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Tether Fined $41M for Lying About Reserves

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Re: Tether Fined $41M for Lying About Reserves

#161

Post by 8note »

bko wrote: post #88
pfisherman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fiat debasing the currency. What I find ironic is that the crypto ecosystem still ended up with something like central banks, only in this case their mandate is make money for its owners, and they have no accountability or obligation to serve the general public.

The difference is I can choose not to hold Tether. Removing my exposure to dollars as a US citizen is a lot harder. Not to mention people that are on a fixed income like my parents. So debasing fiat is a lot worse

You only need to change citizenships to get off the dollar. It's a package deal

Re: Tether Fined $41M for Lying About Reserves

#162

Post by 8note »

anm89 wrote: post #135
floatingatoll wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect, no such right is necessarily guaranteed by societies. For example, during much of the 1900s you were required to sell gold to the US government for USD rather than keep it under your mattress, and if you refused they had the right to seize it with force. For another example, negative savings interest rates in certain European countries.

And yet, I still hold those other things. Many people told that society where to shove it when they came to repossess their assets by force. If you are trying to explain why I owe some debt to society to support their currency you aren't making a very convincing argument.

The government however has the right to demand you pay taxes in a certain currency, regardless of which currency or assets you're holding

Re: Tether Fined $41M for Lying About Reserves

#163

Post by tmcw »

bko wrote: post #88
pfisherman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fiat debasing the currency. What I find ironic is that the crypto ecosystem still ended up with something like central banks, only in this case their mandate is make money for its owners, and they have no accountability or obligation to serve the general public.

The difference is I can choose not to hold Tether. Removing my exposure to dollars as a US citizen is a lot harder. Not to mention people that are on a fixed income like my parents. So debasing fiat is a lot worse

Most people didn't own money market accounts or buy collateralized debt obligations in 2008, but the collapse of those things, ahem, affected them.

Re: Tether Fined $41M for Lying About Reserves

#164

Post by CryptoPunk »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #55
CryptoPunk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libertarian ideology has resulted in Tether being replaced by USDC in Ethereum DeFi. Your claim is based on the bizarre premise that people are only intelligent when formulating mandates for otherd, while they can only exercis if formulating a course of action for themselves

> Your claim is based on the bizarre premise that people are only intelligent when formulating mandates for otherd, while they can only exercis if formulating a course of action for themselves I’m not sure where my statement implied what you are assuming here. I think you may have your dogmatic blinders on. Both tether, and crypto unrelated to tether are implicated in what I stated. That doesn’t make tether any less…

The last sentence of my last comment has a mistype. It should be "while they can only exercise naivety when formulating a course of action for themselves."

As for my point, it's pretty simple: the market moves away from tether on its own just as libertarian ideology suggests it would.

Those who use tether are aware of the risks and are choosing to use it anyway, and if they lose money no one will bail them out.

I suggest you reevaluate what you think a libertarian market, where adults are treated like adults and not like children who are subordinate to high up regulators, evolves into.

And really, that's what you're implying: that certain people, should control other people, for their own good, and I find it bizarre that any one would advocate for that when you can see the extreme inequality and dysfunction this approach has produced in traditional finance.

I think it's holding to your belief - not to the belief in a free society - that requires having ideological blinkers on.

Re: Tether Fined $41M for Lying About Reserves

#165

Post by tmcw »

OneLeggedCat wrote: post #41
pfisherman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fiat debasing the currency. What I find ironic is that the crypto ecosystem still ended up with something like central banks, only in this case their mandate is make money for its owners, and they have no accountability or obligation to serve the general public.

> crypto ecosystem still ended up It's decades from its final form.

Give it a few decades, it'll still be early, somehow.

Re: Tether Fined $41M for Lying About Reserves

#168

Post by toofy »

TameAntelope wrote: post #49
AlexandrB wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, they're still operating. This is the kind of thing that makes me think the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem is a house of cards. Cryptocurrency advocates seem to be really bad at spotting and punishing incompetent and malicious actors in their markets.

I think if you got a few beers in even the most adamant crypto advocate, you'd discover their thinking is more along the lines of, "The house of cards is out in the open with crypto, vs. hidden behind bureaucracy and obfuscation in traditional banking". With crypto, the "average" person gets to feel "in on it" in a way usually reserved for coked up Goldman associates. That is possibly not a good thing, as you're poin…

Sure, but anything which is open about crypto is also open in the financial system. It isn’t “hidden” away, people just don’t do the necessary studying to learn the underlying incredible complexity necessary for an actual world scale financial system.

It’s only hidden in the sense that the definition of “decathect” is hidden. The definition isn’t “hidden”, I just haven’t looked into and learned its definition and i havent considered all the implications of its material interactions with the world yet.

This notion of “hidden” will not be solved by a coin were it to become ubiquitous. People would just have to learn a completely different set of complexities—many of which will actually be hidden by the grifters who take advantage of lack of regulations.

Much of (not all, but much) of this “hidden” argument rests on people who would just prefer simple barter/exchange—but they just don’t seem to understand the complexities that scale inevitably brings. Along with this is that they just don’t understand that crypto is not an answer to the scale complexity problems.

And if someone attempts to make a coin which addresses these complexities, oops, now we’re back to a complex, messy, and steep learning curve.

All of the grifts that we’ve seen throughout society’s history with finance will be repeated in the coin sphere and these people will sadly fall victim to these same grifts yet again.

Does our current financial system have problems? Absolutely. Does crypto solve them without reintroducing previously patched bugs? Nope. Not at all.

Re: Tether Fined $41M for Lying About Reserves

#169

Post by Marciplan »

gws wrote: post #110

Don’t really get you guys saying Tether should be shut down… the big banks get routinely fined with much bigger fines for much bigger crimes, are we gonna shut them all down then? At least Tether did not steal from nor defraud anyone. Just as a random example: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...

Why aren’t you against both big banks and Tether doing it?

Re: Tether Fined $41M for Lying About Reserves

#170

Post by chrononaut »

gws wrote: post #127
ceejayoz wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tether did defraud people. They lied on their website, claiming a) audits (which they never completed a single one of) and b) 1:1 backing of each Tether with a dollar in the bank (which they didn't have).

You are right, they lied, and people could have been harmed if there were a “bank run” on Tether. But in practice there was not and nobody suffered any damage, zero, nada, nicht. While big banks got fined for actually taking money illegally out of people’s pockets and nobody said let’s shut them down

Just because something is built upon fraud doesn't mean it will face imminent collapse. Usually it's events that put notable financial pressure on institutions that reveal their underlying flaws. The extent of the fraud notionally influences how easily it will end up collapsing. Hence why Madoff was able to keep up his scandal for quite a long time.
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