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Tether Critical Announcement

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Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#171

Post by zaarn »

shobith wrote: post #156
foxhop wrote: post #147

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…

According to rensmart.com, 1KWh is approx. 0.5 kg of CO2 saved/used.

A RX480 uses 160W on average according to TomsHardware, mining might pull more but lets use that as a conservative example.

A Mining Rig, decent one, might have 4 cards and pull 100Watts for itself (conservative estimate).

That puts the total power of the rig at 750Watts (approximately)

This will yield a hashrate of about 20MH/s for each card or 80MH/s for the entire thing (atleast from what I can tell)

So the right has about 0.7KWh per hour for 80MH/s, which yields about 0.35kg of CO2 every hour.

Ethereum has a total of 120TH/s or about 1'500'000 of these mining rigs. Which means the total carbon footprint estimate of Ethereum is about 525'000 kg or 525 Tons each HOUR. And that is using my conservative estimates.

The entire year (ass. 365 days incorrectly) is 191'625'000, or about 191 kilotons of CO2.

To comparison, a single person uses about 6 to 8 tons o CO2 per year so Ethereum alone produces as much CO2 per year as 191'000 people combined.

>if anything, we're pushing entropy away, we're tending towards order not away.

What order? Burning any fuel is literally increasing entropy. If you break a wineglass you increase entropy. If you repair the broken wineglass you still increased entropy. Entropy inevitably goes up and you can maybe delay it by putting in massive amounts of energy compared to the entropy saved.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#172

Post by Havoc »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #120
iamthirsty wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without much justification. Well, they've never proved it. Just a literal: "Hey, we promise we have the money." So, can't really say; it's basically a Schrödinger's cat to everyone on the outside. We will only know when it booms — or busts.

In all fairness, this isn't much different from commodity ETFs promising that they have a warehouse of gold or silver somewhere that matches the market cap of the fund. There's no easy way to completely, 100% verify this, so people just trust them.

That’s what auditors are for - solving exactly that problem. Well mostly - like everything else it’s imperfect

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#173

Post by Jasper_ »

kobeya wrote: post #136
askmike wrote: post #126

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…

I read the patio11 post as implying very strongly that Bitfinex was responsible in some way for Tether, when in fact that couldn’t be further from the truth.

http://article78againstnydfs.com/docs/317-cv-01882-BitfinexC...

> I, J.L. van der Velde, hereby declare as follows:

> 1. I am the Chief Executive Officer for iFinex Inc. (“iFinex”), BFXNA Inc. (“BFXNA”), BFXWW Inc. (“BFXWW”), and Tether Limited (“Tether”). I have personal knowledge of the facts set forth below, and if called and sworn as a witness, I could and would testify competently thereto.

> 2. iFinex, through its subsidiaries BFXNA and BFXWW, owns and operates a leading global Virtual Currency platform called Bitfinex.

Bitfinex is responsible for Tether.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#174

Post by runeks »

> Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether treasury wallet […]

> […] they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by Tether for USD.

How will this ever work in real life?

If I yesterday — right after the hack, but before the announcement — in good faith received $1m in USDT, and paid in Bitcoin, who’s liable?

In effect, this policy just shifts the financial burden to innocent people, who may have paid e.g. Bitcoin in exchange for “fake” USDT in good faith.

The issuer needs to take sole responsibility for this. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but because the USDT is useless otherwise. How can it be used for payments if the issuer can make a blog post saying “by the way, if you received USDT from this guy then you have nothing”?

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#175

Post by runeks »

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.…

> I'm generally a huge fan of the goal of Tether (a stable USD backed cryptocurrency), but the proof is in the pudding (i.e the reserves) and your access to it, and both of these are rather questionable.

A “USD-backed cryptocurrency” is a misnomer — it’s just credit. It’s a promissory note saying some issuer will, allegedly, pay you a given USD amount. But unless you believe this claim is 100% certain, it will trade under par, which means it’s no longer backed 1-to-1 (or, at least, the market doesn’t believe it to be in practice).

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#176

Post by ActsJuvenile »

darawk wrote: post #158
ActsJuvenile wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's perfectly reasonable to assume $600 million has flown in via Taiwan. Note that that doesn't mean that local Taiwanese have personally bought $600 million. Tether creates an arbitrage opportunity. If you have a Taiwanese bank account, whenever Tether gets out of sync, to say, 0.99, you can simply arbitrage that away and make a risk-free profit. That is what is happening. The demand isn't coming from Taiwan per se…

No one is going to deposit 600 mill in a hacked exchange via Tether crypto-Hawala using Taiwanese shell bank accounts.

People with real money would instead wire the funds to Gemini or ItBit or even a terribly managed company like Coinbase.

KISS

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#177

Post by ActsJuvenile »

darawk wrote: post #152
ActsJuvenile wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

I was a Bitfinex customer when they got hacked. I lost 30% of my funds on that day. I couldn't be happier with how they handled it. They paid me back in full and did the best they could with the situation they had. People being upset with them over it is insane to me. As far as I can tell, it's mostly people who had nothing to do with it spectating from the sidelines. If an exchange you use ever gets hacked, I certai…

Only a shill would claim to be happy with a 30% haircut scenario. Flagged.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#178

Post by askmike »

darawk wrote: post #166
askmike wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Read the post, man, very first paragraph: 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…

> 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). > Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for them to clear USD-denominated wires...Their solution:…

If it is raining outside and I take an umbrella with me, I can say it's a solution to the rain. That doesn't say anything about whether I bought the umbrella specifically for today and if I had it longer than today I am lying...

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#179

Post by cup-of-tea »

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…

Countries like the UK are dominated by the business of deciding "who owns what". Of course the people running the system are "earning" a whole lot of money for themselves.

But money is a strange thing. Almost everyone you speak to doesn't understand it. People think the money itself---the bank notes and numbers in an app---are "worth" something. The system itself does have value because it enables asynchronous trade, which seems to be a good thing. But when you tell people that the numbers in their bank account were just created from thin air by some bank who lent someone money at one time, their eyes glaze over.

When you look around it is obvious that there really are people who are "good with money", and people who are not. Who knows if the poor understanding is intrinsic or has been nurtured by the finance sector. But if we accept that money is a good thing and that some people are bad with it, then that does mean the finance sector has some value.

Bitcoin has long been about greed, unfortunately. In the beginning it seemed like a majority were in it because they saw the value of trustless electronic cash. A system much like gold but completely electronic and completely accurate. But it hasn't been about that for a while. Today you can't even move BTC around due to high transaction fees. I can't believe that the current market cap reprents the value in the current system.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#180

Post by modeless »

csomar wrote: post #121
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…

Patrick, I thought you are better than making these "non-proved" claims. I can make claims about Bitstamp or Gdax too. Their order book has increased 10-15 times in value since bitcoin price was in the 1000-1200 range too. Tether certainly has a connection to Finex but they are not its biggest client. Tether is being used by crypto-only exchanges mainly Bittrex and Poloniex to give people the possibility to trade coi…

> Tether certainly has a connection to Finex but they are not its biggest client.

This is false. In fact, every "USD" market on Bitfinex is actually a Tether market. It doesn't matter what the label on the ticker is, because USD cannot be deposited or withdrawn from Bitfinex, only Tether. Given that, Bitfinex is by far the biggest Tether market.

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