13 ms·
It amazes me how many people are blissfully unaware of the rampant tether fraud
It seems all anyone cares about with crypto is how much richer they get in dollar terms when cryptos go up.
And yes, those who were busy explaining why Ethereum is garbage, **coin, etc, and why only they know better, would have been 10% richer in just 2 days.
If crypto is supposed to replace other currencies, then you don't get richer if it is worth more in dollars. The entire point is to not use dollars. But nothing is priced in crypto. If it was, there wouldn't be enough supply. Also nobody would ever buy anything with it, because why spend 100 on something today when 50 will buy it tomorrow.
So crypto has devolved into nothing more than a scheme to bid up whatever coin of the day becomes a MEME darling and FOMO kicks in. You don't want to lose out on getting rich, do you?
Don't give me the crap that DeFi everything is around the corner. It's the same thing as automated driving. It's been right around the corner for years.
Windows 95 hit and the entire world was online with email and www everything within three years. Crypto is going on more than a decade with no better use case than day one. Other than a few thousand whales who got super rich when they got the masses to bid up the coins.
It amazes me how many people are blissfully unaware of the rampant tether fraud and the effect it could have on the whole ecosystem. This is a view from a good friend of mine who is an expert on the subject and well in the know.
Nobody knows where the USD supposedly backing it goes. Most of it is in “commercial paper” they said, but the investors who work in that industry say they’ve never heard of them.
This seems impossible because at their scale, that would make them, like, the 5th largest commercial paper investor on Wall Street. How could commercial paper investors not heard of them?
Unlike Bitcoin, Eth, and other coins, Tether was always claimed to be backed by something which ensured its's stable value. Tether the company claims that their tether coins are each worth $1.
There are now >$60Bn worth of Tether coin issued. With that much money they'd be a very serious private financial institution, and yet they only have 13 employee's. They have never been audited by any independent third party. They have repetitively lied about who owns the company (the same people who own Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange own Tether, and yet did not disclose that until it was found out). They have receptively changed their story on what backs Tether coin (originally each coin had $1 in a bank account to back it, now it's majoritively unspecified "commercial paper").
There is nothing which proves that Tether actually is backed by anything and the billions in new Tether coin which are minted could very well be worthless. Institutionalized investors allegedly sending billions of dollars to Tether, despite tether lying about their reserves, committing fraud by claiming to be fully backed when they were not, and reported by Bloomberg to be under DOJ criminal investigation for bank fraud.
There was never anywhere near a trillion dollars put into the crypto system. The miners created multi-millions of imaginary tokens without putting any dollars into the system. Those miner imaginary tokens came out of thin air, not from people investing dollars into the system.
If only 10% of those tokens are cashed out instead of "hodl", the $50 billion in tethers and few other dollars would instantly be depleted. The miners have a lot more than 10% to sell.
It is a classic Ponzi. All is fine when more people are sucked into putting in dollars (to pay the miners who put in zero dollars). But when people want to cash out, there is not enough dollars in the entire Ponzi to pay 10% of the imaginary tokens. The small amount of cash in the Ponzi runs out and the Ponzi collapses. It is very simple and does not require any complex conspiracy theory.
- aristofun 4y agoThe deeper problem is that even the major part of the whole modern financial system (be it IPOs or mortgage bonds etc) — turned into a giant casino. Where nobody win in the long term except the casino. And everybody is kinda okay with that.
- spxd 4y agoAnother crap. My friend told me...read first. Last year, Tether revealed that it held some cash but also bought a large amount of commercial paper, which is short-term corporate debt. This raised concerns given that Tether does not disclose exactly which companies it holds commercial paper from, and where those entities are based. But the company has been reducing the amount of commercial paper in its reserves. In the fourth quarter of 2021, commercial paper made up just over 30% of Tether’s total reserves, down from more than 44% in the third quarter. “Over time we will keep reducing the commercial paper, we aren’t finished yet with the reduction,” Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer of Tether and affiliated cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, told CNBC on Wednesday at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit.
- c7b 4y agoBloomberg News once tried to track down Tether's supposed commercial paper holdings [0]. It's a small market with just over a dozen major players, and Tether's claimed holdings would put them in the top 10. Bloomberg called a few of those firms, nobody had ever heard of or transacted with them. This smells of Maddoff 10 miles against the wind. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-mystery-where-s-the-69-billion-backing-the-stablecoin-tether https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...
- CharlesW 4y agoAnother good read: https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/tether-crypto-danger-ben-mckenzie.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/tether-crypto-danger-be...
- Silverback_VII 4y agoThe effect of Tether was to massively inflate the price of crypto so as to suck in more dollars(even if they despise fiat currency). It's an unbelievable fraud and I'm somewhat surprised that it is tolerated considering how strict laws in other areas are(gambling for example) You say that many people are unaware but I would say that many are perfectly fine with the imaginary riches these schemes provide.