ks.
- nradov 9y ago* risk-free (except for counterparty risk)