Tether Is Breaking Its Peg to the Dollar • Hacker News Board

Re: Tether Is Breaking Its Peg to the Dollar

#81

Post by davidgerard » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 11:18 PM UTC

rspeer wrote: post #70

gruez wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably you can. I personally do not have accounts at any USDT exchanges, so I can't personally verify that fact. Even if all of the USDT exchange don't accept USD withdraws (which itself is unlikely because nobody would provide sell volume to them), at the very least you can trade them for "real" USD on kraken (at a few percent discount).

You say "presumably you can", but according to David Gerard, there is no evidence that anyone has redeemed Tether. Only people presuming that they could if they wanted to, or people who heard of someone who heard of someone who did it. The surprising fact is that people do buy and sell on exchanges that have no access to real money. Trading Tether for USD on Kraken is different, and is the topic of this thread. Given…

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying I know of 0 reports of this happening - and if it had, I'd have heard, and I mean there's not even bitcoin advocates saying they've done it - and one well-documented one of failing to do so: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/12/05/bitfinex-rat...

Re: Tether Is Breaking Its Peg to the Dollar

#82

Post by panarky » Wed, Jan 31, 2018, 7:07 AM UTC

Grangar wrote: post #74

panarky wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If traders lose confidence in Tether, won't they sell Tether to buy other cryptocurrencies, thereby driving the price of Tether down and the price of other cryptocurrencies up?

That's what I'm expecting to see. An initial run up in crypto value, followed by exchanges collapsing because they relied on USDT in place of fiat.

Why would exchanges collapse if Tether goes to zero? They wouldn't collapse if Ripple or Iota went to zero.

To an exchange, Tether is just another cryptocurrency. Traders deposit Tether, other traders deposit Ripple or Iota, then the traders trade and the exchange takes a cut.

If any of these goes to zero traders might get wiped out, but how exactly does the exchange go bankrupt?

Re: Tether Is Breaking Its Peg to the Dollar

#83

Post by beojan » Thu, Feb 01, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

downrightmike wrote: post #80

beojan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> become England's largest company, worth more than their GDP: In case people don't realize, GDP is the total amount a country produces per year , not the total value of the country. There's nothing impossible about a country's largest company being worth more than it's GDP.

There's still a long way to go to do that: With that market cap, Apple is worth nearly 1% of the world’s GDP according to the latest estimates from the World Bank that peg the world’s output at $74.2 trillion. That also means the company is valued at close to 4.4% of America’s $18 trillion GDP. https://www.investopedia.com/news/apple-now-bigger-these-5-t...

Saudi Aramco is worth 1 to 5 times Saudi Arabia's GDP.

Re: Tether Is Breaking Its Peg to the Dollar

#84

Post by downrightmike » Sun, Feb 11, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

beojan wrote: post #83

downrightmike wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still a long way to go to do that: With that market cap, Apple is worth nearly 1% of the world’s GDP according to the latest estimates from the World Bank that peg the world’s output at $74.2 trillion. That also means the company is valued at close to 4.4% of America’s $18 trillion GDP. https://www.investopedia.com/news/apple-now-bigger-these-5-t...

Saudi Aramco is worth 1 to 5 times Saudi Arabia's GDP.

What is most interesting about the South Sea Company, is that they didn't actually produce anything. They had rights to send one ship to Spanish ports for trade in the new world, but the ports would turn them away because the port authorities didn't want them/didn't believe them. Vs exporting oil which now heavily used.