171–180 of 376 posts
What are people holding all those stable coins for? In contrast to other crypto currencies, nobody is holding it for speculation. I doubt anybody expects stable coins to be a better store of "dollar value" than the dollar itself. Yet, someone holds those $150B worth of stable coins. Who and why?
-> is a non taxable event in some countries. You can decide when you get to convert to fiat and pay taxes.
What are people holding all those stable coins for? In contrast to other crypto currencies, nobody is holding it for speculation. I doubt anybody expects stable coins to be a better store of "dollar value" than the dollar itself. Yet, someone holds those $150B worth of stable coins. Who and why?
Provided you trust the stablecoin, it's a lot safer to keep e.g. USDC in a wallet you control rather than hold USD fiat balance on an exchange or some other shady crypto service.
The big question with Tether has been, if they are holding commercial paper, whose commercial paper? Traders who deal in commercial paper of real companies that do real stuff don't see Tether present in that market. The dollar amounts are too big to hide. The suspicion is that their "commercial paper" is high-interest loans to other cryptocurrency companies. With the whole crypto sector in decline, those loans are at…
> This is how you get a 2008-type crash - loans which seem to be unrelated but are tied to a common market. How does this happen again 15 years later? Is it because we ineffectively dealt with 2008? A result of the repeal of Glass-Steagall? Or have we over regulated banking to the point the miscreants went underground to build things like crypto? I don't get it. Crashing over and over doesn't seem good for anyone.
Voila, instant correlation.
Look I am very ignorant about all this stuff but ... is there any downside to shorting a stablecoin? Please be gentle with me: Like if you short it and the price doesn't move (by design) are you out any money? The price won't go up (by design) because nobody's going to spend too much money from their reserves to support a price over US$1. But it's possible for the reserves to run dry in which case the price goes down…
Look I am very ignorant about all this stuff but ... is there any downside to shorting a stablecoin? Please be gentle with me: Like if you short it and the price doesn't move (by design) are you out any money? The price won't go up (by design) because nobody's going to spend too much money from their reserves to support a price over US$1. But it's possible for the reserves to run dry in which case the price goes down…
if i had gone through with it, i would have paid 5 years of interest for close to no return, including in 2018 when crypto fell 90%.
also, if enough people are levered short, crypto traders could short squeeze you. the price just needs to go up temporarily.
also, there's counterparty risk. is the exchange you're trading on going to stay up if tether goes to 0? depends on which one.
We know from the CFTC settlement, and statements from Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky, that Tether Inc has a history of issuing tethers and then accounting the loan itself as the backing for the issuance - literally just printing pseudo-money out of thin air.
I would first presume the tether "redemptions" were just cancellations of these loans. No dollars or other consideration left Tether Inc.
The moment I learned that people want to buy crypto as a means to get rich in (evil ;)) fiat money, I knew I had a ponzi scheme in front of me. The interesting idea behind crypto once was to have a totally different system. Yet in reality, with greedy apes on a spacerock, it was an unreachable Utopia
> The interesting idea behind crypto once was to have a totally different system. the problem with this idea is that this idea of a "different" system is just merely going to evolve back into what we have today. The fundamental needs of a financial system doesn't change much, and what we have today is fit for purpose (mostly - there's efficiency to be had and red tape to cut).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn’t explain why paying with Crypto is better though in this use case. The UK example just shows that a decentralised blockchain approach isn’t required to meet the use case you are describing - in fact it’s worse for the described use case in almost every metric. Having a different, worse alternative isn’t exactly something to shout about.
use case depends on consumer. paying for an abortion in a southern US state or paying a Russian or Iranian contractor for web design services might be a suitable example of crypto. paying for an in-game asset to avoid 30% App Store fees may be another use case in the future. or purchasing digital assets like art, domains. and smart contract functionality like escrow, auctions, loans and lending, global crowdfunds is…
How would paying in crypto avoid app store fees? Presumably you mean the Apple / Google App Stores, when Apple or Google will still want to take their 30%? How do you bypass that?
> purchasing digital assets like art
Who is using Crypto to purchase art? (Note: NFTs are not purchasing Art, you own some metadata that refers to a piece of art publicly hosted somewhere else). I can certinaly use my fiat currency to purchase both the rights to artworks, to purchase actual physical art pieces without having to jump through payment hoops, and even to purchase on-demand streaming of performance art. I cant really do any of that with Crypto without turning it back into regular fiat currency first (without searching out the tiny amount of places that accept crypto directly, but even then - whats the advantage to just paying in fiat?).
I mean I'm entirely unconvinced there is a compelling real use-case in anything listed here.
> ten years ago it was inconceivable to do these things with crypto, ten years from now it may be that these systems will continue to improve in terms of fees, privacy, scalability and user experience.
IMO if a technology is actually transformative, it will find a valid use case quicker than this. The only real use-cases I have seen seem to have been creating ponzi-schemes, effectively laundering money and speculative gambling on the price.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean taxable for US tax office? In my country it is not taxable, only exchange to fiat currency is. (and this is explicitly mentioned).
If this is true, it simply means your tax code has a giant loophole that allows people avoid paying tax on capital gains by simply swapping an asset for another.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would anyone buy Tether at this point? There's zero upside potential, after all. Tether, and "stablecoins" in general are known as the casino chips of Crypto. A way to exchange more volatile crypto for what is supposed to be essentially dollars without creating a taxable event. Assuming crypto is still something people want to trade, that's still a valuable service. Tether isn't supposed to be an investment. It…
Technically, isn’t selling one asset and buying another precisely the definition of a taxable event? I don’t see how tether helps you avoid taxes unless you’re going to lie about your transactions and hope nobody notices.