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Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

• kim0 5y ago
  The other issue is that usdt has zero privacy! Which is why I'm waiting for xUSD from https://havenprotocol.org/knowledge/ https://havenprotocol.org/knowledge/ . This brings a suite of stable coins, protected by Monero grade privacy!
• axus 5y ago
  If I read that correctly, they have $15 billion in Deltec Bank in the Bahamas, and $45 billion moved into other banks.
• naveen99 5y ago
  The money stuff newsletter is less sensationalistic and more interesting and forward looking: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-07/matt-levine-s-money-stuff-looking-for-tether-s-money https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-07/matt-l...
  • freewilly1040 5y ago
    … and sourced from the same Bloomberg article under discussion.
    • naveen99 5y ago
      It’s too bad he didn’t reference bitmex or deribit. I mean you don’t need tether to simulate dollars from Bitcoin. Arthur Hayes was a close second to Matt Levine in the quality of his financial analysis in his crypto digest.
• nevi-me 5y ago
  The article talks about Tether's issued coins making it as large as one of the top 50 US banks (if it were a bank). How many banks does the US have?
  • FireBeyond 5y ago
    At the rate they're going if you compare their holdings to revenue (not particularly accurate, but I'm going for an analogue to try to represent relative size), they're on track to eclipse Alphabet, AT&T and even Saudi Aramco by the end of the year. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Verizon Communications and Pfizer COMBINED hold $400B in reserves.
  • Armisael16 5y ago
    The FDIC lists a little under 5000 (https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-profile/statistics-at-a-glance https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/quarterly-banking-profile/stat...).
    • iav 5y ago
      Plus 4000 local credit unions.
  • dustintrex 5y ago
    Even more damning is this: > about $30 billion of its dollar holdings are invested in commercial paper—short-term loans to corporations. That would make Tether the seventh-largest holder of such debt, right up there with Charles Schwab and Vanguard Group. "Would", because nobody in those markets has seen them.
    • HillRat 5y ago
      At some point I suspect that they’re going to be exposed as holding billions of dollars in ultra-high-risk junk Chinese ABCP. Even before the current economic and political climate, that stuff was toxic — you can buy dodgy SCP for about a penny on the dollar given how poorly regulated the China commercial debt market is.
    • reactspa 5y ago
      This is sounding eerily like the Jeffrey Epstein case, where he was this storied super-successful trader and speculator, but there was no paper trail of the trades that made him into a billionaire.
• dustintrex 5y ago
  https://archive.is/2021.10.07-101853/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-mystery-where-s-the-69-billion-backing-the-stablecoin-tether https://archive.is/2021.10.07-101853/https://www.bloomberg.c...
• newaccount2021 5y ago
  the ship has sailed, the entire crypto market will eventually be bailed out...what's the point in wasting money chasing a paper trail around the world? we let a beanie-baby asset get big enough to kneecap markets, so now we have to pay everyone knows tether is bullshit, it hasn't slowed down crypto speculation. and how is tether less bullshit than ethereum? both of them are pure sentiment some fool with two dollars to his name is cheering on "build back better" which will eventually be the same money used to bail out crypto
• throwoutway 5y ago
  If this goes on for a few more years, with broader investment from traditional investors (ETF), when Tether collapse I half-suspect that the cryptocurrency markets will bring the NYSE down with it in the fall as people sell to cover losses
  • earthtolazlo 5y ago
    The federal government should have shut down Tether years ago. At this point, Tether growing its tendrils into the real economy and becoming a systemic risk almost feels like an inevitability. Madoff 2.0, but even more obviously fraudulent.
  • arcticbull 5y ago
    The last time Bitwise tried to list an ETF, they revealed to the SEC that 95% of all bitcoin trading volume was fake. If the SEC permits a real BTC ETF that would represent a serious failure on their part, IMO, and I agree the potential for Tether contagion would increase materially. [1] [edit] this financial cancer can’t get excised quickly enough. The longer we wait the more will get hurt. [1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitwise-tells-us-sec-that-95-of-volume-on-unregulated-crypto-exchanges-is-suspect https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitwise-tells-us-sec-that-95-...
    • throwoutway 5y ago
      Looks like a futures-based Bitcoin ETF may come in ~2 weeks : https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/10/04/the-first-u-s-bitcoin-etf-could-be-coming-in-2-weeks-but-theres-a-catch/ https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/10/04/the-first-u-s-bitcoi...
    • PretzelPirate 5y ago
      > The last time Bitwise tried to list an ETF, they revealed to the SEC that 95% of all bitcoin trading volume 95% of Bitcoin trading on *unregulated* exchanges was fraudulent. There’s a reason why people don’t use CoinMarketCap anymore and it’s precisely because it shows bad metrics from fraudulent exchanges.
• moneywoes 5y ago
  Are there any legitimate stable coins?
  • longwick 5y ago
    AFAIK I think Terra’s UST is pretty legit
  • EricDeb 5y ago
    Gemini (GUSD) I believe is fairly solid
  • mariocesar 5y ago
    I think Binances BUSD is the closest to legitimate
    • arcticbull 5y ago
      Binance is the last institution you should be stapling the concept of stability to. They’re literally under investigation by every major world financial authority, including by the Cayman Islands monetary authority. BUSD is a co-brand issued by Paxos. No idea how it would hold up once the bear trap snaps shut on Binance.
    • imtringued 5y ago
      Is free banking seeing a resurgence with all these stablecoins? Basically, people replaced bank notes with cryptocurrencies. It's still the same concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking
  • unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
    The U.S. Mint apparently is producing a brass/manganese- clad copper $1 coin called the "American Innovation dollars".[1] You could try that. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Innovation_dollars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Innovation_dollars
    • h2odragon 5y ago
• rossdavidh 5y ago
  The biggest news, buried near the bottom: "After I returned to the U.S., I obtained a document showing a detailed account of Tether Holdings’ reserves. It said they include billions of dollars of short-term loans to large Chinese companies—something money-market funds avoid. And that was before one of the country’s largest property developers, China Evergrande Group, started to collapse. I also learned that Tether had lent billions of dollars more to other crypto companies, with Bitcoin as collateral. "
  • graeme 5y ago
    Of note, Tether values their reserves at redemption value. So if they have a loan to an insolvent company that trades at 25 cents to the dollar, Tether’s attestation values it at 100%. See emphasis of matter, page 2 of their attestation https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/tether_assuranceconsolidated_reserves_report_2021-06-30.pdf https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/tether_assuranc...
    • FormerBandmate 5y ago
      That’s such an insane, non-GAAP way to value fixed income securities. Almost boggles the mind
      • graeme 5y ago
        It really is. I wish more was made of it. No one has asked Tether to comment publicly, that I know of. It’s a loophole you can drive a truck through.
        • Asparagirl 5y ago
          wen mark-to-market?
    • darawk 5y ago
      It's a little more complicated than that: > Management’s accounting policy is to value assets and liabilities at historic cost plus any accrued interest and less any expected credit losses, or otherwise the redemption value where applicable. The realisable value of these assets and liabilities could be materially different if any key custodian or counterparty incurs credit losses or substantial illiquidity. At least in principle they are supposed to mark down "expected credit losses". It would be nice if they spelled out what that means a little more, though.
• NelsonMinar 5y ago
  I don't understand how Tether has survived this long. Bitfinex and Tether sure look transparently like a fraud, all the way back to the "no really we have $1 in the bank for every Tether but you can't audit us" days. And yet it continues to occupy its role as the underpinning of most cryptocurrency markets. Why hasn't it blown up yet? My best guess is that it's useful to everyone taking in money from new retail investors. Also there's no clear financial incentive for blowing it up; there's no way to easily short Tether, for instance. This article talks about the way Tether is loaning out what reserves they have. The Economist looked at this phenomenon and found Tether has a 383-to-1 leverage. That's going to be a complete disaster the moment there's a major blip in the economy. Say, a major Chinese real estate company going broke. Or interest rates in the West finally going up and causing a market correction. Maybe that's what will blow it up. The good news is the Economist also thinks the inevitable cryptocurrency disaster will be bad but won't destroy world economies. " its holders would lose hundreds of billions of dollars but that the fallout would be manageable." I sure hope that happens before this tower of unregulated investments gets so big that when it falls over it crushes the real economy. But don't worry folks, this is all good for Bitcoin. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/08/07/why-regulators-should-treat-stablecoins-like-banks https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/08/07/why-regulators-...
  • arcticbull 5y ago
    It took Liberty Reserve 7 years and 17 countries cooperating to get nuked from orbit. Tether was founded as Realcoin in 2014 by a group including former child star and accused sex offender Brock Pierce, so while it’s technically just rounding the 7 year mark, it didn’t begin in earnest until it was taken over by Bitfinex towards 2015 and didn’t become majorly problematic until 2016/2017 according to the NYAG findings. [1] Given the vastly larger scope here, I suspect we’re going to be dealing with them for a few more years as the wheels of Justice spool up. For anyone wanting to learn more I highly recommend Bennett Tomlins write up. [2] [1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlement_agreement_-_execution_version.b-t_signed-c2_oag_signed.pdf https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen... [2] https://bennettftomlin.com/2020/12/08/an-introduction-to-the-tether-bitfinex-controversy/ https://bennettftomlin.com/2020/12/08/an-introduction-to-the...
• iSnow 5y ago
  Does crypto do anything but cause troubles? If it's not actively destroying the environment, then it's endangering financial stability. How does the government not step in here?
  • fleddr 5y ago
    Ironic remark, as Bitcoin is invented in response to the instability of the traditional financial system.
    • recursive 5y ago
      Very many things have effects different than the ones motivating their invention.
    • dboreham 5y ago
      Curious. Is that true? I ask because I read papers on digital cash years before Bitcoin and never saw any reference to financial system instability. It was just "being able to send money digitally like cash would be useful and cool", perhaps with a bit of "banks and western union are bandits with their fees". I always thought the alternative financial system stuff was added later to make the scene more interesting to prepper types.
      • nrb 5y ago
        Included in the coinbase parameter of the genesis block of Bitcoin is the following message: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”
        • imtringued 5y ago
          Bitcoin doesn't eliminate the need for bailouts. It doesn't even do lending, at least nobody is crazy enough to borrow something that is going up in value.
          • 5y ago
• impostervt 5y ago
  People have been yelling about Tether for years, myself included. But nothing seems to stop it. Not lawsuits, not major news articles. The conclusion I draw is that, yes, the game is rigged - AND EVERYONE IS OK WITH IT. As long as it's making everyone money, no one will really complain. What I also find interesting, is that if tether ever DOES crash, the result might be a big boost for Bitcoin. If you hold Tether, and you want to cash out, the path leads through Bitcoin.
  • smabie 5y ago
    There is no world in which a major tether depeg leads to a boost in BTC price. It will not happen.
    • ric2b 5y ago
      That's what happened when MTGox collapsed many years ago.
    • nly 5y ago
      Tether (the company) are likely huge holders of Bitcoin anyway, given that they lend worthless Tethers out in exchange for Bitcoin as collateral.
  • arcticbull 5y ago
    Re your first claim it just takes time. Re your second claim, that’s a common misconception. The price of bitcoin would skyrocket against USDT but pancake against USD. Who in their right mind would sell their (actually worth USD) Bitcoin for your worthless Bahamian IOUs? Absolutely nobody. So you’ll see a massive skyrocket against USDT and as soon as people realize what’s going on, it’ll go no-bid. RIP. Then the ensuing panic will cause selling on USD markets, arb bots will turn off, and that selling will be accelerated by the few who got BTC from their USDT piles as they run for the exit. Then exchanges will go down for “maintenance.” You don’t need to believe me, this happens with every exchange insolvency. It happened at Gox and it happened at Quadriga.
    • impostervt 5y ago
• ajkdhcb2 5y ago
  I find it ironic that people seem intent on holding Tether to a much higher standard than banks. I know there are certain legal guarantees applied to banks along with regulations, but all evidence points to Tether being in a much safer position than banks with their tiny fractional reserves. People are dissatisfied with anything less than fully-backed when it comes to 'crypto'.
  • jcranmer 5y ago
    A bank having assets to only cover 100% of its liabilities would be in violation of banking regulations. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the general breakpoint you're looking for is about 110% as the minimum asset-to-liability ratio for a viable bank. There's also this not-small matter of making sure that banks aren't relying on overly optimistic valuations that won't bear out, especially in a dire market (if you're a too-big-to-fail bank, the government looks at your books and run its own numbers assuming a pretty severe economic crisis). In this regard, Tether's non-transparency is ringing alarm klaxons.
    • scrubs 5y ago
      Well exactly. Big US banks are subject to deep scrutiny.
    • VirusNewbie 5y ago
      Citation? I don't believe this is the case, I believe a bank needs liquid assets to cover a certain amount of its expenses, not all liabilities?
      • seoaeu 5y ago
        For liquid assets maybe. But if total assets -- liquid and otherwise -- are insufficient to cover all liabilities, then the bank is straight up insolvent.
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      Maybe you can explain this message from the Federal Reserve [0] to me, because I must be misunderstanding. > As announced on March 15, 2020, the Board reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective March 26, 2020. This action eliminated reserve requirements for all depository institutions. I've been swayed by the MMT videos on youtube which I know are controversial, but it seems to me that when a bank makes a loan, its deposits on-the-books increase, they do not have to have deposits equal to liabilities, and in fact a loan is not a liability to the bank, it is a liability to the borrower. Am I wrong? [0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
• fleddr 5y ago
  "Solana, up 9,801% in 2021 for seemingly no reason at all" No reason at all, huh? Anybody with even a remote interest in crypto knows why Solana has exploded. It's L1 season and Solana is a direct competitor to ETH, which suffers from high usage fees. Every other L1 has exploded in value. As said, L1 season. These kind of statements make me suspect the author never used crypto in their life. The cultural gap between crypto and non-crypto is pretty hilarious. The reason crypto holders don't give a shit about any of this, is because to them, a 50%, 80% or even 90% pullback of a coin is just an ordinary Thursday. You can't threaten a crypto holder with "losing it all", because that's an everyday reality for them. And so is multiplying their wealth by 2, 5, 10, 100. Why would so many people engage in this degenerate gambling? This is the part skeptics just won't get. Because the existing financial system/situation doesn't work for them. Young people are locked out of any and all assets. They can't afford real estate or any meaningful amount of stock. Savings accounts have a negative yield. Crypto is the asymmetrical bet. There's the sizable risk to lose it all, yet an upside potential that is countless times larger. And in the case you lose it all, it wasn't that much anyway. It is an act of desperation and a sign of very unhealthy issues in our "regulated" economy: low wages, job insecurity, student debt, inflation, low interest rates, inequality, the list goes on. For sure there will be another crash. Nobody cares. Because they have nothing to lose anyway and will just start over. Because the underlying economic issues did not change.
  • imtringued 5y ago
    What underlying economic issue do you mean? You mean the fact that the old people don't want to give up their posts to the new generation? Real estate has almost nothing to do with the financial system. The fact that there are monopolists ripping you off will happen even in a barter system.
  • CPLX 5y ago
    I'll bite. What can I use Solana for?
    • fleddr 5y ago
      Well, like all crypto you can buy it and hope it goes up in value :) But as for actual usage, it's a smart contracts blockchain that is fast, proof of stake, yet has drastically lower fees than Ethereum. Anything can be built on top of it but this particular rush was caused by a second hype wave of NFTs. As more people want to join the NFT frenzy, it got really expensive to mint one on Ethereum, hence people rushed to this alternative. For the record, I don't own any solana and never have, just explaining what it is. I wish I did own it a year ago though.
• CPLX 5y ago
  A deeply reported investigative journalism piece by a preeminent media outlet for financial journalism, touching on a core tech issue, is... flagged?
• NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Any guesses why this post is flagged and not visible on the HN home page?
  • NelsonMinar 5y ago
    It's now unflagged and back on the front page. Weird.
    • acdha 5y ago
      This happens for most things which are critical of cryptocurrencies, unproven COVID-19 treatments, etc. There's a group of people who try to flag them off of the homepage but the moderators appear to block that after confirming that the article is of legitimate interest.
      • NelsonMinar 5y ago
        It's a shame folks flagging things in bad faith have that much power.
        • acdha 5y ago
          Yeap – I think it also shows how a lot of our traditional management techniques were more effective when it was more mischief or small-scale campaigns, rather than when a lot of people have an ideological or financial motive to coordinate. The Metafilter approach is expensive to scale, not everyone wants it, and I don't see too many other successes dealing with this.
  • loeg 5y ago
    Plenty of cryptocurrency enthusiasts read HN, and some might flag negative press.
    • trompetenaccoun 5y ago
      I think most actual cryptocurrency enthusiasts dislike Tether.
• JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  I don't understand why this is flagged
  • johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
    Me neither... I only got here by submitting the article (8 hours late!). The comments are great. This article should not be flagged.
    • jkhdigital 5y ago
      The level of saltiness around this topic is nuts. I’m pretty sure that these comment threads result in a net negative to the total karma of HN users.
• qeternity 5y ago
  It seems to come up every time Tether is mentioned, so I will make a top level comment: do not short USDT/USD. You will not win. The only way you might (emphasis on might) short Tether is to be long off shore and short CME (I explain why in a comment further down).
  • sydthrowaway 5y ago
    How did you learn this stuff?
    • qeternity 5y ago
      Career hedge fund trader for the trading stuff. Twitter for the Tether stuff (Bitfinexd, Bennett Tomlin, Cas Piancey, Doomberg, David Gerard, and a few others).
      • jcpham2 5y ago
        I never knew one of Trendons minions copied Bitcoinica and started BitFinex, thanks HN I sat in chat rooms with most of these crazy fucknuts a decade ago and that is frightening. Fun re reading old court transcripts yay
        • sydthrowaway 5y ago
          Hm, so they got rich and you didn't?
          • jcpham2 5y ago
            Define the word rich
  • eutropia 5y ago
    Is it theoretically possible to be the last one holding the tether bag in the event of a crash (i.e, set a ridiculous ask price for BTC like millions of tethers each) -- and end up owning enough of the USDT (say like 50 Billion of them) to then sue Tether the company and its owners for their assets? (like the real USD money they make investing/skimming their actual holdings)
• alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Anyone Seen Fort Knox's Trillions?
  • dboreham 5y ago
    I've seen the gold in the basement at the federal reserve in NYC. Or at least something that looked a lot like gold. It isn't all owned by the USG though.
  • error54 5y ago
    The US has been off the gold standard for a long time.
• Ice_cream_suit 5y ago
  LOL ! "The chief financial officer is Giancarlo Devasini, a former plastic surgeon from Italy who was once described on Tether’s website as the founder of a successful electronics business. The only reference to him that turned up in a search of Italian newspapers showed he was once fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software. Elsewhere on the website, there’s a letter from an accounting firm stating that Tether has the reserves to back its coins, along with a pie chart showing that about $30 billion of its dollar holdings are invested in commercial paper—short-term loans to corporations. That would make Tether the seventh-largest holder of such debt, right up there with Charles Schwab and Vanguard Group. To fact-check this claim, a few colleagues and I canvassed Wall Street traders to see if any had seen Tether buying anything. No one had. “It’s a small market with a lot of people who know each other,” said Deborah Cunningham, chief investment officer of global money markets at Federated Hermes, an asset management company in Pittsburgh. “If there were a new entrant, it would be usually very obvious.”" https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-mystery-where-s-the-69-billion-backing-the-stablecoin-tether?srnd=premium-asia https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • adflux 5y ago
    Tether most likely holding CHINESE paper. The kind that probably lost a lot of value in the past weeks. Follow BennettTomlin on Twitter, he has been researching tether for years.
    • jandrese 5y ago
      Or it could be like so many cryptocurrency adjacent businesses a straight up scam/Ponzi scheme.
    • freemint 5y ago
      M Impression was that Tether is holding BitFinex papers. I am not sure though where I read this
    • 5y ago
• hmate9 5y ago
  You can short Tether on FTX. You have to pay ~4% funding per year to short USDT-PERP. But if you think Tether collapses within 25 years its a good bet (probably going to come a lot sooner).
  • colinmhayes 5y ago
    Tether is manipulated semi regulated to spike in value to liquidate shorts. It's hit $1000 briefly.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Good luck shorting something unregulated. When you play by the rules against cheaters, you usually lose.
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Doesn't shorting depend on someone else agreeing to pay you no matter what at the end of its runtime? I don't see that happening. And who would be liable, the party loaning you the share? They would disappear. The exchange? Bankrupt. Tether itself? It'll vanish pretty much overnight. There are no guarantees that you would get any money if you short something unregulated like tether.
• EastOfTruth 5y ago
  I see a billion being issued every other day...
• enterprize 5y ago
  Best article I have seen in a while. Direct line drawn between crypto/wildwest is funny/true. Still HODL tons of USDT though. Real question if deposit/loan ratios can/should ever be enforced in cryptoland :)
• tcgv 5y ago
  Quick question for more experienced folks in this thread: What will happen to USDC if/when Tether tanks?
  • CryptoPunk 5y ago
    I'm not an experienced folk, but I can confidently predict that USDC will be fine. That's why it's already taken over most stablecoin functions in Ethereum DeFi.
• zz865 5y ago
  I dont understand why this is so big though. Surely few people own tether long term. Ie you use it to buy crypto, not sell your crypto and hold thether. I can imagine traders buy and sell a lot but that wouldn't add to tens of billions.
  • TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    > but that wouldn't add to tens of billions Why not?
  • johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
    Another strange phenomenon is that the supply of tether never seems to decrease. It only ever increases or stays stable. Maybe the odd 0.1% decrease here and there.
  • graeme 5y ago
    Somebody owns every single one of the 70 billion Tethers
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Direct link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/HSW5976552066.mp3 https://traffic.megaphone.fm/HSW5976552066.mp3
• brundolf 5y ago
  I knew a guy - an amateur crypto investor - who told me in 2017 that Tether was a scam and was going to cause a bubble pop. How did regulators not catch on sooner?
• geniusgeeks 5y ago
  Tether is making me worried. It's a stable coin but I still don't feel safe holding tether
• cryptica 5y ago
  Everyone knows Tether is a scam but everyone knows that the fiat system is also a scam... Buying Tether using fiat is just exchanging one phony financial instrument for another phony financial instrument. The elites are working hard to promote scam projects in the crypto space. Only allowing unscalable projects to gain traction... But it doesn't matter, they work just well enough to do what they were intended to do. The fiat system is making a mockery out of itself faster than it's making a mockery out of crypto.
• JanisL 5y ago
  The thing that's always surprised me about Tether is the confidence people have in it without a fully transparent accounting being available of their collateral. Also they by their own admission in 2019 they only had 74% of the liabilities covered but people still seem to have confidence in them having 100% reserves. Collateral issues have been known since at least as far back as 2019: https://www.ccn.com/tether-lawyer-shocker-only-74-backed-by-cash-how-will-bitcoin-react/ https://www.ccn.com/tether-lawyer-shocker-only-74-backed-by-... Also: https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    It kinda ties in with modern-day anti-establishment conspiracy thinking; big banks are bad, just like science is bad. It kinda started with the vaccines cause autism trend, which quickly devolved into vaccines are Bill Gates' 5G chips for mind control, gargle bleach instead.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ancris 5y ago
  Does anyone have an explanation for why Tether is never actually equal to $1 ? If you look at the Tether/USD chart on coinmarketcap or whatever other exchange, it always seem to slightly fluctuate by a few decimal digits around the 1 dollar level.
  • shoghicp 5y ago
    It can be traded against actual USD, same as other notes. "stablecoin" does not mean it's equal to USD, but about the same value (see DAI, USDC, etc.)
  • turingfeel 5y ago
    It's not a fixed price asset, it's still a market and Tether relies on arbitrageurs to take profits from inefficiencies in the price when it drops below $1 or rises above.
• asah 5y ago
  My 2c: large crypto investors have no choice but to use stablecoins and they've made such crazy gains they don't care if tether "breaks the buck" - to them, it's just another day in the market where their assets go up and down by 10+%.
• skizm 5y ago
  Seems there is a (very large) market for a legit version of Tether. What's stopping some other company from doing what Tether does with more traditional commercial paper / US based short term loans / govt. bonds / etc.?
  • driverdan 5y ago
    There are multiple alternatives that are far more trustworthy.
    • gammarator 5y ago
      What I don’t understand is why market participants don’t use those rather than Tether. If I had a bunch of Tether today, why wouldn’t I move it to USDC or similar?
      • hackingforfun 5y ago
        USDT has more supported trading pairs and liquidity, particularly for crypto exchanges in Asia. It just seems more popular there for whatever reason. If I had to choose USDC or USDT though, I'd rather hold funds in USDC. In general I'm not much of a fan of stablecoins though, but I do acknowledge the quick, 24/7 transfers they offer is interesting, as well as the high APRs for lending them. However, I'd still rather just hold fiat vs stablecoins. I find other cryptos to be much more compelling.
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Why not use more traditional commercial paper / US based short term loans / govt. bonds / etc. directly then? I mean you can rephrase it but you quickly end up with reinventing the wheel - an old, established, well-regulated, secured and guaranteed wheel. If you want fiat currency, use fiat currency. If you want a secure location to store and transfer your money, use a bank. If you want to support a dodgy organization's fake digital money printing scam though, go with Tether.
    • skizm 5y ago
• unanswered 5y ago
  I'm a bit of a finance noob; is there any practical way to enter a long-term short position on usdt that would actually be redeemable if the Bitcoin ecosystem were to collapse after its downfall?
  • timerol 5y ago
    Gotta do it the old-fashioned way: 1) Find someone you know and trust who owns enough USDT. 2) Borrow their USDT, then immediately sell them for USD. 3) Pay some fee over time for the loan, and then have the contract expire at some point. You would need some kind of contract for the fees and end condition, but it could just be an email that you agree to. If you don't know and trust any cryptofans, then no, there isn't a good way.
    • unanswered 5y ago
      How does such a contract play out if the shorted thing is not marketable at expiration?
• dgellow 5y ago
  If you're interested in Tether, I highly recommend the Crypto Critics' Corner podcast: https://cryptocriticscorner.com/episode-list/ https://cryptocriticscorner.com/episode-list/. Bennet Tomlin and Cas Piancey have done a fantastic job chronicling the story. Their blog posts are also quite good: - https://thecaspiancey.medium.com/finding-finex-3eefac0d45a2 https://thecaspiancey.medium.com/finding-finex-3eefac0d45a2 - https://bennettftomlin.com/ https://bennettftomlin.com/
  • Asparagirl 5y ago
    Was coming here to say this. Bennett and Cas are well-informed and run a fabulous podcast, give deep dives on crypto history and its shady characters. If digging into True Financial Crime is your thing, with lots of “wait, that CAN’T be true, that character/event sounds TOO crazy” entertainment, this podcast is for you.
• echopurity 5y ago
  If you think fraud matters, you don't understand the monetary system.
• TheGigaChad 5y ago
  Soylets, have you seen the gold in fort knox?
• janandonly 5y ago
  I wonder: why doesn't everyone exchange their Tether for another stable coin? Like Maker DAO?
• tdeck 5y ago
  Tether has looked like a scam for years. Here's a post from 2018 about it: https://tonyarcieri.com/the-tether-conundrum https://tonyarcieri.com/the-tether-conundrum
• ghghfhgfg 5y ago
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