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Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

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Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#241

Post by ikeboy »

fny wrote: post #194
adflux wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bennett has done a fantastic job. There WILL be a movie about this company when investors lose faith. Like next decades, "the big short".

But how exactly do you short stablecoins? You can't and even if you did the game is heavily rigged against you. If you remember in the movie, Cohodes got his ass handed to him as banks margin called him out of his position and that's in a regulated market. These guys own their market and the exchange on which it originates. There's no way to even verify if they received dollars for every tether issued and by some mir…

Very easy to do on FTX or aave for basically as much size as you'd like. Yes, it costs 4-5% a year to short. If it blows up in the next few years you'd make a killing though.

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#242

Post by NhanH »

qeternity wrote: post #191
altrus wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't entirely understand this; could you provide a concrete example, or actual trades, that could be involved in such a position? (I'm just curious how it would actually look like in practice.)

Binance: buy $1m BTC/USDT CME: short $1m BTC futures (which are dollar settled and thus BTC/USD) On Binance you are long BTC, and short USDT. On CME you are short BTC and long USD (implicitly on the fiat legs). So if we add that up, the BTC positions net off and you’re just left with short USDT and long USD which is the desired outcome. In practice, if Tether implodes I would expect everyone to sell Tether (by buying…

The difficult part seems to be getting someone lending you $1m in USDT, isn't it? From their POV, you're getting exposed to BTC volatility, and the collateral is likely to be too high to make this practical.

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#243

Post by ikeboy »

qeternity wrote: post #112
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've held a short position on USDT through AAVE for a couple months now. USDT would have to go to ~2 to liquidate me.

If USDT goes, so does AAVE and everything else. And as has been mentioned, the iFinex crew have squeezed USDT to $1,000 before.

What is the actual mechanism by which AAVE collapses if USDT nukes?

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#244

Post by jcpham2 »

arcticbull wrote: post #33
NelsonMinar wrote: post #28

I don't understand how Tether has survived this long. Bitfinex and Tether sure look transparently like a fraud, all the way back to the "no really we have $1 in the bank for every Tether but you can't audit us" days. And yet it continues to occupy its role as the underpinning of most cryptocurrency markets. Why hasn't it blown up yet? My best guess is that it's useful to everyone taking in money from new retail inves…

It took Liberty Reserve 7 years and 17 countries cooperating to get nuked from orbit. Tether was founded as Realcoin in 2014 by a group including former child star and accused sex offender Brock Pierce, so while it’s technically just rounding the 7 year mark, it didn’t begin in earnest until it was taken over by Bitfinex towards 2015 and didn’t become majorly problematic until 2016/2017 according to the NYAG findings…

Bitcoin effectively is the reason I stopped leaving breadcrumbs for Twitter researchers in the future. I read his research and see forum posts from idiots we use to laugh at on irc, but I myself participated in the pirate@40 ponzi, as other people did - maybe 47 poor souls if memory serves.

What a lot people can’t seem to grasp about 2012 is Bitcoin miners were flush with Bitcoin and no place to spend it, no place to invest or divest it. So you are bored it’s a nascent market you browse the forum it’s all one big joke anyways- until it’s not anymore. But you are looking for something to do with Bitcoin and you have to possibilities: bitcointalk or #bitcoin-otc of freenode

One of these requires a registered gpg to trade, one is a dang website

So flush with bitcoins We were running Perl pool hopping proxy scripts to game block rewards and jump to deepbit last minute pre next block - boosting profits by 25%. Trendon Shavers aka The Jimmy Buffer PonziMan also ran a mining meta pool gpumax.com where we could buy gpu shares, say 10 million shares of hash power from your 10 buddies running 10 rigs stuffed full of gpus and then you point that at one of the two Bitcoin mining pools that were left paying a Proportional payout scheme instead of PPLNS (pay per last n shares) and take most of the whole pool rewards in a flurry of blocks blocks blocks… kinda like satoshidice except fun - maximizing ROI and exploiting Bitcoin mining pool payouts was kinda neat for awhile

I normally don’t do this, but the comments and citations have me feeling nostalgic and I do enjoy reading u/arcticbull

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#245

Post by dustintrex »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #220
dustintrex wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. USDC was long considered the adult in the room, but they started going off the rails earlier this year, dropping the 1:1 promise, delaying attestations and also now facing heavy regulatory scrutiny.

If anything, USDC has been reducing its risk profile from what I'm seen. Recently they announced they will be replacing all of their remaining corporate-bond-backing with USD cash and US treasuries. Source for your claims to the contrary?

August 2021: https://beincrypto.com/coinbase-drops-guarantee-of-usdc-stab...

SEC subpoena literally yesterday: https://coingeek.com/usdc-issuer-circle-financial-subpoenaed...

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#246

Post by forgotmyoldname »

jimmydorry wrote: post #227
forgotmyoldname wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that the original Ponzi scheme ran for quite a while and even had the media defending it as a great investment. Tether (and most crypto) seems like someone copied Ponzi's original scheme 1:1. Put in some money, transfer it to another format (Tether to other crypto, with Ponzi it was stamps), then eventually pull out loads of cash. Some people will undeniably get rich off it. But it's not sustainable.

The part I have never seen elaborated on in the "Tether is a Ponzi" claims is at what point will people using Tether make money? Tethers are IOUs to facilitate moving USD between financial institutions (mainly between exchanges, and mostly used by the exchanges themselves). You can spend $1 USD to get 1 Tether that is "redeemable" (by trade, not through the Tether company) for exactly $1 USD. A Ponzi requires some ki…

Tether takes a bunch of money to facilitate users converting to Bitcoin or other currencies. The maintainers of Tether keep sucking up real money, minting Tether that they claim is backed by cash (real currency), but the real cash backing goes poof and they aren't demonstrating that there is any stable backing. But so long as other crypto isn't crashing, they can reliably take real cash, skim off some for themselves, and pay out small amounts of what they receive to people cashing out on Tether. More people are putting money in than taking money out.

This is all elaborated in the article.

Now if, for some reason, too many people decide to withdrawal and cash out on their Tether, there's not a sufficient cash backing there. It'll completely collapse and people will be left with a bunch of Tether that's no more valuable than any other bunch of random sequences of 0s and 1s on the internet. This is no different from the original Ponzi scheme. Just replace crypto with stamps/international reply coupons and it's absolutely identical.

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#247

Post by alisonkisk »

jcpham2 wrote: post #244
arcticbull wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took Liberty Reserve 7 years and 17 countries cooperating to get nuked from orbit. Tether was founded as Realcoin in 2014 by a group including former child star and accused sex offender Brock Pierce, so while it’s technically just rounding the 7 year mark, it didn’t begin in earnest until it was taken over by Bitfinex towards 2015 and didn’t become majorly problematic until 2016/2017 according to the NYAG findings…

Bitcoin effectively is the reason I stopped leaving breadcrumbs for Twitter researchers in the future. I read his research and see forum posts from idiots we use to laugh at on irc, but I myself participated in the pirate@40 ponzi, as other people did - maybe 47 poor souls if memory serves. What a lot people can’t seem to grasp about 2012 is Bitcoin miners were flush with Bitcoin and no place to spend it, no place to…

Was this comment written by a Markov chain? Subreddit Simulator?

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#248

Post by alisonkisk »

fabianhjr wrote: post #225
fny wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how exactly do you short stablecoins? You can't and even if you did the game is heavily rigged against you. If you remember in the movie, Cohodes got his ass handed to him as banks margin called him out of his position and that's in a regulated market. These guys own their market and the exchange on which it originates. There's no way to even verify if they received dollars for every tether issued and by some mir…

All shorting consists on 5 steps: 1. Borrow 2. Sell 3. Wait 4. Buy back 5. Close There is USDT lending available. Even more, there is decentralized collateralized lending available. If someone wanted to short USDT there are plenty of opportunities to do so. (And there might be a lot of people doing so, specially now that the shadyness is being reported on some of the more reputable traditional newspapers)

Does "5. Close" happen?

In cryptocurrency it's usually some form of "4.5 Rug pull"

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#250

Post by brundolf »

cjensen wrote: post #108
rossdavidh wrote: post #22

The biggest news, buried near the bottom: "After I returned to the U.S., I obtained a document showing a detailed account of Tether Holdings’ reserves. It said they include billions of dollars of short-term loans to large Chinese companies—something money-market funds avoid. And that was before one of the country’s largest property developers, China Evergrande Group, started to collapse. I also learned that Tether ha…

One dollar of Evergrande's debt -- that is, a promise to pay one dollar -- is not worth anywhere near a dollar. So besides the sketchiness of having lots of Chinese company paper on their "asset" books, there's the whole question of how they are valuing said paper. In other words, when they say they have $1 dollar of assets for every $1 of issuance, is the asset an Evergrande promise to pay $1? Or is it an amount of…

Makes me wonder if there's a financial "weapon" a country could use in geopolitical conflict where they intentionally create an inscrutable bubble in another's economy, and then once it's grown big enough they suddenly pull off the veil and let the whole thing collapse

Not that this one sounds intentional, but it makes you think

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