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Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did

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Re: Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did

#111

Post by wcoenen »

EGreg wrote: post #73
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #30

The fact that they've been minting billions of tether without collateral should make it abundantly obvious that this isn't a stablecoin and never had been. Anyone can pretend to have a peg in the good times, that doesn't mean there's really a peg or that the peg will remain in bad times. And if you can't count on the peg in bad times, it's not a stablecoin. If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is…

A year ago I advocated this “riskless” strategy on HN… if anyone actually listened to me, would you be up 1,000,000% right now? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26106281

Your idea was basically to short tether at high leverage and wait. But margin trading with high leverage isn't free. You are essentially borrowing the money at a very high interest rate.

For example, at Kraken the margin cost is currently typically 0.02% per 4 hours. This is not something you want to maintain while waiting for an event that could take years to materialize. And that's for modest leverage (up to 5x), I imagine it's even more expensive for the 100x leverage you were looking for.

https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/206161568-What-...

Re: Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did

#112

Post by tluyben2 »

sshine wrote: post #71
shafyy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is, then you deserve to lose your (real) money to some crypto VCs on an island somewhere. The sad reality is that many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked by VCs and other grifters into this with billions of dollars spent in advertising. So, no, they don't deserve to lose their money to these assholes. These assholes need to be prosecu…

> many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked I’m sorry, but it’s worse than that. Whenever I’ve said “Tether is a scam waiting to blow up, and the evidence is obvious”, none of my smart peers had anything to say, either. The BTC price is hells high by this fake USD money printer. At least people are collectively waking up. Brrrr.

The religious (for a lack of better word as it is a religion to believe that cryptocurrencies are inherently better than other assets (outside NFTs) but they do believe that if you read twitter/reddit) people are hodling but all the 'saner' people I know went out in december. There was enough writing on the wall to know that 2022 would not be a good year for some assets (and it's just beginning). Only the real believers are still holding and it's a drama; a friend of mine went 'all in' on Terra and is staunchly 'hodling' because he believes it's the greatest project in finance since humans invented currencies. He has 30+ years work of money in it which is his families money (his brothers and parents gave him their savings to 'invest') etc. But he is not depressed; he firmly believes it is coming back as it's decentralized. There are many of him. MANY.

I mean there are also other stories; an acquaintance (he invested in my business with cash in 2018) got out end 2017 with around 60m$ in cash; he was a waiter making minimum wage who borrowed 50k$ from his family who remortgaged their house (not rich people but at least house owners) in 2014 and gambled his families future and accidentally (he was a real believer, but the 'business scams' around blockchain made him a non-believer) gambled right. It's a weird casino.

Maybe it is my circle (but I read it on reddit all the time the past 10 years though) but the financially illiterate seem far more likely to 'invest' with borrowed money, do not diversify and put 'everything on red'/all-in kind of thing and then don't know what to do when that goes wrong (lie to their spouses and kids about it). An senior sales guy of my (then) company invested ALL his money and borrowed more (totaling many millions) in a Dutch web stock (worldonline) and lost everything; his wife, son, house, cars; basically life.

Re: Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did

#113

Post by namdnay »

EGreg wrote: post #73
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #30

The fact that they've been minting billions of tether without collateral should make it abundantly obvious that this isn't a stablecoin and never had been. Anyone can pretend to have a peg in the good times, that doesn't mean there's really a peg or that the peg will remain in bad times. And if you can't count on the peg in bad times, it's not a stablecoin. If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is…

A year ago I advocated this “riskless” strategy on HN… if anyone actually listened to me, would you be up 1,000,000% right now? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26106281

The main risk is your riskless strategy is that when the whole system blows up, everything you have on your exchange disappears too.

Re: Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did

#114

Post by retube »

lozenge wrote: post #53
jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #4

If Tether is backed, then Bitfinex could buy currently-discounted tethers off the market and redeem them for face value, pocketing the difference. The fact this is not happening means they really don't have the money, do they?

"Elsewhere on the website, there’s a letter from an accounting firm stating that Tether has the reserves to back its coins, along with a pie chart showing that about $30 billion of its dollar holdings are invested in commercial paper—short-term loans to corporations. That would make Tether the seventh-largest holder of such debt, right up there with Charles Schwab and Vanguard Group." Commercial paper is not dollars,…

It's actually much better for tether to be invested in CP and similar paper. You can't leave $80bn in the bank, cos then you have gigantic concentrated credit risk to the bank. It's actually imperative you invest in CP, and preferably, government bills, to diversify your risk.

Re: Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did

#116

Post by fastball »

gassit wrote: post #87
fastball wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me that math doesn't add up very well. Let's assume that 5 minutes from now, Tether drops to zero. Turns out Tethers were approximately 100% unbacked. There are currently ~$80B USDT in circulation. Even if you also assume 100% of USDT holders were also Bitcoin maxis who were using USDT as a "stable store of value" when they periodically want to exit their BTC position, the market cap of Bitcoin is still ~$500B, so…

This isn't how it works. You need to look at how much of the flows into BTC (supporting the price) are coming from Tether. You will find this is a whole lot more than 16%. So if it drops to zero 5 minutes from now (not going to happen, but just to use the same scenario), then all those flows which supported the price drop to zero. A comparison between the relative market caps doesn't tell you much, it's the buying vo…

That's not really how it works either. If the 24hr USDT volume is $175B, that just means people are trading the same USDT for other things multiple times in a 24 hour period. That's it. But two people cannot use the same Tether to buy different things at the same time, so market inflation due to USDT can never really be beyond its market cap.

Tether is a vehicle, not the money in the system. People use Tether because it can be traded against your favorite coin on your favorite exchange. For example Binance (the largest crypto exchange) doesn't offer any USD pairs, so if you are someone with a lot of dollars you buy some USDT with your USD at 1-to-1, then you go trade that USDT for whatever you want.

USDT causes a crash in crypto based on two properties: actual fraud / funny money shenanigans and market sentiment. I was only really addressing the former in my analysis, because "market sentiment" is basically impossible to do anything useful with in a future-telling sense.

Re: Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did

#117

Post by mdoms »

shafyy wrote: post #55
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #30

The fact that they've been minting billions of tether without collateral should make it abundantly obvious that this isn't a stablecoin and never had been. Anyone can pretend to have a peg in the good times, that doesn't mean there's really a peg or that the peg will remain in bad times. And if you can't count on the peg in bad times, it's not a stablecoin. If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is…

> If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is, then you deserve to lose your (real) money to some crypto VCs on an island somewhere. The sad reality is that many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked by VCs and other grifters into this with billions of dollars spent in advertising. So, no, they don't deserve to lose their money to these assholes. These assholes need to be prosecu…

They do deserve it.

Re: Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did

#119

Post by [deleted] »

frozenport wrote: post #66
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #30

The fact that they've been minting billions of tether without collateral should make it abundantly obvious that this isn't a stablecoin and never had been. Anyone can pretend to have a peg in the good times, that doesn't mean there's really a peg or that the peg will remain in bad times. And if you can't count on the peg in bad times, it's not a stablecoin. If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is…

How are VCs making money? They invested $$$ and the company became insolvent? Don't the investors loose?

[deleted]

Re: Tether starting to lose its peg too, after Terra did

#120

Post by austhrow743 »

someotherperson wrote: post #62
adhesive_wombat wrote: post #30

The fact that they've been minting billions of tether without collateral should make it abundantly obvious that this isn't a stablecoin and never had been. Anyone can pretend to have a peg in the good times, that doesn't mean there's really a peg or that the peg will remain in bad times. And if you can't count on the peg in bad times, it's not a stablecoin. If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is…

> If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is, then you deserve to lose your (real) money to some crypto VCs on an island somewhere This is victim blaming. Nobody deserves to be exploited, robbed or otherwise for any reason.

Financial speculation is a zero sum game. These "victims" were hoping to gain from the loss of others just like the supposed crypto VCs that have made out well. They're not victims just the losers.
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