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Coinbase transaction message in last mined block with 12.5 BTC subsidy: "NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue" https://

by k00b 6y ago

Coinbase transaction message in last mined block with 12.5 BTC subsidy: "NYTimes 09/Apr/2020 With $2.3T Injection, Fed's Plan Far Exceeds 2008 Rescue" https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/629999 https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/629999

arcticbull 6y ago
Ooh! Ask them about Tether! And how all the worlds crypto prices are in USDT, which is at most 70% backed (30% seized by the feds in a money laundering sting) and has never been audited.
- seibelj 6y ago
  You grind this axe in literally every crypto thread, it's getting very stale. Yes, you hate Bitcoin, we get it!
  - liquidify 6y ago
    He is right. Tether is completely messed up.
    - seibelj 6y ago
      No one puts a gun to anyone's head to use it. There are many stablecoins now, with various properties. USDC trades at the same value as USDT https://www.circle.com/en/usdc https://www.circle.com/en/usdc Traders value Bitcoin the same in USDT or USDC, and USDT / USDC trades at parity. That implies the market trusts USDT. It doesn't matter what people on HN say, as long as the market agrees.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Frankly it's really strange to hear on the one hand: 1. ...that "the feds are debasing our currency through their relentless printing" It is producing a measured, consistent, relatively small 2% rate of inflation over decades and decades. They are of course acting on behalf of an elected body, and ultimately accountable to that body. They're also audited. 2. ...that Tether's relentless, un-audited, 70%-at-most backed printing is fine because the "market trusts it" and "nobody's forcing you to use it." The market trusts it because number go up, and it's in the interest of exactly zero market participants to show the world the emperor has no clothes. It's also not fair to say that "nobody's forced to use it" when everyone is forced to use it. In 2018, 80% of all crypto exchange transactions were conducted in Tether. That makes USD transactions by far the minority. Since arbitrage bots keep the prices in sync, and the majority is USDT, even the USD exchanges follow the USDT prices so long as there exists sufficient liquidity to balance the books. [1] [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mystery-behind-tether-the-crypto-worlds-digital-dollar-1534089601 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mystery-behind-tether-the-c...
        csomar 6y ago
        I'm not sure what is that you are missing? Many exchanges now offer a set of Stable coins. If you had concerns with USDT then you should switch to USDC which so far functions the same as USDT. I did. Many people probably also did. USDT still holds its peg and did hold its peg through some bad price swings. So either it's fully backed or they are doing some magic there. > The market trusts it because number go up, and it's in the interest of exactly zero market participants to show the world the emperor has no clothes. Wouldn't work on extreme market fluctuations. Bitcoin dropped 50% and USDT still hold the peg. Bitcoin then almost tripled in a short period and USDT still hold the peg. I'm not sure if they have full reserves or running some magic; but whatever they are doing is working very well.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        > I'm not sure if they have full reserves or running some magic; but whatever they are doing is working very well. We know they don't have full reserves because we know 30% of them were seized. [1] > ...but whatever they are doing is working very well. Frauds work until they don't. [1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/head-of-crypto-capital-arrested-in-connection-with-money-laundering https://cointelegraph.com/news/head-of-crypto-capital-arrest...
        GoblinSlayer 6y ago
        Better call it economics. Not like there's difference, but economics is better for PR.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        No, there's a big difference lol, the economy is managed and administered at the will of the people to benefit the people. This fraud is being administered by a shady cabal in the BVI with offices in Hong Kong to the benefit of themselves.
        mtrower 6y ago
        >>> We know they don't have full reserves because we know 30% of them were seized. [1] You suspect they don't have full reserves because you know 30% of them were seized. Presuming "full reserves" means 1:1 backing (what else could it mean, here?), your statement assumes they had exactly 1:1 reserves before the seizure. If they had more than that, your assumption could end up false. So sure, you suspect. From what I've read in this thread, I tend to agree. But I fail to see how you know.
      - arthurcolle 6y ago
        Agreed - some find it useful to have this instrument in order to move dollars to crypto, so it's really no worse than the fiat currencies that we are forced to use, and that many are deciding to move away from. It is a fact that at present, you can't replace your entire life with cryptocurrency transactions, but the actions of the Federal Reserve over the last few months demonstrate how useful it is to have a parallel construct that actually represents an asset that isn't immediately able to be transmogrified by actions of a shadowy cabal (JPow in particular, who with his 50mm nest egg stuck in a hole at BlackRock, has a direct incentive to keep markets afloat) Just my $0.02
      - wpietri 6y ago
        > It doesn't matter what people on HN say, as long as the market agrees. "It doesn't matter what those crazy geologists say, as long volcano hasn't exploded yet."
      - occamsrazorwit 6y ago
        > It doesn't matter what people on HN say, as long as the market agrees. The market can never overvalue or undervalue? Hmm...
        GoblinSlayer 6y ago
        If there was an objective way to assign value, wouldn't it make speculation impossible?
    - chipperyman573 6y ago
      I've never heard of Tether before this, what effects does it have on the btc halving?
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        - 80+% of crypto exchange transactions aren't denominated in USD, but in USDT. - USDT is a fictional currency invented by Bitfinex to make up for the fact they don't actually have access to banking because they're unbelivably shady. - They got many other exchanges onboard since it effectively allows you to skirt AML and KYC regulations. - Bitfinex is a shadowy cabal of truly dreadful market participants who mess around under the covers with Tether and use it to effectively control pricing. They print Tether and use it to buy BTC to drive the price up. They then sell BTC for Tether if they want to drive the price down. - They promised for 5+ years that they'd get Tether's bank account audited but instead auditors up and quit. - They had 30% of their assets seized in a money laundering sting but of course, the exchange rate remained 1:1 instead of 1:0.7 - The NYAG is suing them. The price you see of BTC doesn't really reflect anything other than Bitfinex' manipulation. The rate of BTC inflation falling from 12.5BTC/block to 6.25/block affects miners and their ability to be solvent. Not much else.
        xtracto 6y ago
        > - They had 30% of their assets seized in a money laundering sting but of course, the exchange rate remained 1:1 instead of 1:0.7 Thsi one I don't understand: A ton of MXN has been seized because El Chapo had been using it for shady stuff, but yet nobody expects the MXN/USD pair to suffer from that. Why would it be different? The fact that someone takes the token "by force" won't suddenly decrease their value.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        If El Chapo seized 30% of the MXN in existence I'd suggest the currency would in fact fluctuate lol.
        bostonpete 6y ago
  - catalogia 6y ago
    > stale How is that relevant? If he's right, he's right.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- lend000 6y ago
  If you are so confident, why not sit on a Tether short? The reality is that the market expects solvency for the foreseeable future, and tether solves a market problem (liquidity in environments that do not impose the KYC laws required by the US government to trade USD), thereby allowing Bitcoin users to achieve a level of anonymity while still having liquidity. It also, of course, allows a wider variety and leverage range of financial instruments.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    > If you are so confident, why not sit on a Tether short? Because betting either way in a manipulated market is a sucker's game. Bitfinex has their finger on the scales. Why on earth would I bet in their casino? Does anyone other than Bitfinex even allow you to short USDT? Remember those two are one and the same, and Bitfinex doesn't even have banking. What are they going to pay my USDT short in? USDT?
    - seibelj 6y ago
      https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/48857/former-head-of-circle-otc-says-theres-more-to-the-tether-narrative https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/48857/former-head-of-cir... > Matuszewski told On the Brink's Nic Carter that the idea of tethers driving the price of bitcoin significantly higher is "not true whatsoever." > "I say this as someone who created and redeemed billions of tether over the course of my life and specifically created it in 2017," he said. > In short, Matuszewski affirmed that there were incentivizing events for the generation of Tethers. Bitfinex didn't print Tether out of nowhere either, since Matuszewski said he himself was one of the drivers. > “I can tell you that billions of dollars were sent in to make it like that," he said. "I can 100%, without question, verifiably guarantee it happened. I did it, I was there...That money wasn't just being hypothecated. It wasn't just coming out of thin air, that was happening." I worked for Circle, I worked with Dan, and I can guarantee you that Dan (former head of Circle Trade, the second largest crypto OTC desk) knows his stuff, and Tether is nowhere near as sketchy as your posts and conspiracies would have you believe.
      - 6y ago
- csomar 6y ago
  Though I'm not sure why so many people were hinged about Tether (albeit the average solidity of its peg meant it's legit); the positive effect of this is that we now have lots of different stable USD coins: Coinbase, Gemini, TrueUSD, Binance all have stable coins with a total cap of over $1bn. Sure it's much less than TetherUSD $6.3bn but it's roughly 16%. Much better than the total monopoly of tether two years ago.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Because when the whole house of tulips inevitably comes crashing down, the stable coins are gonna be worthless too. So people will take 99.99999999% losses and not 60-80%. Real dollars go in.... IOUs out of a bull's behind come out.
    - csomar 6y ago
      Coinbase/Gemini USD are US regulated. So... no.
      - TylerE 6y ago
        Because regulation worked SO WELL in numerous cases anyone could name (Enron, Worldcom, Authur Anderson, Lehman Brothers...)
        product50 6y ago
        Yeah - everything is fucked so why do anything? Lets just sit here and criticize everything. And that is the life we choose to live.
        TylerE 6y ago
        That's pointlessly reductionist. Just because we can't do perfect means we should look at a steaming pile of dogshit like it's filet mignon. The short term solution to "everything's fucked" is to stop making it even more fucked.
- mraudiobook_com 6y ago
  Why do HNers turn into such idiots around Bitcoin?
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  Tether to me comes across as one of these things HN and the skeptics got so painfully wrong for years. It would be amusing to go through all the posts from 2017 on the subject.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    Bernie Madoff's scam lasted perhaps as much as 40 years. It was still a scam.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      And the catholic church is around even longer .. claiming to be the only ones who know the eternal truth. (luckily they lost power, so today they can only claim(mostly) and not enforce)
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    I think you'd find them pretty consistent: "where is the audit you keep promising?"
    - shobith 6y ago
      But what about Hillary's emails!
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Hillary didn't promise to hire an auditor over, and over for years, then hire an auditor, and then fire the auditor when things started going pear-shaped during the audit. Or, you know, have 30% of her email seized in an AML sting. My point is, the analogy falls over right quick. I'm also not asking for proof of a negative (that Hillary didn't destroy her emails). I'm asking for proof of an affirmative. That Tether does have funds to back it's liabilities. Should be easy. Bring in KPMG, show them your bank accounts and have them attest to it. If they do that I'll shout how wrong I was from the rooftops. I'm only asking them to follow through on their numerous, repeated promises over a half decade. "We are aware of online discussions about Tether’s lack of publicly-available audits. Periodic audits of our bank balances have been performed by the Taiwan-based auditing firm TOPSUN CPAs & Co. The results of those audits were for the benefit of shareholders and were not in a form suitable for public consumption (to begin with, they were in Mandarin)" [1]. ... they couldn't share these audits because they were in Mandarin?! Where on earth would they find a translator. [1] https://tether.to/tether-update/ https://tether.to/tether-update/
- 0x8BADF00D 6y ago
  Crypto can be priced in anything, including gold. Please think a little before posting like this. It ruins the quality of discussion.
  - jayd16 6y ago
    He's talking about how tether is backed. If its backed by other coins and or even itself through the smoke screen of other coins then its not really backed at all. I think in the context here, "pricing with gold" would mean you need to find someone who will actually give you that price in gold.
    - scottlocklin 6y ago
      Nobody tell him about fractional reserve banking.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        ... the thing Bitcoin set out to eliminate? Now it has the same flaws as the regular financial system, but much less efficient. Where do I sign up?
        ric2b 6y ago
        And Bitcoin is not Tether.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        Of course but one's not particularly useful without the other. 80% of BTC exchanges happened via USDT. Tether defines the price. You can't separate them.
      - vkou 6y ago
        Banks practicing FRBs have liquidity reserve limits, and are frequently audited, and have to be solvent (Value of all assets minus liabilities exceeds value of all deposits) in order to operate. Tether is a fly-by-night con job that, to disburse USD redemptions, wires hundreds of millions of dollars to money launderers in the Carribean, who then go ahead and steal most of it. And when law enforcement starts digging through their books, we discover that a third of Tether's 'reserves' consist of a "I'll pay you guys a few billion dollars, pinky swear", scrawled on a napkin. It's not fractional reserve. It's straight-up fraud.
- shobith 6y ago
  "tether bad, so bitcoin bad!"
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    It's not about good or bad. Bitcoin is bad because a transaction takes 700kWh and 87 grams of e-waste. It's staggeringly inefficient because trust is a huge optimization. Tether is bad. Where it intersects is it can create the impression people think Bitcoin is worth something in dollars.
    - shobith 6y ago
      > It's not about good or bad. ok > Bitcoin is bad because... ??
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        Poorly worded but what I meant was that Tether's shadiness doesn't imply Bitcoin is bad. That, I believe stands on its own merits.
- mudlus 6y ago
  The irony of talking about auditing in fiat as stock prices soar despite 20 million unemployed. Enjoy exponential exacerbation of income disparity so you can keep your BigMac at a "stable" price. NOTHING is valued correctly, RN. Bitcoin is the metric system for money.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Hold on there, we've got so many things to unpack. > The irony of talking about auditing in fiat as stock prices soar despite 20 million unemployed. Stock are not a proxy for the economy, as you're discovering. They're a forward-looking price discovery mechanism. The market sees an end to this, and they're pricing it in. There's no reason a stock's ticker should fluctuate day by day to reflect the current sales. That's not how stocks are priced. > Enjoy exponential exacerbation of income disparity so you can keep your BigMac at a "stable" price. Stock prices have nothing to do with Big Mac prices. In general Big Mac pricing is an excellent metric when estimating purchasing power parity [1]. Income / wealth disparity is a real problem, and I guarantee you, bitcoin is not the solution to that. It's got worse wealth inequality than any banana republic. "The top 2.8 percent of wallet addresses control 95 percent of the supply of bitcoin, according to statistics." [2] Income inequality isn't relevant here since income tends to follow inflation. That's a social problem that needs a social solution. > NOTHING is valued correctly, RN. Things are valued according to what people are willing to pay. > Bitcoin is the metric system for money. In a way it's closer to the imperial system: a slow, old, backwards, deflationary when the whole world is inflationary, system. Economically speaking of course. In general though that's a meaningless statement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/five-reasons-why-bitcoin-wealth-155752613.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/five-reasons-why-bitcoin-weal...
- zkmon 6y ago
  You are trying very hard to educate some hardened heads. While I appreciate your efforts, I should advise you to let things fail. Natural forces will establish the facts and show that cryptocurrencies have no place in the evolution of state-controlled economies of the world.
kinghajj 6y ago
How do you find that quote in the site?
- k00b 6y ago
  Look at the coinbase data for the block
- hanniabu 6y ago
  It doesn't really show on mobile, you need to be on desktop to view it
ur-whale 6y ago
Sweet, and reminiscent of the message included in the initial block [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
2bitencryption 6y ago
I hope they picked the title of the article in the physical NYT paper release, and not the nytimes website, since the website is known to change the title.
- lawn 6y ago
  They did. Here's a picture: https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/0Td4BmI0gqihoTWRp.jpg https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/0Td4BmI0... And yes the website has changed the title.
ehsankia 6y ago
For those like me who didn't understand the relevance, back in 2009, Satoshi (the creator of Bitcoin) put the following message in the very first block: > The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks Back then it was a response to the 2008/9 financial crisis, which is what makes this new message relevant.
- k00b 6y ago
  Link to that very first block https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/0 https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/0 The subsidy then was 50 BTC
  - iso-8859-1 6y ago
    Hardly a subsidy if it can't be spent ;)
    - tim333 6y ago
      The potential discounted future cash flows from it were good.
      - sneak 6y ago
        I believe GP’s joke is about the minor technical issue that the very first block reward is unspendable in the blockchain, not that there was no market for it.

by k00b 6y ago

arcticbull 6y ago

Ooh! Ask them about Tether! And how all the worlds crypto prices are in USDT, which is at most 70% backed (30% seized by the feds in a money laundering sting) and has never been audited.

seibelj 6y ago
You grind this axe in literally every crypto thread, it's getting very stale. Yes, you hate Bitcoin, we get it!
- liquidify 6y ago
  He is right. Tether is completely messed up.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    No one puts a gun to anyone's head to use it. There are many stablecoins now, with various properties. USDC trades at the same value as USDT https://www.circle.com/en/usdc https://www.circle.com/en/usdc Traders value Bitcoin the same in USDT or USDC, and USDT / USDC trades at parity. That implies the market trusts USDT. It doesn't matter what people on HN say, as long as the market agrees.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Frankly it's really strange to hear on the one hand: 1. ...that "the feds are debasing our currency through their relentless printing" It is producing a measured, consistent, relatively small 2% rate of inflation over decades and decades. They are of course acting on behalf of an elected body, and ultimately accountable to that body. They're also audited. 2. ...that Tether's relentless, un-audited, 70%-at-most backed printing is fine because the "market trusts it" and "nobody's forcing you to use it." The market trusts it because number go up, and it's in the interest of exactly zero market participants to show the world the emperor has no clothes. It's also not fair to say that "nobody's forced to use it" when everyone is forced to use it. In 2018, 80% of all crypto exchange transactions were conducted in Tether. That makes USD transactions by far the minority. Since arbitrage bots keep the prices in sync, and the majority is USDT, even the USD exchanges follow the USDT prices so long as there exists sufficient liquidity to balance the books. [1] [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mystery-behind-tether-the-crypto-worlds-digital-dollar-1534089601 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mystery-behind-tether-the-c...
      - csomar 6y ago
        I'm not sure what is that you are missing? Many exchanges now offer a set of Stable coins. If you had concerns with USDT then you should switch to USDC which so far functions the same as USDT. I did. Many people probably also did. USDT still holds its peg and did hold its peg through some bad price swings. So either it's fully backed or they are doing some magic there. > The market trusts it because number go up, and it's in the interest of exactly zero market participants to show the world the emperor has no clothes. Wouldn't work on extreme market fluctuations. Bitcoin dropped 50% and USDT still hold the peg. Bitcoin then almost tripled in a short period and USDT still hold the peg. I'm not sure if they have full reserves or running some magic; but whatever they are doing is working very well.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        > I'm not sure if they have full reserves or running some magic; but whatever they are doing is working very well. We know they don't have full reserves because we know 30% of them were seized. [1] > ...but whatever they are doing is working very well. Frauds work until they don't. [1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/head-of-crypto-capital-arrested-in-connection-with-money-laundering https://cointelegraph.com/news/head-of-crypto-capital-arrest...
        GoblinSlayer 6y ago
        Better call it economics. Not like there's difference, but economics is better for PR.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        No, there's a big difference lol, the economy is managed and administered at the will of the people to benefit the people. This fraud is being administered by a shady cabal in the BVI with offices in Hong Kong to the benefit of themselves.
        mtrower 6y ago
        >>> We know they don't have full reserves because we know 30% of them were seized. [1] You suspect they don't have full reserves because you know 30% of them were seized. Presuming "full reserves" means 1:1 backing (what else could it mean, here?), your statement assumes they had exactly 1:1 reserves before the seizure. If they had more than that, your assumption could end up false. So sure, you suspect. From what I've read in this thread, I tend to agree. But I fail to see how you know.
    - arthurcolle 6y ago
      Agreed - some find it useful to have this instrument in order to move dollars to crypto, so it's really no worse than the fiat currencies that we are forced to use, and that many are deciding to move away from. It is a fact that at present, you can't replace your entire life with cryptocurrency transactions, but the actions of the Federal Reserve over the last few months demonstrate how useful it is to have a parallel construct that actually represents an asset that isn't immediately able to be transmogrified by actions of a shadowy cabal (JPow in particular, who with his 50mm nest egg stuck in a hole at BlackRock, has a direct incentive to keep markets afloat) Just my $0.02
    - wpietri 6y ago
      > It doesn't matter what people on HN say, as long as the market agrees. "It doesn't matter what those crazy geologists say, as long volcano hasn't exploded yet."
    - occamsrazorwit 6y ago
      > It doesn't matter what people on HN say, as long as the market agrees. The market can never overvalue or undervalue? Hmm...
      - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
        If there was an objective way to assign value, wouldn't it make speculation impossible?
  - chipperyman573 6y ago
    I've never heard of Tether before this, what effects does it have on the btc halving?
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      - 80+% of crypto exchange transactions aren't denominated in USD, but in USDT. - USDT is a fictional currency invented by Bitfinex to make up for the fact they don't actually have access to banking because they're unbelivably shady. - They got many other exchanges onboard since it effectively allows you to skirt AML and KYC regulations. - Bitfinex is a shadowy cabal of truly dreadful market participants who mess around under the covers with Tether and use it to effectively control pricing. They print Tether and use it to buy BTC to drive the price up. They then sell BTC for Tether if they want to drive the price down. - They promised for 5+ years that they'd get Tether's bank account audited but instead auditors up and quit. - They had 30% of their assets seized in a money laundering sting but of course, the exchange rate remained 1:1 instead of 1:0.7 - The NYAG is suing them. The price you see of BTC doesn't really reflect anything other than Bitfinex' manipulation. The rate of BTC inflation falling from 12.5BTC/block to 6.25/block affects miners and their ability to be solvent. Not much else.
      - xtracto 6y ago
        > - They had 30% of their assets seized in a money laundering sting but of course, the exchange rate remained 1:1 instead of 1:0.7 Thsi one I don't understand: A ton of MXN has been seized because El Chapo had been using it for shady stuff, but yet nobody expects the MXN/USD pair to suffer from that. Why would it be different? The fact that someone takes the token "by force" won't suddenly decrease their value.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        If El Chapo seized 30% of the MXN in existence I'd suggest the currency would in fact fluctuate lol.
        bostonpete 6y ago
- catalogia 6y ago
  > stale How is that relevant? If he's right, he's right.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
lend000 6y ago
If you are so confident, why not sit on a Tether short? The reality is that the market expects solvency for the foreseeable future, and tether solves a market problem (liquidity in environments that do not impose the KYC laws required by the US government to trade USD), thereby allowing Bitcoin users to achieve a level of anonymity while still having liquidity. It also, of course, allows a wider variety and leverage range of financial instruments.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > If you are so confident, why not sit on a Tether short? Because betting either way in a manipulated market is a sucker's game. Bitfinex has their finger on the scales. Why on earth would I bet in their casino? Does anyone other than Bitfinex even allow you to short USDT? Remember those two are one and the same, and Bitfinex doesn't even have banking. What are they going to pay my USDT short in? USDT?
  - seibelj 6y ago
    https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/48857/former-head-of-circle-otc-says-theres-more-to-the-tether-narrative https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/48857/former-head-of-cir... > Matuszewski told On the Brink's Nic Carter that the idea of tethers driving the price of bitcoin significantly higher is "not true whatsoever." > "I say this as someone who created and redeemed billions of tether over the course of my life and specifically created it in 2017," he said. > In short, Matuszewski affirmed that there were incentivizing events for the generation of Tethers. Bitfinex didn't print Tether out of nowhere either, since Matuszewski said he himself was one of the drivers. > “I can tell you that billions of dollars were sent in to make it like that," he said. "I can 100%, without question, verifiably guarantee it happened. I did it, I was there...That money wasn't just being hypothecated. It wasn't just coming out of thin air, that was happening." I worked for Circle, I worked with Dan, and I can guarantee you that Dan (former head of Circle Trade, the second largest crypto OTC desk) knows his stuff, and Tether is nowhere near as sketchy as your posts and conspiracies would have you believe.
    - 6y ago
csomar 6y ago
Though I'm not sure why so many people were hinged about Tether (albeit the average solidity of its peg meant it's legit); the positive effect of this is that we now have lots of different stable USD coins: Coinbase, Gemini, TrueUSD, Binance all have stable coins with a total cap of over $1bn. Sure it's much less than TetherUSD $6.3bn but it's roughly 16%. Much better than the total monopoly of tether two years ago.
- TylerE 6y ago
  Because when the whole house of tulips inevitably comes crashing down, the stable coins are gonna be worthless too. So people will take 99.99999999% losses and not 60-80%. Real dollars go in.... IOUs out of a bull's behind come out.
  - csomar 6y ago
    Coinbase/Gemini USD are US regulated. So... no.
    - TylerE 6y ago
      Because regulation worked SO WELL in numerous cases anyone could name (Enron, Worldcom, Authur Anderson, Lehman Brothers...)
      - product50 6y ago
        Yeah - everything is fucked so why do anything? Lets just sit here and criticize everything. And that is the life we choose to live.
        TylerE 6y ago
        That's pointlessly reductionist. Just because we can't do perfect means we should look at a steaming pile of dogshit like it's filet mignon. The short term solution to "everything's fucked" is to stop making it even more fucked.
mraudiobook_com 6y ago
Why do HNers turn into such idiots around Bitcoin?
DarthGhandi 6y ago
Tether to me comes across as one of these things HN and the skeptics got so painfully wrong for years. It would be amusing to go through all the posts from 2017 on the subject.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Bernie Madoff's scam lasted perhaps as much as 40 years. It was still a scam.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    And the catholic church is around even longer .. claiming to be the only ones who know the eternal truth. (luckily they lost power, so today they can only claim(mostly) and not enforce)
- arcticbull 6y ago
  I think you'd find them pretty consistent: "where is the audit you keep promising?"
  - shobith 6y ago
    But what about Hillary's emails!
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Hillary didn't promise to hire an auditor over, and over for years, then hire an auditor, and then fire the auditor when things started going pear-shaped during the audit. Or, you know, have 30% of her email seized in an AML sting. My point is, the analogy falls over right quick. I'm also not asking for proof of a negative (that Hillary didn't destroy her emails). I'm asking for proof of an affirmative. That Tether does have funds to back it's liabilities. Should be easy. Bring in KPMG, show them your bank accounts and have them attest to it. If they do that I'll shout how wrong I was from the rooftops. I'm only asking them to follow through on their numerous, repeated promises over a half decade. "We are aware of online discussions about Tether’s lack of publicly-available audits. Periodic audits of our bank balances have been performed by the Taiwan-based auditing firm TOPSUN CPAs & Co. The results of those audits were for the benefit of shareholders and were not in a form suitable for public consumption (to begin with, they were in Mandarin)" [1]. ... they couldn't share these audits because they were in Mandarin?! Where on earth would they find a translator. [1] https://tether.to/tether-update/ https://tether.to/tether-update/
0x8BADF00D 6y ago
Crypto can be priced in anything, including gold. Please think a little before posting like this. It ruins the quality of discussion.
- jayd16 6y ago
  He's talking about how tether is backed. If its backed by other coins and or even itself through the smoke screen of other coins then its not really backed at all. I think in the context here, "pricing with gold" would mean you need to find someone who will actually give you that price in gold.
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    Nobody tell him about fractional reserve banking.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      ... the thing Bitcoin set out to eliminate? Now it has the same flaws as the regular financial system, but much less efficient. Where do I sign up?
      - ric2b 6y ago
        And Bitcoin is not Tether.
        arcticbull 6y ago
        Of course but one's not particularly useful without the other. 80% of BTC exchanges happened via USDT. Tether defines the price. You can't separate them.
    - vkou 6y ago
      Banks practicing FRBs have liquidity reserve limits, and are frequently audited, and have to be solvent (Value of all assets minus liabilities exceeds value of all deposits) in order to operate. Tether is a fly-by-night con job that, to disburse USD redemptions, wires hundreds of millions of dollars to money launderers in the Carribean, who then go ahead and steal most of it. And when law enforcement starts digging through their books, we discover that a third of Tether's 'reserves' consist of a "I'll pay you guys a few billion dollars, pinky swear", scrawled on a napkin. It's not fractional reserve. It's straight-up fraud.
shobith 6y ago
"tether bad, so bitcoin bad!"
- arcticbull 6y ago
  It's not about good or bad. Bitcoin is bad because a transaction takes 700kWh and 87 grams of e-waste. It's staggeringly inefficient because trust is a huge optimization. Tether is bad. Where it intersects is it can create the impression people think Bitcoin is worth something in dollars.
  - shobith 6y ago
    > It's not about good or bad. ok > Bitcoin is bad because... ??
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Poorly worded but what I meant was that Tether's shadiness doesn't imply Bitcoin is bad. That, I believe stands on its own merits.
mudlus 6y ago
The irony of talking about auditing in fiat as stock prices soar despite 20 million unemployed. Enjoy exponential exacerbation of income disparity so you can keep your BigMac at a "stable" price. NOTHING is valued correctly, RN. Bitcoin is the metric system for money.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Hold on there, we've got so many things to unpack. > The irony of talking about auditing in fiat as stock prices soar despite 20 million unemployed. Stock are not a proxy for the economy, as you're discovering. They're a forward-looking price discovery mechanism. The market sees an end to this, and they're pricing it in. There's no reason a stock's ticker should fluctuate day by day to reflect the current sales. That's not how stocks are priced. > Enjoy exponential exacerbation of income disparity so you can keep your BigMac at a "stable" price. Stock prices have nothing to do with Big Mac prices. In general Big Mac pricing is an excellent metric when estimating purchasing power parity [1]. Income / wealth disparity is a real problem, and I guarantee you, bitcoin is not the solution to that. It's got worse wealth inequality than any banana republic. "The top 2.8 percent of wallet addresses control 95 percent of the supply of bitcoin, according to statistics." [2] Income inequality isn't relevant here since income tends to follow inflation. That's a social problem that needs a social solution. > NOTHING is valued correctly, RN. Things are valued according to what people are willing to pay. > Bitcoin is the metric system for money. In a way it's closer to the imperial system: a slow, old, backwards, deflationary when the whole world is inflationary, system. Economically speaking of course. In general though that's a meaningless statement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index [2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/five-reasons-why-bitcoin-wealth-155752613.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/five-reasons-why-bitcoin-weal...
zkmon 6y ago
You are trying very hard to educate some hardened heads. While I appreciate your efforts, I should advise you to let things fail. Natural forces will establish the facts and show that cryptocurrencies have no place in the evolution of state-controlled economies of the world.

kinghajj 6y ago

How do you find that quote in the site?

k00b 6y ago
Look at the coinbase data for the block
hanniabu 6y ago
It doesn't really show on mobile, you need to be on desktop to view it

ur-whale 6y ago

Sweet, and reminiscent of the message included in the initial block [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

2bitencryption 6y ago

I hope they picked the title of the article in the physical NYT paper release, and not the nytimes website, since the website is known to change the title.

lawn 6y ago
They did. Here's a picture: https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/0Td4BmI0gqihoTWRp.jpg https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/0Td4BmI0... And yes the website has changed the title.

ehsankia 6y ago

For those like me who didn't understand the relevance, back in 2009, Satoshi (the creator of Bitcoin) put the following message in the very first block: > The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks Back then it was a response to the 2008/9 financial crisis, which is what makes this new message relevant.

k00b 6y ago
Link to that very first block https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/0 https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/0 The subsidy then was 50 BTC
- iso-8859-1 6y ago
  Hardly a subsidy if it can't be spent ;)
  - tim333 6y ago
    The potential discounted future cash flows from it were good.
    - sneak 6y ago
      I believe GP’s joke is about the minor technical issue that the very first block reward is unspendable in the blockchain, not that there was no market for it.