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Tether price manipulation

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Re: Tether price manipulation

#461

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>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…

r/bitcoin is heavily censored, it's the reason for Bitcoin Cash fork and why the uncensored r/btc was made.

All the original Bitcoin adopters from the beginning moved discussion there.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Has already happened, Nano is feeless, currently supports 250tx/s on main net and requires the energy of one windmill for the entire network.

It's also more secure than Bitcoin due to a higher decentralization coefficient.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#463

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The killer app for Bitcoin is escaping government fiat money that is backed by literally nothing at all and is being printed at increasingly alarming rates. 40% of all USD ever created were “made” in 2020. That will have repercussions for decades and isn’t a currency I want to stay in. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1 Ironically (or not) Bitcoin was created in 2009 right when that graph gets really crazy.

> backed by literally nothing It is the only thing the government accepts for tax payments. Given that you can be arrested for not paying your taxes it is "backed" by the barrel of a gun, a threat to your very being. In one sense this is the only real thing there is.

Ok are you saying that is a good reason to invest in it? I always hear this and it seems like if force or military force is your only bastion of reason left to invest in a currency you should have left it long ago.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#464

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Maybe they didn't have any intrinsic value in the past besides looking pretty but in the modern era both gold and silver have industrial uses. They are not just stores of value. One could also argue that both metals also had intrinsic value in the past since both metals were used in jewelry and various items to make them look good.

The industrial usefulness is an irrelevant byproduct when considering gold and silver as an investment. Put another way, if people lost faith in gold as an investment tomorrow, and the value fell to the economic value of the industrial use cases, investors in gold would be ruined.

I’ve never thought of it this way. I wonder what the price of gold and silver would be if they were strictly used for manufacturing and jewelry instead of speculation and store of value?

Re: Tether price manipulation

#466

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Gold has had thousands of years to equalize in value. Bitcoin is about 12 years old.

Alright, then maybe in a hundred years your gold comparison will be meaningful, but not today.

Disruptive technology is disruptive.

Tell someone from the past to imagine having godlike computing power in your pocket, and they'd say "why would anyone want that?"

Re: Tether price manipulation

#467

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It can only be taken in these events: 1) Seed phrases are discovered (ie. plaintext document or physical artifact). 2) Seed phrases are handed over by willing party. If #1 doesn't exist, then #2 is the only option.

This is the same as with cash money. Money can only be seized if the safe is found. And the combination is handed over by a willing party. The difference is that money is actually more secure because you don't have a public ledger telling you that it exists and who owns it and how much of it they own as you do with the public cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Cash needs to be accessible to be useful.

Crypto is magnitudes more accessible. I can travel to any country in the world with an encrypted usb drive of my seed words, and no one is wiser. OR even upload a file to the internet and forego carrying anything at all. A government can try to censor transactions belonging to an address, but we don't have good precedent to see how the network will behave. Miners in other jurisdictions have no reason to follow someone else's censorship.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#468
post #94
post #64

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>does not have a "killer app" and is 99.99% used for speculation You could argue speculation is the killer app. I'm not a fan but it's hard to deny it's a huge business and some people seem to like it. Kind of like Las Vegas in a way.

It definitely has a killer app. Probably not a big enough app to justify these prices, but one nonetheless. As Stripe, PayPal, Visa, Gofundme, Patreon, et. al. shut down avenues of payments for legal, but unpopular purchases, BTC is the obvious workaround. Vendors of firearms, pornography, legal funds for unpopular causes, dissident content creators, etc have become increasingly estranged from the "normal" payments m…

Regulation just shifts to exchanges. Bitstamp already ask for a ridiculous amount of information regarding source of funds.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#469
post #82

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Though when you sell your USDT for euro or whatever on Kraken say, the tether org must step in and buy to keep the price at US$1. So they effectively redem if not directly.

When is tether org involved in this? From your example the only thing that happened is that now you hold x euros and Kraken holds x amount of USDT. Unless Kraken goes to Tether org and asks "hey I got these USDTs, please give me the USD" no redemption has occurred. That some people can in effect transact USDT for fiat via other mechanisms (like your example above) says nothing about Tether org backing or reserves. Un…

The reason tether stays at $1 is because the tether org or their delegates buy or sell to keep it there. They have to or the whole thing would become untethered as it were.

Re: Tether price manipulation

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

* The narrative around bitcoin has always been "It is digital currency. It works like gold".* I don't think we need to get into whether or not gold is a currency or a commodity but you are fooling yourself if you think that the price of gold is driven by jewelers and PCB fabs.

You'd be surprised how much does go to jewelry https://www.statista.com/statistics/274684/global-demand-for...

Long term the price is driven by the mining cost.

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