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

ag.ny.gov

341–350 of 517 posts

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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly kidding... Buy forever stamps from USPS. As they raise the price of postage, your stamps will go up in value, and then you can sell them for a profit! This is probably a terrible idea, but it makes me giggle. Now I'm imaging some sort of push on r/wallstreetbets to YOLO on stamps, posting insane strategies on how to predict when the price of postage will go up, by how much, and how liquid the market is for…

My wife is a lawyer and she buys a lot of stamps. Recently she stumbled onto some strange stamp firesale on Ebay and bought forever stamps at below face value. I could only guess that this was an unwinding of the trade you propose.

Stamps (forever or not) are often used for Ebay manufactured spend because they're easy to sell (clear value, lightweight and easy to ship).

It goes like Ebay says spend $X or sell $X on ebay and they'll give you a rebate. (Or sometimes the rebate comes from a credit card or Bing). If the $X covers ebay fees and shipping, then buy stamps to reach the $X and then sell them when you get them. If the rebate it sufficient, you can sell the stamps for less than cost, because you're already ahead.

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

#342
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your recommendation for least-worse inflation hedge?

Paper towels never lose value and pretty pegged to inflation. But seriously, look at the past 20 years and your takeaway should be that USD is indestructible and that the Fed can do no wrong. They ran the printing press day and night for years and struggled to hit 2% inflation. "Full Faith and Credit of the US Government" is evidently the best inflation hedge in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-of-history_illusion

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

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Even if everything alleged were true, it really wouldn't be a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of shenanigans central banks have been pulling for centuries. If the crypto-currency market is illegitimate due to money printing by Tether, then so is the conventional financial system due to quantitive easing by the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world. Currently Tether is printing $3.5B wor…

Tether is using Deltec Bank and Trust in the Bahamas. Deltec's CEO actually did an interview where he responded to the Tether fraud claims: https://unchainedpodcast.com/is-tether-a-fraud-its-bank-says... When Tether started, most financial institutions weren't open to working with cryptocurrency companies, but the fact that it's still the top stablecoin by value is troubling since there are plenty of better options n…

People have already researched that the total volume in-out of Deltec and it could not be more than a fraction of Tether's printing meaning:

1) They aren't holding the money as USD 2) They aren't holding the money in the Bahamas—then where? 3) They are printing money without a corresponding asset aka Ponzi Scheme.

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

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tether themselves essentially admitted that it wasn’t fully backed in 2019: https://www.coindesk.com/tether-lawyer-confirms-stablecoin-7... The strangest part of the Tether story is how much of it was obvious or even out in the open. Cryptocurrency proponents were happy to look the other way as long as prices were only going up. I suspect cryptocurrency proponents and Bitfinex are working hard to spin this as a win f…

Getting rid of the fraud (tether) at the core of btc will strengthen btc. This cryptocurrency proponents should be all for it. I have honestly been surprised how long this obvious tether saga has gone on.

might strengthen it but not it’s price

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

#345
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which ones—Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and Argentina? I don't think Bitcoin adoption is terribly high here in Argentina, but hopefully you can forgive me bringing it up—I live here, so it's the place I know best, and the uses of Bitcoin are pretty easy to understand here even if most people aren't using it yet. And even those four countries are hardly inconsequential in terms of the global commonweal: 170 million people live in them, one in every 46 people alive. That's, like, more people than play Fortnite or Minecraft. More people than have bought a Justin Bieber album. Almost as many people as follow Ariana Grande on Instagram. Four times as many people as live in California. We're not talking about some tiny Elbonia here. Anything that affects 170 million people is a big deal for human welfare.

But the utility, or potential utility, of Bitcoin is a lot broader than that.

Argentina is not terribly high on the scale of "people being unbanked" or "kleptocracy". If we take infant mortality as a rough measure of kleptocracy, we're #84 out of 201 countries and territories in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an..., so we're actually better than average. We're neck and neck with PRC and way ahead of India. If we trust the table in the GFMag link I posted, which they attribute to "a just-released study by the British research platform Merchant Machine", whoever that is, there are nine countries with an even larger percentage of unbanked than Argentina, namely, Morocco, Vietnam, Egypt, the Philippines, Mexico, Nigeria, Perú, Colombia, and Indonesia. Each of Nigeria and Indonesia are individually nearly the size of the US; Indonesia is the fourth biggest country in the world. As for India and China, they claim that 20% of PRC's population is unbanked (another unbanked population nearly as large as the US) as well as 20% of India's (yet another).

And Bitcoin doesn't become useless just because you have a bank account. If you're paying a 3% tax on every bank transaction (as we do here), experiencing substantial inflation rates, working under the table, or facing the prospect of an Argentina-style bank confiscation, you have a use case for Bitcoin. Don't tell me it can't happen in the US; it did happen in the US in 01933 with Executive Order 6102, with gold playing the role of Argentine dollars.

To expand on the inflation question, on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inflation... there are 24 countries with a consumer price inflation index over 10% per year, of course including Venezuela, Argentina, and Iran (but not Cuba), but also including Sudan (regular and South), Zimbabwe, Congo, Angola, Libya, Syria, Suriname, Haiti, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Nigeria, Mozambique, Turkey, Pakistan, Zambia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Ghana, Liberia, and Malawi. You may not care about Burundi but this list also includes the 7th-biggest country in the world by population and the NATO member with the largest military. These countries don't necessarily have "authoritarian regimes" but it's still useless to try to save up money in the local currency for anything more than the very short term; after 5 years you've donated 40% of it to your central bank by way of inflation. Or maybe 85% if you're in Angola.

India doesn't have a high inflation rate by the numbers but it did "demonetize" the savings of the poor in 2016—those piles of rupee bills under your mattress didn't lose just 10% or 20% of their value but 100% of it—and this in a country where hundreds of millions of people have no bank accounts! Most of them have cellphones, though.

Both India and China also have a tendency to limit their subjects' access to foreign exchange in general, and cut it off entirely at precisely the moments when their subjects most need to emigrate to seek work. This is not at all unusual among poor countries; a Bloomberg overview of some of the measures current in 02019 is at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/stocks/news/fro... though mostly from the perspective of foreign investors.

Now, even if the 84 million Turks (one third without bank accounts) aren't currently using Bitcoin to escape the ruinous inflation rate (15% per year)—the way they used to use dollars before the government cracked down on it—it's clearly a problem many of them need to solve, whether or not their nominally democratic government is an "authoritarian regime". But diffusion of innovations doesn't happen in a vacuum, and it may take a while for Bitcoin or something similar to get widely adopted in Turkey.

So that's the kind of thing that makes me think my Argentine experience generalizes to about ⅔ of the world population, and my US experience doesn't.

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

#346
post #272

I've been following Tether for quite a long time. I have no absolute proof it is a scam but the writing is on the wall. Here are some facts. - The current Market Cap of USDT is 34 Billion Dollars. It was 4B this time last year. Since the value is pegged this means there has been an influx of cash of 30 B into this shady company in the last year alone. Who invested this money? We have no idea since Tether doesn't disc…

Not considering your other points - I never had issues converting between USDT and USD. I just did it yesterday in fact.

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

#347
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all fiat deposits into Bitfinex create USDT. Thats an additional fact that the amount is in line with the amounts that would be deposited into any big exchange. If Coinbase minted USDC whenever someone deposited, you would see the same kind of growth. The basis of your entire post is assuming impropriety based on pretty normal behavior with the addition of the business quirk of when USDT is created. The abilit…

Is 'pretty normal business behavior' pretending two entities (bitfinex and Tether) are arms lengths entities with no relationship to each other to hide the conflict of interest, along with the provably lying about the actual backing of the coin, and using what were supposed to be customer trust funds to bail out what was supposed to be an explicitly stated unrelated business? If so - be aware those are felonies in ma…

Surprisingly, yes. That is fairly normal in financial institutions. It seems nonsensical at a first glance, but:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/analyst/090501.asp

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

#348
post #346
post #272

I've been following Tether for quite a long time. I have no absolute proof it is a scam but the writing is on the wall. Here are some facts. - The current Market Cap of USDT is 34 Billion Dollars. It was 4B this time last year. Since the value is pegged this means there has been an influx of cash of 30 B into this shady company in the last year alone. Who invested this money? We have no idea since Tether doesn't disc…

Not considering your other points - I never had issues converting between USDT and USD. I just did it yesterday in fact.

Did you exchange USDT for USD through the exchange or did you trade USDT for USD, there is a difference.

In the first instance the exchange is on the hook for the USDT and they have to go to Tether to get USD to cover it.

In the second instance the other user you traded with is on the hook for the USDT and they will probably just trade it for USD in the future or another crypto.

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

#349
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same doubts you do about Tether's legitimacy, but there's a few conclusions I believe you're jumping to which I think don't quite hold: - Tether's volumes being greater than other crypto-currencies don't have much impact on the legitimacy of other crypto-currencies. The volume is so high because USDT is the other side of most crypto-currency trading pair. Given the liquidity of the market, you can trade al…

> If the crypto-currency market is illegitimate due to money printing by Tether, then so is the conventional financial system due to quantitive easing by the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world. The difference is that central banks aren't lying about whether they're printing money or not.

Instead, they control the methodologies that define the value of what they've printed as well as the flows.

Differences...Distinctions...are there?

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

#350
post #272

I've been following Tether for quite a long time. I have no absolute proof it is a scam but the writing is on the wall. Here are some facts. - The current Market Cap of USDT is 34 Billion Dollars. It was 4B this time last year. Since the value is pegged this means there has been an influx of cash of 30 B into this shady company in the last year alone. Who invested this money? We have no idea since Tether doesn't disc…

What will happen to NY AG which investigated Tether for 2 years, went through 2.5 mil pages of documentation, yet missed such an obvious scam that a lot of people, including on this forum, can clearly see?

If Tether implodes, is this proof that NY AG is incompetent or even worse, somehow implicated in this giant scam by covering it up?

In the NY AG settlement PDF it clearly states that they will not indict Tether in the future for the investigated crimes, including not being backed up by assets, which happened before the date of the payment of the fine:

> 56. Within five (5) days of the receipt of the penalty ... and agrees not to bring any claims or causes of action against Bitfinex or Tether ... for matters relating to the conduct set forth in the Findings and the Petition ... arising out of Bitfinex or Tether’s representations concerning the backing of tethers during the time period January 1, 2014 to the effective date of this Settlement Agreement; transfers of a portion of the cash reserves backing tethers to Bitfinex pursuant to the line of credit

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