Tether price manipulation • Hacker News Board

Re: Tether price manipulation

#151

Post by gruez » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

martinko wrote: post #100

40four wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not individuals buying Tether from Bitfinex and then buying Bitcoin that causes this. It is Bitfinex as an organization ‘printing’ free money and using it to pump the market.

Nonsense. If this were the case then tether could not trade at par.

I suppose this could work as long as you don't print too much. Let's say you have $10M USD in deposits. You can print $20M in USDT as long as you're reasonably sure that on average, people don't withdraw 50% of their deposits. This gets tricky though because USDT is used by multiple exchanges, so I'm not sure what exactly would happen if everyone withdraws their deposits not in USD, but in USDT to another exchange. They'd all need to be in on the conspiracy with some sort of settlement system to transfer money between them.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#152

Post by alisonkisk » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

eecks wrote: post #118

newsclues wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If BTCs killer app is criminal transactions, then regulation is guaranteed.

Is it illegal to transfer value from person A to person B without the middleman?

In many cases, yes. It's not the "middleman" that is required, but reporting the transaction to the government is.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#153

Post by NovemberWhiskey » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

There is one question to ask here: "Why is so much of the volume in BTC driven by USDT trades?", i.e. what exactly is so great about Tether that we're supposed to believe everyone is actually buying it?

It is supposed to be a stablecoin. That's meant to be exceedingly boring. Tether is anything but boring, with all kinds of intrigue, lack of transparency about its reserves, law suits and so on.

There are a bunch of other stablecoins out there that just seem like better propositions, so why does crypto price action continue to be primarily driven by inflows from Tether?

Re: Tether price manipulation

#154

Post by alisonkisk » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #145

michaelchisari wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And twenty-five years on, 1 Beanie Baby = 1 Beanie Baby.

Can't you literally make more beanie babies?

No, only counterfeits.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#155

Post by rglullis » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

xur17 wrote: post #139

rglullis wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why USDT and not USDC or DAI? Don't you feel like holding USDT makes you complicit in whatever shit is going on? Also, I would be very, very weary of using an centralized exchange that "can not hold fiat". With the layer-2 projects that are coming now (take a look at loopring or Stakenet), you can transact as much as you want, no gas fees and exchange fees are about the same as any CEX.

Because way more exchanges offer USDT trading. USDC / DAI are both fairly new, and aren't offered as trading pairs nearly as frequently.

Still, they do exist now. And again, if an exchange only offers USDT as on-ramp that should be a massive signal against its trustworthiness.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#156

Post by sneak » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

tromp wrote: post #107

jdhn wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast, vast majority of "bitcoin evangelists" couldn't care less about the actual mechanics of Bitcoin. They don't care that it was created as a digital F-You to fiat currency, and they don't care that it enables you to be your own bank. Just look at /r/bitcoin. It's 99% price/hodl memes, and 1% posts about the protocol & enhancements to the protocol itself.

For bitcoin protocol discussion there is the Development & Technical Discussion [1] on bitcointalk. Some general cryptocurrency technical discussion can be found on r/CryptoTechnology [2] [1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoTechnology

In the decades-old tradition of foss collaboration, there is also bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org, which is quite good.

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-d...

Re: Tether price manipulation

#157

Post by lai-yin » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

Anyone know the source of Jacob's chart in part 5 of his thread?

Re: Tether price manipulation

#158

Post by shuntress » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #143

samvher wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true but there is definitely a difference between the way people talked about it earlier ("later we will all be paying with bitcoin") to how it is now ("it's a store of value and maybe there is potential for bitcoin-backed currencies").

I think the scaling limitations were well known at the beginning. If Bitcoin were to get as large as visa/mastercard the blockchain would be growing at a rate of a few gigabytes per day, which would kill decentralization.

As far as I was aware, this problem was mostly ignored.

It was expected (again, as stated in the whitepaper) that truncating transactions (in order to shrink blocks that are "old enough") would be able to manage block size well enough to stay reasonable.

In my experience (circa ~2011,) this expectation seemed to be generally accepted without much question by anyone talking about bitcoin. If it was acknowledged as a flaw it was usually hand-waved as only likely to be a problem 10+ in the the future.

edit: Or that a new network would learn from the bitcoin experiment and implement a protocol that works better at large scale.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#159

Post by gruez » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

vegannet wrote: post #71

Traster wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing I don't understand about the "Illegit" method is that it relies on people accepting USDT for BTC and then not cashing them out to real USD. Because if the company is printing USDT it wouldn't have the cash to pay the people trying to cash out USDT. So to allow this to happen you would need a people to be holding a huge amount of USDT.

You can’t redeem Tether — that’s a core part of the fraud, they have “banking issues” and had them for years. You can sell it on an exchange but the Tether organisation have prevented any redemption of USD from USDT for years. Anybody turning USDT into USD is selling their USDT.

So you can't trade USDT for USD at all (eg. third party exchange trades, or withdrawing from an USDT exchange directly), or is it only that you can't trade USDT for USD by going through Tether Limited?

Re: Tether price manipulation

#160

Post by 40four » Fri, Jan 08, 2021, 2:24 PM UTC

martinko wrote: post #100

40four wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not individuals buying Tether from Bitfinex and then buying Bitcoin that causes this. It is Bitfinex as an organization ‘printing’ free money and using it to pump the market.

Nonsense. If this were the case then tether could not trade at par.

I'm not a finance or a crypto expert, so don't take my word on it. But many people way smarter than me have been trying to prove this hypothesis for years.

Bitfinex doesn't exactly have a reputation that deserves any trust, so I wouldn't put it past them.

I think there is a good reason Coinbase does not allow trading Tether.