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Tether price manipulation

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Re: Tether price manipulation

#431

Post by microtherion »

seibelj wrote: post #132
miracle2k wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what does the company do with those USDT? If the money printing theory is correct, companies like yours would be the ones counteracting any sell-pressure on USDT. If the theory is not correct, companies like yours would see an at least equal buy-side demand for USDT, bringing real USD into the system. I mean, does the company hold (increasingly?) large USDT positions on their balance sheet (and would therefore be…

I worked at Circle https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/48857/former-head-of-cir...

That article was published in December 2019, when $4B of Tether had been issued in total, and covers an unspecified earlier period.

Are you sure that the $20B of Tether issued since then have an identical origin story?

Re: Tether price manipulation

#432

Post by doggosphere »

microtherion wrote: post #427
doggosphere wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Can the government seize Bitcoin directly? No. A government could seize miners, and given that ~50% of the world's Bitcoin mining capacity appears to be located in one country, that might give them considerable leeway to rewrite the blockchain to their liking.

Yes. The solution to this is a software fork.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#433

Post by microtherion »

doggosphere wrote: post #432
microtherion wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can the government seize Bitcoin directly? No. A government could seize miners, and given that ~50% of the world's Bitcoin mining capacity appears to be located in one country, that might give them considerable leeway to rewrite the blockchain to their liking.

Yes. The solution to this is a software fork.

Did you mean "soft fork", or are you thinking of a different concept I'm not familiar with?

Forks can and have been used to deal with isolated malicious incidents, but do you think they can be successful against an actor in extended control of a substantial part of the hash rate?

Re: Tether price manipulation

#434

Post by incrudible »

doggosphere wrote: post #413
incrudible wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Securing $1 billion of bitcoin? Who needs to secure $827 million of Bitcoin? Securing $937 million of Bitcoin is not a killer app. In all seriousness, securing the value of Bitcoin is the problem that is not easily solved.

Bitcoin is bits of data on a network. It does exactly what its supposed to do; a dictionary for strings to integers. Securing external value to people is not a goal or responsibility of Bitcoin. That's simply a consequence to how we as humans choose to use scarce assets.

> Securing external value to people is not a goal or responsibility of Bitcoin.

Fair enough, but then your comparison to physical gold is meaningless. Physical gold is generally used to store value, not to transfer it.

For that purpose, you have paper money (or paper gold such as futures) which is cheap to transfer.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#435

Post by TomSwirly »

doggosphere wrote: post #308
qeternity wrote: post #15

The problem is that in the early days of @Bitfinex'ed this was all a bit of a sideshow because there was genuinely large interest from retail and the outcome of crypto was far less certain. However three years on, crypto still does not have a "killer app" and is 99.99% used for speculation. Bitcoin's narrative has had to morph from "digital currency" to "digital gold". But in the depths of the March panic, Tether jum…

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.

That's not an app. That's meaningless advertising lingo.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#436

Post by TomSwirly »

gruez wrote: post #383
rednerrus wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a USD to USDT match, where are the audits?

Is that relevant? I'm not arguing against the claims that tether is shady, I'm only arguing against the outrageous claims that you can't convert USDT back to USD that some tether opponents claim.

> Is that relevant?

Of course it's relevant. If there are no actual reserves, the whole thing is a scam and certain to collapse sooner or later.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#437

Post by TomSwirly »

gruez wrote: post #136

>4) How the scam works: >Tether can print infinite amounts of (worthless) $USDT. >They then inject this into BTC, ETH, LTC, (and others) to cause prices to pump. >Notice how during the months they stopped printing Tether, the market moves sideways or drops significantly. >This graph also shows the extent to which USDT plays a role in Bitcoin's price action over the years. I don't get it. This doesn't really prove any…

"It could be" that they have $2.5 billion dollars hidden somewhere but they don't want to show it to anyone or have it audited.

"It could be" that if you send me $1 million, I'll make you live forever. You should try it and see.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#438

Post by xenihn »

WMX123 wrote: post #428
xenihn wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I still don't see that artificially inflating coinbase bitcoin. I don't know how to explain it any more clearly to you. >plus only bitfinance would be able to print/create tether Yes, but whoever controls the printing could then use the Tethers on any exchange that supports them. >also, there's no evidence that companies what you claim they could do You asked for an explanation of how it could be done, not evidence.

The explanation is clear, but I just don't see it as being particularly convincing. Sure, I didn't ask for evidence. Now, I am. Where's your evidence?

>The explanation is clear, but I just don't see it as being particularly convincing.

Why not?

>Sure, I didn't ask for evidence. Now, I am. Where's your evidence?

You need to specify what exactly you want evidence for. Then you need to google it, because that's what I'm going to do, assuming you want evidence of something like arbitrage.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#439

Post by gruez »

jVinc wrote: post #404
gruez wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that relevant? I'm not arguing against the claims that tether is shady, I'm only arguing against the outrageous claims that you can't convert USDT back to USD that some tether opponents claim.

Well ofcause you can. A pyramid scheme keeps paying out profits to the chumps right up to the point when it doesn't. The argument here isn't that Tether has no cash on hand, it's that if enough people pull out, they hit the the bottom of the non 1:1 reserve and everyone else left holding will zero out. If you have 1 kg of gold and start selling papers giving people claim to that 1kg of gold, nothing will prevent you…

You seem to be spending 3 paragraphs re-arguing that tether is shady, when I already said that wasn't the point I was arguing. A argument in favor of tether shouldn't be taken as a sign that I support them wholeheartedly.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#440

Post by gruez »

TomSwirly wrote: post #436
gruez wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that relevant? I'm not arguing against the claims that tether is shady, I'm only arguing against the outrageous claims that you can't convert USDT back to USD that some tether opponents claim.

> Is that relevant? Of course it's relevant. If there are no actual reserves, the whole thing is a scam and certain to collapse sooner or later.

>I'm only arguing against the outrageous claims that you can't convert USDT back to USD
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