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Tether: The Story So Far

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Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#131

Post by mirekrusin »

skywhopper wrote: post #83
lawn wrote: post #70

> I have looked, quite a bit. I have not found a good use case yet I'm always surprised that intelligent and knowledgeable people claim this. You haven't even found a single use case? You don't think buying a VPN anonymously is a good use case? Or see the need for uncensorable donations? (Remember how the U.S. shut down Wikileak's PayPal donations when they exposed their war crimes?) Or that cryptocurrencies allow bu…

Cryptocurrencies aren't anonymous. They also don't eliminate payment processor risk: fraudulent exchanges, hackers, and your own mistakes can all lose or lock you out of your money. And generally there's far less legal recourse when that happens with crypto. I'm skeptical how many people in Venezuela saved their fortunes via Bitcoin et al, but if you have some data on that, I'd be curious to hear about it. In particu…

Yes, they are, zcash, bitcoin/ethereum mixers etc. and intense research around zero-knowledge proofs will yield first-class, easy to use anonymity relatively quickly.

Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#132

Post by spurdoman77 »

semiotagonal wrote: post #69
ur-whale wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard the lament of the no-coiner[1][2] put together so eloquently. You should have someone write music to these lyrics, you'd make a killing. [1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nocoiner [2] https://www.coindesk.com/the-problem-with-nocoiners

My point still stands. If there's one thing people want to avoid empowering more than banks and governments, it's bitcoin wingnuts.

Even if thats true, crypto could still be huge. It is still peanuts compared to mainstream finance.

Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#133

Post by darawk »

patio11 wrote: post #26
darawk wrote: post #15

Your daily reminder that you can short Tether if you want. All these people writing these articles, and the freely moving market price hovers right around 1:1. Funny how when people are asked to bet, despite the fact that there's almost no risk of loss for shorting it, their convictions disappear.

As explained in the post, you have to bite off very high levels of counterparty risk to short. Cryptocurrency exchanges die in something like 20% of exchange-years, and your estimate of an exchange dying _contingent on me being right_ should be biased towards the high side if they are exposed to the risks of using tether. This is a subplot of the Big Short, and cost several groups of the protagonists a lot of money:…

The big short is a very different situation from crypto exchanges. Banks are highly levered and exposed directly to the assets they are trading. Crypto exchanges do not have this same problem. Secondly, you can use leverage to make these trades, and you can make them on many different exchanges, diversifying your risk considerably. The counterparty risk argument does not imply that the current price should be 1:1 under the assumption that insolvency is obvious.

Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#134

Post by darawk »

pavlov wrote: post #18
darawk wrote: post #15

Your daily reminder that you can short Tether if you want. All these people writing these articles, and the freely moving market price hovers right around 1:1. Funny how when people are asked to bet, despite the fact that there's almost no risk of loss for shorting it, their convictions disappear.

Where can you sell Tether short in a market that's not controlled by these same unscrupulous manipulators? Shorting makes sense in regulated public markets with plenty of liquidity. Cryptocurrencies aren't like that.

You can short on Binance, Kraken, and Poloniex, off the top of my head. None of those exchanges have a relationship to Bitfinex/Tether.

Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#135

Post by darawk »

api wrote: post #92
darawk wrote: post #15

Your daily reminder that you can short Tether if you want. All these people writing these articles, and the freely moving market price hovers right around 1:1. Funny how when people are asked to bet, despite the fact that there's almost no risk of loss for shorting it, their convictions disappear.

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Also if Tether implodes the exchanges you're using to short are also likely to implode or exit-scam (since they'll know the gig is up), and there is no recourse.

> "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

That is absolutely correct. However, an equally correct statement is: Whenever you think the market is being irrational, you just don't understand the situation well enough.

So, if you think you can read some blog posts and determine that a freely trading financial market is being irrational...well, it's not the market that is irrational.

Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#136

Post by darawk »

Barrin92 wrote: post #41
darawk wrote: post #15

Your daily reminder that you can short Tether if you want. All these people writing these articles, and the freely moving market price hovers right around 1:1. Funny how when people are asked to bet, despite the fact that there's almost no risk of loss for shorting it, their convictions disappear.

the other posts about the ownership issues aside a good amount of people will find it ethically reprehensible to make money off a scam like this and to participate or be involved with it at all so I've always considered these "why don't you bet on it?" arguments to be in borderline bad faith. If you told me that I could make a ton of money by betting on the blood diamond market I wouldn't do it even if I knew 100% th…

> the other posts about the ownership issues aside a good amount of people will find it ethically reprehensible to make money off a scam like this and to participate or be involved with it at all so I've always considered these "why don't you bet on it?" arguments to be in borderline bad faith.

How, exactly, is it unethical to make money off of something like that? Your bet would be providing information to the rest of the market. You would be helping other people to be informed about the situation.

Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#137

Post by api »

darawk wrote: post #135
api wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Also if Tether implodes the exchanges you're using to short are also likely to implode or exit-scam (since they'll know the gig is up), and there is no recourse.

> "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." That is absolutely correct. However, an equally correct statement is: Whenever you think the market is being irrational, you just don't understand the situation well enough. So, if you think you can read some blog posts and determine that a freely trading financial market is being irrational...well, it's not the market that is irrational.

Your second point could only be true if markets were infinitely intelligent.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2284.pdf

Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#138

Post by Geee »

Isn't it curious that he writes a lengthy post about frauds made possible with the current banking system (trust-based reserve) and then doesn't find any use for cryptocurrency?

This is exactly the reason why Bitcoin was invented; its supply is mathematical and can't be over-inflated. Satoshi even included the criticism in the Bitcoin's Genesis block: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks".

Obviously Tether (or any private stablecoin like Libra) is even worse than a regulated fiat currency, and should be strictly illegal.

Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#139

Post by _57jb »

falcolas wrote: post #77
lawn wrote: post #70

> I have looked, quite a bit. I have not found a good use case yet I'm always surprised that intelligent and knowledgeable people claim this. You haven't even found a single use case? You don't think buying a VPN anonymously is a good use case? Or see the need for uncensorable donations? (Remember how the U.S. shut down Wikileak's PayPal donations when they exposed their war crimes?) Or that cryptocurrencies allow bu…

All of your use cases involve anonymity. Crypto currencies don’t provide anonymity. Sure it’s not directly tied to your name and address, but it’s quite possible to make that tie. Such cases are on the news fairly frequently.

Mixing coins or sending to a coldstore address freshly minted.

Each address is a new account, the paranoid of the groups create new accounts quite regularly for their transactions.

It is a low bar to learning this, I suggest reading the 101 level information first.

Re: Tether: The Story So Far

#140

Post by colinhb »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #129
colinhb wrote: post #127

> I have looked, quite a bit. I have not found a good use case yet Agree with a lot of the analysis. But not quite the broader thesis. Analogy I would make is this: the fact that some banks are bad does not imply that fiat currency is bad. The fact that Tether is bad does not imply that Bitcoin is bad. Bitcoin enables payments / transfers without intermediaries. In the existing financial system, intermediaries take a…

In Bitcoin, miners are the intermediaries, and they take an even larger cut. You cannot magic away the need to keep a ledger, and keeping a distributed ledger is going to be more costly than keeping a centralized ledger.

Think interchange in US is around 2% and wire fees can be in tens of dollars.

Right now a reasonable Bitcoin fee would be around 30 sats / byte or 6000 sats / transaction, which is around 50 cents USD. Average transaction fee is less than this right now.

But this is well-trodden ground.

I agree with you in principle, you need to pay for trust somewhere, but a loosely regulated banking sector and cartel of card networks isn’t giving us an ideal outcome, and a decentralized system may be better.

A point in your favor, I’ve been much happier with payments since moving out of the US and into the Eurozone.

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