151–160 of 327 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you singling out Bitcoin though? All cryptocurrencies are affected by this.
Because Bitcoin matters more than all of the other coins combined? Insofar as market cap means anything, Bitcoin alone takes up about 56% of the sum of all cryptocurrencies listed on coinmarketcap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They may not be. $30 mil is a small percentage though. Bitfinex makes a few million per day in volume. It's not unreasonable to think they might still be solvent, even with a 30 million dollar loss. But they also might not. However, they definitely won't be if their fix to block the stolen Tethers goes through.
Bitfinex got hacked for 119,756 BTC last year, and Tether got hacked for $30 mil today. Both are owned by iFinex LTD, and had the same CEO till earlier this year. Total amount they have lost comes out to $1 Billion. How are you still claiming "They may not be"?
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…
There are others though not really at Tether's level. There is bitUSD on cryptocurrency called Bitshares.
> Is this good news for Bitcoin? Oh this is great news for Bitcoin.
Some more discussion on this topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15633852
To add to your post, there are some claims on the fact that it is not finex which has the highest volume rather Bittrex and Poloneix.
There is an interesting reason for that- there is no market for BTC/USDT on Bitfinex as far as I can tell: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/#markets
Though I am unable to open the exchange link - https://www.bitfinex.com/t/USDT:USD
This means if I need my USDT to convert to BTC Finex is not the place. They are rather Poloneix and Bittrex which have an exchange for BTC/USDT. Hence people are going to those exchanges in droves, instead of finex.
The second interesting thing is as far as I can tell, finex seems to peg the USDT to $1 and invariably sell/buy at the same price. There is no free float. While others have a free float to BTC/USDT which means prices can be pushed higher there. So I will not be surprised if Bittrex/Poloneix had higher BTC prices.
That said, the chart of USDT is also interesting: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/#charts
The peg was maintained for a long while before things seem to get hairy in April/May this year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They may not be. $30 mil is a small percentage though. Bitfinex makes a few million per day in volume. It's not unreasonable to think they might still be solvent, even with a 30 million dollar loss. But they also might not. However, they definitely won't be if their fix to block the stolen Tethers goes through.
Bitfinex got hacked for 119,756 BTC last year, and Tether got hacked for $30 mil today. Both are owned by iFinex LTD, and had the same CEO till earlier this year. Total amount they have lost comes out to $1 Billion. How are you still claiming "They may not be"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come on man.. > The post I was responding to claimed Tether was specifically created to address Bitfinex's wire issues. That is false. It does not claim that it was "specifically created for that", it claims that "Their solution" to the wire problems was "Tether". It does not state anything about why Tether was created in the first place. > Secondly, there is plenty of reason to create something like Tether independe…
> It does not claim that it was "specifically created for that", it claims that "Their solution" to the wire problems was "Tether". It does not state anything about why Tether was created in the first place. Read the post, man, very first paragraph: > Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for them to clear USD-denominated wires...Their solution: issue a cryptocurrency which is c…
I've read it a few times now, still can't find where they say they specifically created tether (the system) for this exact purpose. Keep in mind that the issuance of tether is not the creation of the complete tether blockchain/system (they are issuing new tether around the clock).
> That's true, except you probably have never tried to actually execute that kind of arbitrage before. I have, so let me tell you the problem tether solves: speed.
You are right, I have never tried arbing through the banking system. I am doing small/mid scale arbing in cryptomarkets, however I stay away from anything that touches any bank / FIAT.
Though my point is that: yes arbing through banks is slow, inefficient and very dangerous. People will do it nonetheless because of the margins you can make. The exchange does not care how hard it is or how people do it, just that there is some guy somewhere (potentially flying around with suitcases of cash) who is doing it.
So yes I 100% agree with:
> That is an enormous benefit to arbitrageurs equalizing prices, and inter-exchange liquidity.
But bfx only cares about the latter, not really about the people doing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm curious to know what the carbon footprint of a human is, that way we can compare it to the GPUs doing an equivalent amount of work (which I think will be tricky to determine in the first place).
> 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
if anything, we're pushing entropy away, we're tending towards order not away.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's about 0.6% of the market cap of bitcoin
"market cap" is a very bad representation of the overall value which is impossible to actually estimate. try selling 600 million worth of btc and see how that cap changes.
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…
Tether announcement on their own website mentions their Taiwan banks have frozen all international wire transfer since April 18: https://tether.to/announcement/ Tether has printed $600 million worth of tokens since, so either: 1) Local Taiwanese have deposited $600 million to buy Bitcoins through domestic wires, OR 2) Tether is lying and printing tokens out of thin air. Place your bets gentlemen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> We literally are mining coal to burn it in powerplants to energize servers and GPUS to waste clock cycles to find "coins". I'm curious to know what the carbon footprint of a human is, that way we can compare it to the GPUs doing an equivalent amount of work (which I think will be tricky to determine in the first place). > The world is the realm and how we use its people and resources matters, especially when its to…
And the legacy systems from barter to bitcoin are all still around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
moving money around without record-keeping to prove it wasn't criminally obtained is a serious crime.
We know. The point was that it's malum prohibitum (a crime because it's forbidden), not malum in se (evil by itself). [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malum_prohibitum
The first is what everyone can agree on is evil and the later is what we haven't agreed on (or not yet).
To quote from the page on malum in se; "The phrase is used to refer to conduct assessed as sinful or inherently wrong by nature, independent of regulations governing the conduct", which I don't think is a thing tbh.