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Tether price manipulation

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Re: Tether price manipulation

#331

Post by damon_c »

vorpalhex wrote: post #320
doggosphere wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However three years on, crypto still does not have a "killer app" and is 99.99% used for speculation. The killer app is decentralized, permissionless, open source, and censorship resistant network. Bitcoin's narrative has had to morph from "digital currency" to "digital gold". Gold morphed from worthless rocks in the the ground, to coins traded by traveling merchants, to stores of value that were eventually centraliz…

> The killer app is decentralized, permissionless, open source, and censorship resistant network. Yes, but what can I do with that other than toot/tweet/twit at other people and buy LSD tabs?

Here are a few projects that use Ethereum to do things that have nothing to do with acquiring chemicals or crypto asset speculation.

https://www.nucypher.com https://filecoin.io https://alice.si https://www.augur.net

Re: Tether price manipulation

#332

Post by jrh206 »

qeternity wrote: post #298
csomar wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody will need to take the counter-trade (the arbitrage dude) and unless he can redeem to close the circle, he is going to stop. USDT are redeemable to your bank account if you have a good sizable balance (talking 7-8 figures). You'll get it deposited from some of their offshore shell companies. But you didn't hear it from me :)

No, they don't. There doesn't need to be an arbitrage. If you have 10 USDT and I give you 9.90 USD for that...nothing else needs to happen. But the degree that this is happening pales massively in comparison to the billions that are sat on exchanges and recycled. Tether would be the first legitimate billion dollar operation where people have to say things like "but you didn't hear it from me".

> No, they don't. There doesn't need to be an arbitrage. If you have 10 USDT and I give you 9.90 USD for that...nothing else needs to happen.

I'm not an expert, so I might be wrong (seriously, not sarcastically). I _think_ this is technically arbitrage even though you never complete the loop.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#333

Post by schmichael »

doggosphere wrote: post #324
vorpalhex wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The killer app is decentralized, permissionless, open source, and censorship resistant network. Yes, but what can I do with that other than toot/tweet/twit at other people and buy LSD tabs?

With Bitcoin you own property that can never be confiscated or debased by any government. With IPFS you can host and access files that can't be censored. (same level of censorship resistance as torrents) With Monero you can transact free from surveillance. The biggest applications on Ethereum right now is decentralized finance, with billions of dollars locked in.

> With Bitcoin you own property that can never be confiscated or debased by any government.

Private keys can be confiscated like anything else. They won't do you much good if you're thrown in prison for not turning them over if legally compelled. Sure you can try to hide your ownership, but my point is that actual cryptocurrencies are only one layer of very deep opsec you need to resist state actors. For the common illegal goods consumer it's unlikely to do much more than provide a false sense of security due to other opsec failures (use of phones, use of cookies, use of mailing addresses, use of non-e2e chat, using a hosted wallet, lack of anonymous vpn, etc etc etc).

> The biggest applications on Ethereum right now is decentralized finance, with billions of dollars locked in.

Interesting use of "dollars." How much is actually Tether? How much is manipulated market cap (through wash trading or more convoluted defi mechanisms)? How much is actually liquid USD?

Re: Tether price manipulation

#334

Post by doggosphere »

corrys wrote: post #329
doggosphere wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Bitcoin you own property that can never be confiscated or debased by any government. With IPFS you can host and access files that can't be censored. (same level of censorship resistance as torrents) With Monero you can transact free from surveillance. The biggest applications on Ethereum right now is decentralized finance, with billions of dollars locked in.

Bitcoins have been confiscated by many governments. A quick Google search reveals many instances of that.

Lets clarify semantics.

Can the government seize Bitcoin directly? No.

Can the government seize your bank account directly? Yes.

Can they threaten you with jail if you don't hand over your Bitcoin? Yes

Re: Tether price manipulation

#335

Post by SilasX »

Born_Again wrote: post #181
shuntress wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin's narrative has had to morph from "digital currency" to "digital gold" The narrative around bitcoin has always been "It is digital currency. It works like gold". Hence the notion of "mining" . EDIT: downvote me if you want but you are flat wrong Section 6 in the bitcoin whitepaper explicitly likens bitcoin to gold [0] > The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expe…

>>Bitcoin's narrative has had to morph from "digital currency" to "digital gold" I wholeheartedly agree with this. Let's look at some Reddit /r/bitcoin posts in January 2014: https://redditsearch.io/?term=&dataviz=false&aggs=false&subr... People were discussing bitcoin being used as a digital currency. There was talk of bitcoin being accepted on Overstock.com, TigerDirect, and using bitcoin apps on phones as a digita…

I would say it’s now more promoted as an uncorrelated asset class.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#336

Post by DennisP »

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.

It doesn't google anymore and might be gone now, but back in the day there was an article on a bitcoin website which went through some math, arguing that Bitcoin could achieve 4000 transactions per second. People used to link to it on a regular basis.

Aside from that, people figured Moore's Law would continue at its historical pace, and Bitcoin could grow indefinitely at the same pace.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#337

Post by DennisP »

shuntress wrote: post #158
gruez wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

As far as new networks go, that appears to be happening.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#338

Post by j0ba »

birdyrooster wrote: post #289
shuntress wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bitcoin's narrative has had to morph from "digital currency" to "digital gold" The narrative around bitcoin has always been "It is digital currency. It works like gold". Hence the notion of "mining" . EDIT: downvote me if you want but you are flat wrong Section 6 in the bitcoin whitepaper explicitly likens bitcoin to gold [0] > The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expe…

It’s digital gold you can use to magically transport any drug to your doorstep. That’s an amazing killer app.

Meh, USD is much better for that. Lots more drug dealers accept it.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#339

Post by doggosphere »

schmichael wrote: post #333
doggosphere wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Bitcoin you own property that can never be confiscated or debased by any government. With IPFS you can host and access files that can't be censored. (same level of censorship resistance as torrents) With Monero you can transact free from surveillance. The biggest applications on Ethereum right now is decentralized finance, with billions of dollars locked in.

> With Bitcoin you own property that can never be confiscated or debased by any government. Private keys can be confiscated like anything else. They won't do you much good if you're thrown in prison for not turning them over if legally compelled. Sure you can try to hide your ownership, but my point is that actual cryptocurrencies are only one layer of very deep opsec you need to resist state actors. For the common i…

A wrench attack will always be the easiest vector. That said, there is no other asset in history that gives you this level of security for such marginal cost. The cost of securing $100 is essentially the same as the cost of securing $100m.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#340

Post by wskinner »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #325
wskinner wrote: post #290

When the Bitfinex’d posts came out in 2017, I found them fairly convincing. It seems likely there is something not quite right at Bitfinex and Tether. But I have yet to see any evidence that the scale of “not right” is so large as is frequently claimed. These critiques never seem to address the most parsimonious explanation for periods of increased Tether issuance, which is that they are driven by genuine demand for…

> These critiques never seem to address the most parsimonious explanation for periods of increased Tether issuance, which is that they are driven by genuine demand for bitcoin, and much of that demand is routed via Tether The bigger question is: Why are so many institutions using Tether to purchase 7-8 figures of bitcoin at a time instead of simply engaging with any of the well-known institutions who will facilitate…

> The only explanation I can come up with is that Tether is being used to skirt financial regulations or launder money, which doesn't bode well for Tether either.

This may well be true. But it also seems to be the case that for a long time, Tether was the only game in town, and institutions built integrations around it. Someone starting out now might not build on Tether.

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