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Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

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Re: Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

#261
post #159
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% of crypto trades are against USDT

why? a friend said it's because he doesn't have to pay tax, i corrected him last year. are people doing this because they really think they don't have to pay tax unless they swap to actual USDs? Or they're just hiding their USDs away from the IRS and other taxation entities?

The exchanges are able to buy USDT for less than $1 and use it to trade against customers. Big advantages to them to use it, and also they don’t need banking relationships to acquire it this way.

FTX and Binance among biggest customers. Likely offering commercial paper to Tether in exchange for the USDT. Already established that Tether made crypto backed USDT loans to Celsius.

Here’s Tether’s customers:

https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-inve...

Re: Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me think; what if you shorted USDT? There seems to be almost no scenario where USDT becomes more valuable than the USD, and the worst case is it continues to be worth the same. But there is a fair probability it becomes worthless, meaning that you gain from it. While you need to pay premiums in the interim, for something with an indefinite timeframe, that risk seems fairly minor for the potential reward.

It costs about 9% per year to short it on most exchanges but about 4-5% on many DeFi platforms. Since most fractional banks live off of a 10% reserve ratio, you could very well be keeping Tether alive and prevent it from ever going under by shorting it. They are profiting from all of the tether FUD nonsense by being able to lend their coins at a higher rate.

> Since most fractional banks live off of a 10% reserve ratio, you could very well be keeping Tether alive and prevent it from ever going under by shorting it.

Some might say that FDIC made the banks super rich -- it wasn't the services that made the banks profitable, as it was the bank had a sudden and large influx of government backed cash to make loans from.

In the US, it's not just reserves it's that 95% of account holders will be FDIC insured. And because the accounts are insured, there's rigorous banking regulations around the bank so FDIC doesn't have to pay out constantly.

So at what point does a run on $USDT happen? When the Chinese commercial paper market goes belly up? When they bitfinex files for bankruptcy or is charged with RICO? Sure there's a lot of FUD but if you read the tea leaves, I think China already sees systemic risk.

Re: Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

#263
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If USDT collapses it will take out multiple exchanges with it, and the fact that you have a winning position won't matter if the the people running the exchange it was on have entirely disappeared to sandy beaches somewhere. Counterparty risk during the systemic "banking" collapse will be very high, and completely uninsured.

If you have extracted the cash in dollars somehow before the crash, then it would work, but you have to move your money out of the exchange as fast as you can.

The collapse of Tether is likely to be right in the middle of the crash and the exchanges will have suspended withdrawals already, and everyone will be looking for a lifeboat.

You have a database entry showing that you have a large amount of winnings that you can see on your screen.

You are going to have to deal with corrupt human beings on other end, who are outside of your jurisdiction, and are assuming they are just going to wire your bank account money based on that database entry, when you have no leverage over them at all, and when they will be better able to see the writing on the wall than you do.

Even within your jurisdiction, for something like Coinbase, if it becomes completely insolvent then you become an unsecured creditor in the bankruptcy liquidation process.

You'll be stuck yelling into the ether making twitter posts shaming them for not wiring you your winnings. And whatever actual cash you sent them to make those bets will be long gone and you'll lose everything.

Even assuming you could find some form of betting market outside of the crypto exchanges to place bets with other people that Tether would collapse the interest you have to pay should more than offset the eventual winnings. This is similar to how using options for portfolio insurance is a poor idea because by the time you're worried about your portfolio losing value everyone else can see the issue as well and wants a premium to write you that insurance.

And there's no sure bet that Tether/crypto collapses in the near term. I suspect that crypto will likely pop to a new bubble blow-off peak in 2022 and then 2022/2023 there will be another systemic test of crypto that could lead to its failure. But there's many billionaires with a vested interest in seeing the game continue who will do whatever they can to kick the can further down the road. I thought that it would fail in 2018 and was wrong (but the transcripts with bitfinex showed that it was probably on the brink). You could wind up betting Tether collapses for so long that by the time it finally does you've spent more on those bets than you've won back.

Re: Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

#265

I wonder what would happen if this proved to be scam. Would that kill the whole crypto market?

Lots of people in here who don't understand neither Tether nor Bitcoin. The quickest way to get rid of Tether for most people, is to buy Bitcoin. The alternative would be to try to withdraw your Tether. Good luck with that during a crisis situation! Your best bet is thus still to buy Bitcoin, which would necessarily lead to a spike in its price. Then Bitcoin can be transferred to any exchange that deals in actual fiat currency, and sold from there, most likely with a nice profit to boot. Or do like the pros and just don't sell it ever, because that's actually safer than keeping your fiat these days, and especially if you're keeping it in mumbo-jumbo like Tether.

Re: Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

#266
post #265

I wonder what would happen if this proved to be scam. Would that kill the whole crypto market?

Lots of people in here who don't understand neither Tether nor Bitcoin. The quickest way to get rid of Tether for most people, is to buy Bitcoin. The alternative would be to try to withdraw your Tether. Good luck with that during a crisis situation! Your best bet is thus still to buy Bitcoin, which would necessarily lead to a spike in its price. Then Bitcoin can be transferred to any exchange that deals in actual fia…

Nobody “keeps” tether. Other than for having liquidity readily available. Your stance on Bitcoin is uncritically over optimistic, but if we stay in the confines of this topic, a tether crash would most likely make a significant dent on BTC. How big and how long would it take to recover, that’s a question. Might be days, might be years.

Re: Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

#267
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people in here who don't understand neither Tether nor Bitcoin. The quickest way to get rid of Tether for most people, is to buy Bitcoin. The alternative would be to try to withdraw your Tether. Good luck with that during a crisis situation! Your best bet is thus still to buy Bitcoin, which would necessarily lead to a spike in its price. Then Bitcoin can be transferred to any exchange that deals in actual fia…

Nobody “keeps” tether. Other than for having liquidity readily available. Your stance on Bitcoin is uncritically over optimistic, but if we stay in the confines of this topic, a tether crash would most likely make a significant dent on BTC. How big and how long would it take to recover, that’s a question. Might be days, might be years.

Please allow me to illustrate:

Tether is used to buy Bitcoin and other cryptos. As you correctly observed. But:

Tether ≠ Bitcoin.

Tether FUD = get rid of Tether.

The only thing that could dent Bitcoin, as in making it dip, would be if potential buyers withdrew Tether instead of doing the logical thing, which is to buy Bitcoin. The most likely outcome is that the “dent” results in a blow off top scenario, meaning that price would surge before a sell-off.

As for “over optimistic;” people have been saying that since Bitcoin was a dollar, and possibly before that too.

Re: Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

#268
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because my main strategy for DeFI has been to (a) provide liquidity in Uniswap pools with tokens paired against USDC and (b) liquidity on Curve, where you stake USDC and DAI. It's worth pointing out that most pools with USDC on curve also expose you to USDT.

Not the one from Compound. It is cDAI + cUSDC only. But to be completely honest, I am not on this anymore. I moved to the EURS/sEURS based one, as the CRV incentives are very good at the moment. Seeing how I was wrong about Circle status regarding audits, I need to do some more checks about the bank behind EURS.

There's no free lunch. Returns on lending stablecoins are ~ 2X higher than a 5-year treasury bond atm because the risk is 2X higher that Circle/Tether will default vs the US-government over the next 5 years.

Stablecoin returns aren't a miracle - you are effectively lending money to these organisations and taking on associated credit risk. For example there are many small banks around the world that will pay > 3% APR on USD deposits [1]

https://nomadcapitalist.com/finance/highest-interest-rates-b...

Re: Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a lot of good would come from that and not much bad. Here something that'd happen - the homeless in encampments would get hoovered up by slumlords who put them in squalor and consume their $1k checks. Poor people would have more children because each child = $1k/mo, even if they have to wait 18 years. Abduction would be easy - the ransom pays itself over time. Fraud would be rampant. The ultra poor undercla…

Not a single legitimate theoretical or experimental economics research paper supports these extreme claims for the effect of a UBI.

[deleted]

Re: Approx. 24 hours ago, Tether printed 1B $USDT out of thin air

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the one from Compound. It is cDAI + cUSDC only. But to be completely honest, I am not on this anymore. I moved to the EURS/sEURS based one, as the CRV incentives are very good at the moment. Seeing how I was wrong about Circle status regarding audits, I need to do some more checks about the bank behind EURS.

There's no free lunch. Returns on lending stablecoins are ~ 2X higher than a 5-year treasury bond atm because the risk is 2X higher that Circle/Tether will default vs the US-government over the next 5 years. Stablecoin returns aren't a miracle - you are effectively lending money to these organisations and taking on associated credit risk. For example there are many small banks around the world that will pay > 3% APR…

I'm not sure if I'm looking in the right place, but this [0] shows 5-year treasury bonds at 1.25% right now. You can get anywhere from 9% (blockfi, gemini, etc) up to 20 or 30% depending on where you look - much more than 2x.

[0] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/i...

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