The price of bitcoin dropped substantially yesterday. I wonder who was trading on this information before release...
It was always public information that this was coming out today or tomorrow.
Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
261–270 of 517 posts
Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
#262Earlier 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.
If I could buy tulips on cryptoexchanges with freshly printed Tether, I could bid the price of tulips up. If the majority of tulip trades took place on crypto exchanges and much of that was bidding the price up with newly printed Tether, tulips would be exactly as useful as before, but cost a lot more. As such, if Tether were to collapse, people's bulbs would be worth a lot less. Tulips would still be tulips, but they'd be part of a Tether bubble.
Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No one would care how many Bitcoin they had without an exchange rate. Tether printing is a convenient way to inflate the exchange rate. Remove Tether printing and the exchange rate falls. As long as people talk about Bitcoin in terms of the exchange rate, Tether and Bitcoin are deeply connected.
No it would not, plenty of stablecoins to take it's place, or just crypto/crypto ratios.
Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of. There are many many people hyping Bitcoin (and various bitcoin-adjacent projects: mining rigs, wallets, dodgy unregulated exchanges, etc.), and most of them have a vested financial interest in it. BTC didn't get to the price it is today on the backs of a few cypherpunks experimenting with decentralized digital currency technology.
> Sort of. There are many many people hyping Bitcoin (and various bitcoin-adjacent projects: mining rigs, wallets, dodgy unregulated exchanges, etc.), and most of them have a vested financial interest in it. You've basically described commerce. Pick a random asset class--stocks, real estate, commodities, etc--and ask yourself: are there people who are hyping that asset who have a vested financial interest in it? The…
In the less-scammy world of regulated finance, there are rules about disclosure and the SEC will come after you for running a pump-and-dump scheme.
Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I grant Bitcoin has value as a hedge against system failure. And maybe you’re right about the corner case it addresses being larger than I think. But so much of the hype of Bitcoin is in developed countries with very low inflation. And this should be tempered.
But I'm not talking about system failure, primarily; I'm talking about day-to-day life for somewhere between one third and two thirds of people, most of whom aren't using Bitcoin yet.
The same four countries get brought up by BTC proponents all the time. Yes, evading authoritarian regimes can be useful. But like 1/3 of the planet lives in just India/China. Going from "a use case is sending cash from the US to your family in Iran" to "2/3 of the world population wants this" is a big leap.
Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
The returns you can make in securities over ten to twenty years is much more impressive than bonds.
Key word being "can". On average securities have a much better return than bonds, but they also have a much higher risk of a large drop in value.
On an individual basis perhaps but not if you're in an S&P 500 ETF.
Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. We've traded confidence in centralized, old world financial institutions, for decentralized, techno-utopian...financial institutions. Same s**, different marketing.
At least banks have to operate within the realities of regulations and legal recourse. It’s not perfect, but it does provide a forcing function to make them think long and hard before doing anything that might be fraudulent. Cryptocurrency proponents like to tout crypto’s ability to escape regulation as a good thing, while ignoring that the same property makes it a dream come true for financial fraud schemes.
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Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is only true if we accept your unstated premise that BTC itself isn't a big ole Ponzi scheme. I guess we could argue, "It's good news for our slightly more subtle fraud if the blatant, obvious fraud gets stamped out."
> This is only true if we accept your unstated premise that BTC itself isn't a big ole Ponzi scheme. Let's be clear, here: There's a substantial difference between Bitfinex engaging in outright financial fraud vs a bunch of people buying into the value of a virtual currency for reasons no one can understand. BTC is not a ponzi. It's just a long-running speculative bubble. A collective delusion. You can disagree with…
> but it's certainly no more a fraud than Beanie Babies or tulip bulbs
Did their bubbles also last 12 years, went through multiple bear/bull markets?
Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
#269question for HN. If tether has been so successful at avoiding scrutiny while also making money, why is it that we don't see more tethers? It seems like a very easy way to make money.. given the authorities are asleep at the wheel ?
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Re: Bitfinex and Tether required to end all trading activity with New Yorkers
#270Earlier 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…
On top of that, any asset for which demand comes mostly from being an "inflation hedge" is a bad inflation hedge since prices will rise when people want more inflation hedging and drop when they want less hedging, meaning the majority of people inflation hedging will buy high and sell low. Gold has had that dynamic for a long time, which is one reason it is not considered a good investment most of the time. Buy asset…
This proven logic is drowned by people's instinct to follow the herd... and buy Bitcoin.