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Tether Critical Announcement

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Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#141

Post by shobith »

hvk wrote: post #125
foxhop wrote: post #68

The abstractions and tech which cryptocurrency works on is fragile in most of the same ways as the layers that came before it (credit cards/banks/etc). Try to look at all this holistically. How many people and resources do we dedicate on this planet to keep track of money, economy, mine the coins, cash the checks, swipe the cards, keep the lines working? All of these abstractions make trade faster and more liquid but…

Without making a comment on the crypto/tether aspect, I just want to express that it seems to me that the "cause of keeping track of 'who owns what'", as you put it, is precisely the singular technological achievement which has enabled the "human condition" to evolve to its current state. Money is literally the decentralized, asynchronous, dynamic, and continuous computation that has evolved to process the combinator…

> Money is literally the decentralized, asynchronous, dynamic, and continuous computation that has evolved to process the combinatorial coordination of signals/information on resources between 7+ billion unfathomably complex and independent agents.

I liked that thought, however, I don't agree with the sentence that followed it. We can do way better than that, if we're designing the "next gen" currency, it better give us way more productivity.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#142

Post by Nursie »

hvk wrote: post #125
foxhop wrote: post #68

The abstractions and tech which cryptocurrency works on is fragile in most of the same ways as the layers that came before it (credit cards/banks/etc). Try to look at all this holistically. How many people and resources do we dedicate on this planet to keep track of money, economy, mine the coins, cash the checks, swipe the cards, keep the lines working? All of these abstractions make trade faster and more liquid but…

Without making a comment on the crypto/tether aspect, I just want to express that it seems to me that the "cause of keeping track of 'who owns what'", as you put it, is precisely the singular technological achievement which has enabled the "human condition" to evolve to its current state. Money is literally the decentralized, asynchronous, dynamic, and continuous computation that has evolved to process the combinator…

Really?

You really think that having only 30% of output go into actual, productive endeavour would be a good thing?

It just screams of a completely broken system to me, and inefficiency.

I could understand if your attitude was that, well, it seems it had to be this way, it's the best we can do. But to actually celebrate a ~2:1 ratio of fund-shuffling busywork over production seems crazy.

Don't get me wrong, I work in the sector right now, I'm happy to get paid for it, and I can see a use for what I'm doing (exposing data for use in new services) but really not so much when it comes to using distributed supercomputers and thousands of coders to try to predict tiny market movements. And really not "burning energy as fast as possible to (adversarially) compute transactions on a shared ledger".

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#143

Post by kobeya »

MichaelGG wrote: post #47
patio11 wrote: post #4

If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters: Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times) about the level of involvement. The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for…

This also illustrates the absurdity of so called "money laundering". Just moving money around between private parties is somehow a serious crime. Hint: It's not. Money laundering is just a cheat code for prosecutors to get easy points when they can't actually find real wrongdoing. The funny part is that Tethers came into being after Bitfinex was hacked, right, as a way to help them out? Sometimes we say after someone…

> The funny part is that Tethers came into being after Bitfinex was hacked, right, as a way to help them out?

No, Tether is completely unrelated and existed (or was in the process of being stood up) years prior. It just became widely used in 2017 after some exchanges (bitfinex being a big one) switched to it for USD for a variety of reasons.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#144

Post by repomies691 »

gciruelos wrote: post #134
patio11 wrote: post #4

If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters: Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times) about the level of involvement. The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for…

This is awesome, great write-up, thank you very much. You briefly mention that crypto-currencies are used for money laundering. Do you think that's what's driving btc price to insane levels? Or is it just good old euphoria?

It might also be that the central banks are printing money like hell, and people look for places where their value stays better.

For example ECB (european central bank) is issuing 60 billion euros new money each month, and buying bonds with it. That is half of the bitcoin market cap.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#145

Post by kobeya »

chrisco255 wrote: post #57
matt_wulfeck wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't just keep hard forking even time something had happens. The problem is inherit to digital assets: they can be hacked.

Banks can be robbed, museums can be swindled, even credit bureaus like Equifax can get hacked. There's no such thing as hack-proof. That some cryptos will hard fork and adjust shows that the system can heal itself and not be in a permanent state of disrepair. That's not a bad thing at all.

It’s a bad thing to the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account.

Why not just run it in your favorite RDBMS? That way we’d at least save a bunch of CO2 emissions.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#146

Post by FreeRadical »

repomies691 wrote: post #127
darawk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...except that Tether long predates Bitfinex's wire issues. They're usable on many of the major exchanges (Bittrex, Poloniex, for example). Tether was explicitly created for the purpose of equalizing prices across exchanges. It's indeed possible that they're insolvent, but there is no real evidence of that, just lots of people speculating incessantly without much justification. Basically everything about the parent c…

> Basically everything about the parent comment is factually incorrect. I'm not sure why it's so upvoted. patio11 is well respected in this community, so I guess the post is upvoted just because of the author. I personally respect patio11 on quite many topics as a very knowledgeable, but when it comes to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies he seems to have some personal issue with them, which makes his posts on the topic no…

He has been a bitcoin bear for a long time. Like many people that have been anti bitcoin, they keep jumping on new reasons why it’s a scam or not going to work when their old reasons become irrelevant.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#147

Post by foxhop »

shobith wrote: post #139
foxhop wrote: post #68

The abstractions and tech which cryptocurrency works on is fragile in most of the same ways as the layers that came before it (credit cards/banks/etc). Try to look at all this holistically. How many people and resources do we dedicate on this planet to keep track of money, economy, mine the coins, cash the checks, swipe the cards, keep the lines working? All of these abstractions make trade faster and more liquid but…

I understand your sentiment. However, I think about it slightly differently -- crypto currencies (and their likes) are just an attempt to replace man-power with computer-power. We need someone to enforce the rules without human intervention, hence, freeing up more people to do stuff that doesn't involve managing the abstraction of money. edit: When we imagine "mining" in this realm, it'd help to think in terms of min…

Most of the other layers of abstractions and tech are still present.

We literally are mining coal to burn it in powerplants to energize servers and GPUS to waste clock cycles to find "coins".

The world is the realm and how we use its people and resources matters, especially when its to just create more entropy faster then natural systems.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#148

Post by repomies691 »

FreeRadical wrote: post #146
repomies691 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically everything about the parent comment is factually incorrect. I'm not sure why it's so upvoted. patio11 is well respected in this community, so I guess the post is upvoted just because of the author. I personally respect patio11 on quite many topics as a very knowledgeable, but when it comes to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies he seems to have some personal issue with them, which makes his posts on the topic no…

He has been a bitcoin bear for a long time. Like many people that have been anti bitcoin, they keep jumping on new reasons why it’s a scam or not going to work when their old reasons become irrelevant.

It is probably very painful following it closely and not investing from the around $10 prices or so. Makes you mentally even more tied to the non-investment, and makes you invent better arguments on why you didn't invest.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#149

Post by chx »

ActsJuvenile wrote: post #111
Jd wrote: post #28

Here's some more context: Tether was originally setup as RealCoin. It originally had a clear bank account relationship with a Taiwanese bank. It had about $30mm. Then the bank cut them off. Since then they've been floating without any announced banking relationship and they also changed their terms of service. Over the same time period they made a partnership with BitFinex and their supposed AUM has gone up over 10x.…

Tell your friends they should shutdown the company immediately to avoid prison time. Using USD to back any token or digital asset 1:1 is a serious crime as demonstrated by Liberty Reserve.

What...? Liberty Reserve was a money laundering operation and had nothing to do with 1:1 or whatever. If there's something in the US Criminal Code about that, you need to cite it but I believe there isn't.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#150

Post by mrb »

ActsJuvenile wrote: post #116
darawk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right. I'm not saying they're solvent. There just isn't any evidence that they aren't.

They just got hacked for $30 mil. Pretty safe to say they are in the red at this time.

No. They blacklisted the stolen tethers, and all they now have to do is issue a new batch of $30 million worth of tethers. In no way this puts them in the red.
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