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When price goes up, the conspiracy theory is that it's all fake, because it's just Tether printing. So where is the Tether printing now? Since everybody agrees

by 323 5y ago

When price goes up, the conspiracy theory is that it's all fake, because it's just Tether printing. So where is the Tether printing now? Since everybody agrees that Tether is unbacked and their printer can go brrr at will, why don't they just print more billions to prop the market up?

dimgl 5y ago
It's there. It continues to happen almost hourly. https://twitter.com/whale_alert https://twitter.com/whale_alert https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter Two hours ago $100m USDC went into circulation. Almost another $100m two hours before that.
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  USDC is not Tether
- scottiebarnes 5y ago
  USDC = Tether now?
  - dimgl 5y ago
    I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but they're both stablecoins and the principles are the same.
    - edf13 5y ago
      Not really - USDC is backed/owned by Coinbase with more stability (and hopefully more USD backing)… Tether - we’ll tether is not
  - Yizahi 5y ago
    Always has been (c) meme. They never had an independent audit, just like Tethers. They were lower on the radar because previously they were much smaller fish. They are still smaller, but catching up while Giancarlo and Paolo aren't printing.
- Yizahi 5y ago
  1.2 billions on Sunday: https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter/status/1485285001176440832 https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter/status/148528500117644083... Probably some institutional investor drove a garbage truck full of unmarked dollars in small denominations to some back alley near Circle headquarters.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    Seriously, they even printed almost a billion dollars during Christmas Eve!
- blhack 5y ago
  Those are almost always “chain swaps” meaning the same amount is burned off of another chain, and the total supply remains the same. You can look at the market cap here: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ IF the type of "printing" you were talking about were happening, you would see the market cap increasing with every print.
- anon9001 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what this is showing. What does "Just printed $100,494,053 USDC!" mean? I think this means that someone minted $100M of USDC by depositing USD. The way this normally happens, USD deposits are made to an exchange that has a relationship with Circle, and 1 USDC is minted for each 1 USD on deposit at Circle. Circle then invests those funds in things that are considered financially prudent, making some amount of money, but preserving the full amount of USD required to back the issued USDC. What they really do with the money has historically been the concern by people who don't trust corporate transparency, maybe rightfully so. These "usdcoinprinter" tweets seem to imply that Circle is just making up fictional USDC not backed by anything to prop up the failing crypto market. As in, "we just minted $100M USDC which we'll now use to buy bitcoin, to keep the price of bitcoin high"? I'm not sure I see how that could work without Circle risking their entire business and probably committing some type of fraud.
  - AnonHP 5y ago
    > The way this normally happens, USD deposits are made to an exchange that has a relationship with Circle, and 1 USDC is minted for each 1 USD on deposit at Circle. On the other hand, the most popular (?) stablecoin, Tether (USDT) doesn’t have a one-to-one relationship with USD deposits, and the amount it really has in USD is believed to be very low (I don’t know the numbers, but have read that there haven’t been any audits or published audits).
    - anon9001 5y ago
      If this bothers you, you will be shocked to learn how US chartered banks operate.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
      If you "have read", that should be enough for you to mortgage your house, invest all that money in shorting the USDT/USD trading pair and get rich. Sure thing, you have read it.
  - microtherion 5y ago
    What the alert shows is that the coins came into existence. It makes no claim one way or another whether it means that somebody deposited $100M USD or whether there was creation ab nihilo. But I find it generally a bit suspicious that people would choose to buy a stablecoin in order to buy bitcoin instead of buying the bitcoin directly (the explanation given is usually something about evading currency controls/KYC). In a bear market, I find it even more suspicious that there would still be more buyers than sellers of these stablecoins necessitating further creation.
- soared 5y ago
  That Twitter is stunning. If this were a private company that was signing multiple $100MM contracts a day, and the occasional $1B contract they’d easily be the biggest company on the stock market. $47B in “revenue”, with probably a 99.99% margin. Deal sized like this take a very long time, tons of legal work, audits, background checks, etc. To have multiple every day is nonsensical.
Liron 5y ago
People who got in early have $billions of BTC that they’d love to liquidate at current market prices if they could cajole enough USD buyers to cash them out without crashing the price. The ideal manipulation is to keep the price somewhere in the current range, not to pump it too high where normal suckers start thinking about selling. Another manipulation strategy is taking the price lower, collecting USD by having a bunch of suckers buy leveraged shorts, then manipulating the price up to wipe them out.
The_Colonel 5y ago
There's no point in having the ability to manipulate BTC and using it to keep it stable. Pump and dump.
jVinc 5y ago
If your neighborhood decides for whatever reason that your IOU's are worth what is printed on them or even increasing values over time, then you can generate a lot of cash, and looking from the outside it will look like everyone in the neighborhood is getting filthy rich because all their market caps and transactions sizes will be going through the roof. And you can comfortably say that you have your IOU's backed 1:1 in things of equal value, by just printing 2 everything you hand one out and keeping one, which will naturally be as valuable as the other right? Or you can use one of them to buy BTC/Ether/whatever on your own exchange, whatever, point is that you can keep the value backed in theory because you have a money printing press. This works as long as money is flooding into the system, and there is enough trust in your IOUs. But what you can't do is try to use IOU printing to guard against the values of your IOU's falling, it just doesn't make sense when Timmy comes by and says "I want my $10k, here's the IOUs" that you say "Ok, wait a second, I have like $20k worth of IOU's I could give you instead, would that make you happy?". Because you aren't proping up the value of the IOU's, your just devaluing them faster.
tim333 5y ago
I think Tether are trying to be a bit non fraudulent which puts a limit on that stuff. They were also around during the last bitcoin crash from $20k to $4k approx and didn't stop that happening. I'm guessing this time will be similar. $68k to $14k? Maybe not quite that much - dunno.

by 323 5y ago

dimgl 5y ago

It's there. It continues to happen almost hourly. https://twitter.com/whale_alert https://twitter.com/whale_alert https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter Two hours ago $100m USDC went into circulation. Almost another $100m two hours before that.

ulzeraj 5y ago
USDC is not Tether
scottiebarnes 5y ago
USDC = Tether now?
- dimgl 5y ago
  I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but they're both stablecoins and the principles are the same.
  - edf13 5y ago
    Not really - USDC is backed/owned by Coinbase with more stability (and hopefully more USD backing)… Tether - we’ll tether is not
- Yizahi 5y ago
  Always has been (c) meme. They never had an independent audit, just like Tethers. They were lower on the radar because previously they were much smaller fish. They are still smaller, but catching up while Giancarlo and Paolo aren't printing.
Yizahi 5y ago
1.2 billions on Sunday: https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter/status/1485285001176440832 https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter/status/148528500117644083... Probably some institutional investor drove a garbage truck full of unmarked dollars in small denominations to some back alley near Circle headquarters.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Seriously, they even printed almost a billion dollars during Christmas Eve!
blhack 5y ago
Those are almost always “chain swaps” meaning the same amount is burned off of another chain, and the total supply remains the same. You can look at the market cap here: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ IF the type of "printing" you were talking about were happening, you would see the market cap increasing with every print.
anon9001 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand what this is showing. What does "Just printed $100,494,053 USDC!" mean? I think this means that someone minted $100M of USDC by depositing USD. The way this normally happens, USD deposits are made to an exchange that has a relationship with Circle, and 1 USDC is minted for each 1 USD on deposit at Circle. Circle then invests those funds in things that are considered financially prudent, making some amount of money, but preserving the full amount of USD required to back the issued USDC. What they really do with the money has historically been the concern by people who don't trust corporate transparency, maybe rightfully so. These "usdcoinprinter" tweets seem to imply that Circle is just making up fictional USDC not backed by anything to prop up the failing crypto market. As in, "we just minted $100M USDC which we'll now use to buy bitcoin, to keep the price of bitcoin high"? I'm not sure I see how that could work without Circle risking their entire business and probably committing some type of fraud.
- AnonHP 5y ago
  > The way this normally happens, USD deposits are made to an exchange that has a relationship with Circle, and 1 USDC is minted for each 1 USD on deposit at Circle. On the other hand, the most popular (?) stablecoin, Tether (USDT) doesn’t have a one-to-one relationship with USD deposits, and the amount it really has in USD is believed to be very low (I don’t know the numbers, but have read that there haven’t been any audits or published audits).
  - anon9001 5y ago
    If this bothers you, you will be shocked to learn how US chartered banks operate.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    If you "have read", that should be enough for you to mortgage your house, invest all that money in shorting the USDT/USD trading pair and get rich. Sure thing, you have read it.
- microtherion 5y ago
  What the alert shows is that the coins came into existence. It makes no claim one way or another whether it means that somebody deposited $100M USD or whether there was creation ab nihilo. But I find it generally a bit suspicious that people would choose to buy a stablecoin in order to buy bitcoin instead of buying the bitcoin directly (the explanation given is usually something about evading currency controls/KYC). In a bear market, I find it even more suspicious that there would still be more buyers than sellers of these stablecoins necessitating further creation.
soared 5y ago
That Twitter is stunning. If this were a private company that was signing multiple $100MM contracts a day, and the occasional $1B contract they’d easily be the biggest company on the stock market. $47B in “revenue”, with probably a 99.99% margin. Deal sized like this take a very long time, tons of legal work, audits, background checks, etc. To have multiple every day is nonsensical.

Liron 5y ago

People who got in early have $billions of BTC that they’d love to liquidate at current market prices if they could cajole enough USD buyers to cash them out without crashing the price. The ideal manipulation is to keep the price somewhere in the current range, not to pump it too high where normal suckers start thinking about selling. Another manipulation strategy is taking the price lower, collecting USD by having a bunch of suckers buy leveraged shorts, then manipulating the price up to wipe them out.

The_Colonel 5y ago

There's no point in having the ability to manipulate BTC and using it to keep it stable. Pump and dump.

jVinc 5y ago

If your neighborhood decides for whatever reason that your IOU's are worth what is printed on them or even increasing values over time, then you can generate a lot of cash, and looking from the outside it will look like everyone in the neighborhood is getting filthy rich because all their market caps and transactions sizes will be going through the roof. And you can comfortably say that you have your IOU's backed 1:1 in things of equal value, by just printing 2 everything you hand one out and keeping one, which will naturally be as valuable as the other right? Or you can use one of them to buy BTC/Ether/whatever on your own exchange, whatever, point is that you can keep the value backed in theory because you have a money printing press. This works as long as money is flooding into the system, and there is enough trust in your IOUs. But what you can't do is try to use IOU printing to guard against the values of your IOU's falling, it just doesn't make sense when Timmy comes by and says "I want my $10k, here's the IOUs" that you say "Ok, wait a second, I have like $20k worth of IOU's I could give you instead, would that make you happy?". Because you aren't proping up the value of the IOU's, your just devaluing them faster.

tim333 5y ago

I think Tether are trying to be a bit non fraudulent which puts a limit on that stuff. They were also around during the last bitcoin crash from $20k to $4k approx and didn't stop that happening. I'm guessing this time will be similar. $68k to $14k? Maybe not quite that much - dunno.