81–90 of 421 posts
Tether looks like a good short since if it is a fraud it will go way down and if it isn't a fraud it will stay right where it is.
I'm in the US and would like to short Tether. But I want to get paid if I'm right.
What is the point of Tether? Is it for dodging taxes?
You can "dodge taxes" with any cryptocurrency, if that's your goal. What Tether offers primarily is a safeguard against crypto-world volatility without having to deal with FIAT exchanges randomly holding your money for weeks or months at a time, of which you can find many horror stories on Reddit (even for people with KYC verification in place). I believe "stablecoins" will be needed in the cryptoworld, especially if…
What is the point of Tether? Is it for dodging taxes?
In Europe, trading like-kind assets isn't a taxable event, so a lot of people take gains and move them into USDT. edit: At least that's what I remember seeing last, laws may have changed.
If this is a grand jury subpoena, things could get ugly fast in the crypto space. Despite all talk of decentralization, the major exchanges pose a systemic risk.
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The achilles' heel with these systems is their integration points with fiat. Always has been.
For a different perspective, I would say their problem is integration with the "real world" with constrains that bitcoin wasn't designed for.
Otherwise we're just wasting gigawatts of electricity to print Monopoly money.
Cryptocurrencies are in an interesting middle ground, from a regulator’s political perspective. They’re complicated and stand to harm mostly those who inflicted it on themselves. For an ambitious regulator looking forward to an administration’s nominating committee, Senate confirmation hearing or even campaign trail, that makes it unattractive relative to e.g. insider-trading hedge fund managers or Medicare fraudster…
> They’re complicated and stand to harm mostly those who inflicted it on themselves They're about as "inflicted on yourself" as most fraud is. You could say that a grandma getting scammed by a person pretending to be a government official[0] also brought it on herself, and so did the guy scammed by an insurance MLM. The truth is, there's enough of buzz around cryptocurrencies that it starts to impact regular citizens…
"The other day my barber asked me whether he should put all his money in Bitcoin." - Paul Krugman
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/opinion/bitcoin-bubble-fr...
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Good summary. There’s also the accusation that a lot/most of those tethers were not paid for at all and simply minted and used to purchase Bitcoin.
Exactly. There is some circumstantial evidence that Tether printing may be inflating bitcoin prices: http://www.tetherreport.com/ But it is just circumstantial at this point. There are a lot of ifs related to Tether, but it has that fishy feeling to it. While I think there is a very good chance that Tether is not backed by USD, I think the regulators may actually be more interested in USDT being used for money launde…
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You're skipping a key bit here; billions of Tethers magically appeared on the market in the last month and were used to buy BTC in suspiciously regular fashion, in 100 million USDT amounts, and with no clear evidence that it was actually purchased by anyone using real USD.
Here’s what I don’t understand. You can exchange bitcoins for fiat currency. But afaik you can’t exchange USDT for fiat. So why is anyone willing to take the risk of holding on to USDT? Why are any exchanges even willing to touch it?
Kraken offers a USD/USDT market that allows you to obtain fiat for your USDT, and the price stays fairly stable but the liquidity is low (thus slippage is high). It's currently trading at a discount; you could sell ~1M USDT for ~954k there. Kraken's withdrawal limits are way more severe than Bitfinex's, though, so it would take some time to get all of that out.
How trustworthy is Kraken? Tether looks like a good short since if it is a fraud it will go way down and if it isn't a fraud it will stay right where it is. I'm in the US and would like to short Tether. But I want to get paid if I'm right.