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Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

ag.ny.gov

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Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#131

Post by tootahe45 »

BelenusMordred wrote: post #59
temp wrote: post #19

So even back in 2017, Tether was backed only by a fraction of USD. >Until September 15, 2017, the only U.S. dollars held by Tether ostensibly backing the approximately 442 million tethers in circulation was the approximately $61 million on deposit at the Bank of Montreal. Wonder how much of the tether they pumped out through last year has been backed?

Do people here not realise that people give them bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for that in exchange for tethers? If they were only a week late in converting it to USD they'd be up tens of billion in profit this year. The lack of critical thinking and mindless mob mentality around tether is amusing and has been going on for years now. Proven wrong everytime.[1][2][3] Even this announcement is dumb politiking that…

A 145m sell just sent BTC down 13k. It's not so easy to just sell your ~30b worth of buttcoin.

If anything it's shocking that "we checked and it's all fraud" is seen as a win for crypto.

Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#132

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

tectec wrote: post #108
jcfrei wrote: post #97

"Contrary to online speculation, there was no finding that Tether ever issued tethers [USDT] without backing, or to manipulate crypto prices" I hope that ends the spreading of FUD - claiming that bitcoin and other cryptos are propped up by the printing of fake tethers - which seems to spread here every time there is a sharp rise in prices.

Where is that quote from? I don't see it in the linked article

https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/95207/bitfinex-tether-ne...

> Jason Weinstein, a partner at Steptoe & Johnson and counsel to Bitfinex and Tether

Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#133

Post by erwan »

mumblemumble wrote: post #52
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency isn’t the only way to escape USD inflation. Investors have been investing to avoid inflation long before Bitcoin was invented. Investing in virtually any asset other than cash will, almost by definition, shield you from inflation. Inflation is an increase in asset prices, resulted in reduced buying power. You only need to invest in assets (stocks for example) and minimize holdings in cash if your goal…

Even if we assume only Bitcoin, it's not currently expected to stop printing money until (assuming Ray Kurzweil wasn't right all along) long after we're all dead. The Bitcoin inflation story is more political than simply economic. Right now, it's not really possible for it to be narrowly about whether printing money is OK. But one could easily mount an argument about whether humans should be able to twiddle with the…

You can inflate the money supply and still be "deflationary" if the convenience yield of holding the money (tokens, UTXOs, or whatnot) exceeds or neutralize that inflation rate. You make an excellent point, Bitcoin doesn't have to overtake gold or become a global-reserve to change the world. It just has to be a plausible alternative that enables people to opt-in or out of the system. It has largely already achieved that and I'm hopeful for a future of monetary pluralism.

Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#134

Post by anewaccount2021 »

api wrote: post #48
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency isn’t the only way to escape USD inflation. Investors have been investing to avoid inflation long before Bitcoin was invented. Investing in virtually any asset other than cash will, almost by definition, shield you from inflation. Inflation is an increase in asset prices, resulted in reduced buying power. You only need to invest in assets (stocks for example) and minimize holdings in cash if your goal…

> Investing in virtually any asset other than cash will, almost by definition, shield you from inflation. ... which is why virtually every nation on Earth adopted some kind of inflationary fiat currency. It pushes money to be invested, not held. Wealth is a verb, not a noun.

This makes sense when you are under forty and can wait out a bad market. If you are 75, expect to live to be 83, you are much better off being able to guarantee your assets.

This is a strange pattern emerging on HN lately - that inflation is fine because you should be fully invested in equities anyway

Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#135

Post by bronzeage »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31
bronzeage wrote: post #16

I'm waiting patiently for the whole Tether printing scheme to fall and crush to finally purchase Bitcoin / Ether. However I'm not viewing them as inflation hedges so long as Bitfinex / etc. are allowed to continue with their obvious money printing scheme. When most crypto trading volume is traded at trustworthy exchanges which actually hold dollars as much as they say they do, I'll trust $/BTC to be a fair market. It…

Cryptocurrency isn’t the only way to escape USD inflation. Investors have been investing to avoid inflation long before Bitcoin was invented. Investing in virtually any asset other than cash will, almost by definition, shield you from inflation. Inflation is an increase in asset prices, resulted in reduced buying power. You only need to invest in assets (stocks for example) and minimize holdings in cash if your goal…

Stocks might fall in inflationary circumstances, depending on many things such as how much of the companies revenue can inflate - and most times, the answer is worse than inflation. Bonds might not give you a yield exceeding the inflation, especially in inflation created for the sole purpose of buoying bonds.

Speculative inflation hedges might also act erratically, like bitcoin and gold, getting ahead of themselves and the inflation sometimes.

Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#136

Post by eigenvalue »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31
bronzeage wrote: post #16

I'm waiting patiently for the whole Tether printing scheme to fall and crush to finally purchase Bitcoin / Ether. However I'm not viewing them as inflation hedges so long as Bitfinex / etc. are allowed to continue with their obvious money printing scheme. When most crypto trading volume is traded at trustworthy exchanges which actually hold dollars as much as they say they do, I'll trust $/BTC to be a fair market. It…

Cryptocurrency isn’t the only way to escape USD inflation. Investors have been investing to avoid inflation long before Bitcoin was invented. Investing in virtually any asset other than cash will, almost by definition, shield you from inflation. Inflation is an increase in asset prices, resulted in reduced buying power. You only need to invest in assets (stocks for example) and minimize holdings in cash if your goal…

It’s absolutely not true that investing in any assets besides cash will shield you from inflation. Inflation impacts companies very differently, and you want a preservation of real earnings power taking into account the need to replace plant and equipment over time. The best inflation protection would come from a company with a pure revenue royalty with fixed expenses. The worst would be a company with bad pricing power and lots of commodity inputs.

Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#137

Post by jessriedel »

mumblemumble wrote: post #52
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency isn’t the only way to escape USD inflation. Investors have been investing to avoid inflation long before Bitcoin was invented. Investing in virtually any asset other than cash will, almost by definition, shield you from inflation. Inflation is an increase in asset prices, resulted in reduced buying power. You only need to invest in assets (stocks for example) and minimize holdings in cash if your goal…

Even if we assume only Bitcoin, it's not currently expected to stop printing money until (assuming Ray Kurzweil wasn't right all along) long after we're all dead. The Bitcoin inflation story is more political than simply economic. Right now, it's not really possible for it to be narrowly about whether printing money is OK. But one could easily mount an argument about whether humans should be able to twiddle with the…

>18.5M of bitcoin has already been mined of the maximum 21M. So the amount of remaining future inflation from increased supply negligible. That the remaining 2M will be mined asymptotically over many years is not important except for purposes of incentivizing miners to run transactions.

Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#138

Post by CarelessExpert »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #65
api wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Investing in virtually any asset other than cash will, almost by definition, shield you from inflation. ... which is why virtually every nation on Earth adopted some kind of inflationary fiat currency. It pushes money to be invested, not held. Wealth is a verb, not a noun.

The world would certainly be a strange and sad place if the best thing for everyone to do with their wealth was hoard it in currency. Not holding wealth in cash has been investing 101 material long before cryptocurrency. It is fascinating how crypto proponents took over that narrative to imply that crypto was the only investment that could escape inflation. They’ve also spread an idea that money printing is the singu…

> They’ve also spread an idea that money printing is the singular source of inflation, which isn’t true at all. Bitcoin, for example, is an inflating asset due to hype-driven demand.

Uh, I'm very much of the opinion that your average BTC fan isn't exactly educated about macroeconomics, but this sentence makes absolutely no sense.

Inflation isn't a thing that happens to a currency, it's a thing that happens to an economy. It's a systemic increase in prices across a basket of assets that demonstrates the devaluation of a currency, as a single unit of that currency effectively buys less.

Bitcoin, if it had been a usable currency over the last decade, is very clearly deflationary, as its rise in value as a currency relative to USD has dramatically outpaced the rise in the price of goods and services as denominated in USD, meaning that had prices been denominated in BTC, they would have dropped.

Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#139

Post by rthomas6 »

intotheabyss wrote: post #103
rthomas6 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always championed DAI for a stablecoin. I don't know why it's not more popular. https://makerdao.com/en/ Instead of it being (supposedly) backed by a dollar reserve, it's collateralized by ETH and several ERC20 tokens in a smart contract. The smart contract does things to make DAI tend toward $1. It's been out for years and I think it has worked pretty well: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/multi-collateral-…

DAI is very cool. If you want to really blow your mind, check out RAI: https://stats.reflexer.finance/

Very interesting. I wonder how stable it will be vs USD over the long run.

I am interested in someone making a CPI coin, that tracks some value of a basket of goods instead of another currency. I think that would be sort of the ultimate inflation hedge because ideally the value would not change at all over the long run.

Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers

#140

Post by user-the-name »

jkhdigital wrote: post #92
pavlov wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (probably is now) This kind of argumentation makes cryptocurrency proponents so insufferable. There’s no evidence Tether is backed, but somehow we can just assume in a parenthesis that they probably are, and then go on a tangential rant about banks or fiat or digital gold or something.

Tether is Tether. Bitcoin is Bitcoin. The fact that exchanges exist which allow you to trade one for the other does not make them the same kind of thing.

Remind me, what percentage of Bitcoin trades happens in Tether, again?
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