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Tether reveals partnerships with Secret Service, FBI in letter to U.S. Senate

finance.yahoo.com

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Re: Tether reveals partnerships with Secret Service, FBI in letter to U.S. Senate

#71

Post by Lerc »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #64

So... Half the appeal of crypto and Tether & co has been a separation from the current financial system and 'deep state,' yet here we are embracing both with hugs. The cryptoverse is no place for making sense.

I think there were some early adopters with libertarian or just simple "stick it to the man" ideals that believed that, it was never the original position and those who wanted it to be that ended up up disillusioned.

Bitcoin was created with the notion of decentralized control in mind. It was all about having the option to go elsewhere. I'm not sure if the early developers stated a position on secrecy. I find it hard to reconcile the public ledger with any goal of avoiding scrutiny.

Re: Tether reveals partnerships with Secret Service, FBI in letter to U.S. Senate

#72

Post by Podgajski »

fallingfrog wrote: post #25

“Tether seeks to be a world class partner to the U.S. as we continue to assist law enforcement and expand dollar hegemony globally." Well that’s an interesting statement, saying the quiet part loud (About dollar hegemony)

(Big ass kissing sound from tethers lips on the left and right cheeks of the single corporate political party.)

Re: Tether reveals partnerships with Secret Service, FBI in letter to U.S. Senate

#73

Post by kube-system »

agentgumshoe wrote: post #64

So... Half the appeal of crypto and Tether & co has been a separation from the current financial system and 'deep state,' yet here we are embracing both with hugs. The cryptoverse is no place for making sense.

That was always a hopeful lie that anti-government types were telling themselves. If you use cryptocurrency while you're in a country, you are subject to that country's laws. The 'cryptoverse' is learning that math is not stronger than guns and prison bars.

https://xkcd.com/538/

Re: Tether reveals partnerships with Secret Service, FBI in letter to U.S. Senate

#74

Post by TacticalCoder »

scaredginger wrote: post #23
kristjank wrote: post #9

That might explain why it has not crashed completely yet. As a rule of thumb, never trust service providers that should, by all common sense, fail, but miraculously don't.

Can you explain this 'common sense'? I was under the impression that Tether was in the business of taking USD (with the promise of returning it) and earning interest on that USD without paying any interest on it. If that's true, it sounds like a dream business to me

> I was under the impression that Tether was in the business of taking USD (with the promise of returning it) and earning interest on that USD...

To be fair there's a HN unicorn doing just that: Coinbase. They created a joint venture with Circle and are backing $25 billion USDC by US short term treasuries, minting a cool 1.25 billion yearly in interests.

And contrarily to tether, Coinbase does have the actual USDs / short term US treasuries backing the USDC emitted (big names banks have published the list and individual numbers of all the US treasuries they're holding for Coinbase and during the SVB fiasco Coinbase was shown to have 3.3 bn at SVB or something like that).

Certainly a very profitable business to be in...

Re: Tether reveals partnerships with Secret Service, FBI in letter to U.S. Senate

#75

Post by RustyRussell »

delabay wrote: post #34

To those who think tether is a massive fraud: time to get caught up. The crypto dollar market is extremely large, the product market fit is extremely real and tether is king. https://t.co/caUMlsufXA

This could well be true!

But remember, the crypto exchange market is also extremely large and profitable, and yet exchanges keep turning out to be massive frauds.

The number of people who promised to keep your money safe and had long term incentive to do so and yet failed miserably used to astonish me. Now I assume it's the norm.

Re: Tether reveals partnerships with Secret Service, FBI in letter to U.S. Senate

#78

Post by nostrademons »

wolverine876 wrote: post #30
Animats wrote: post #2

Each disabled token is pure profit to Tether. They're not cashing them out to the US Treasury, as with Bitcoins recovered from criminal operations.

It's an interesting question: What does that mean? Maybe it's better to look at cryptocurrencies as financial securities, shares in an asset controlled by a private company (as has been said many times before). Could General Electric 'disable' the shares of a shareholder? What would that mean? The shareholder can't sell their shares, I suppose, but GE's equity would remain the same (not counting any market movement t…

Companies absolutely can "disable" trading by certain shareholders. This is what an IPO lock-up is, where insiders cannot sell their shares until 6-12 months after the conclusion of the IPO. It's also what a trading blackout is, where employees cannot trade shares between the end of the quarter and release of earnings. These are very common - almost everyone who works for a public company has encountered them.

These cases are temporary, but I suspect there are also permanent trading bans that might be caused by legal action - if, for example, an employee is found guilty of a crime, or is under a wage garnishment order.

Also, crypto has long had the phenomena of coins that get "locked" and can never be touched or transferred again, simply through holders that have died or lost the private key. For example, the original "Satoshi coins" - the roughly 1M Bitcoin (~$45B at today's prices, enough to make their holder the 27th richest person in the world) mined by Satoshi before Bitcoin became mainstream - have never been spent, and it's likely that their owner is dead. They simply drop out of circulation, and the price of all other Bitcoin rises to compensate.

Re: Tether reveals partnerships with Secret Service, FBI in letter to U.S. Senate

#79

Post by elcritch »

alexb_ wrote: post #37
fallingfrog wrote: post #25

“Tether seeks to be a world class partner to the U.S. as we continue to assist law enforcement and expand dollar hegemony globally." Well that’s an interesting statement, saying the quiet part loud (About dollar hegemony)

It's not exactly a secret. The US dollar's proliferation is an extremely good thing to happen in the world - our modern banking system is one of our greatest inventions.

It’s a very effective way to tax foreign countries too. Just print a few trillion and let the small countries pay the costs in inflation.

Re: Tether reveals partnerships with Secret Service, FBI in letter to U.S. Senate

#80

Post by nostrademons »

kristjank wrote: post #9

That might explain why it has not crashed completely yet. As a rule of thumb, never trust service providers that should, by all common sense, fail, but miraculously don't.

Does that include the banking system? Because fractional reserve banking is definitely one of those systems that should never work in theory but miraculously works in practice.
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