191–200 of 421 posts
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The achilles' heel with these systems is their integration points with fiat. Always has been.
If you don't integrate with fiat, all you have is "mobile game gems" or "WoW gold". Fiat is and always will be tightly monitored and controlled. If cryptos want to replace fiat, they will have to do the same.
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It's not “old news” if it wasn't publicly known in the past (and if the market had known it already, no one would be panic selling based on it.)
I'm just not sure why Bloomberg would choose to omit the date until being pestered online. Doesn't this change things quite a bit? If there was a true smoking gun, they would be shut down then and there already instead of continuing to operate/grow, such as issuing more tethers in the past month.
That's...an unwarranted conclusion.
If this were all done and resolved, then Bitfinex would have a strong incentive to say that clearly, specifically, and unequivocally. The fact that they aren't and CFTC isn't commenting strongly suggests that the process starting with the subpoena is ongoing.
So, to those who are skeptical of Tether...you know that you can convert Tether 1:1 for USD by depositing it at Bitfinex, right? They'll then wire you that USD to any Taiwanese bank account[1] (the only banks that haven't frozen their wires). AFAIK, there are no reports from Taiwanese account holders of trouble with these wires. [1] - https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/203
No one has provided proof of withdraw from Bitfinex USD or Tether since they've gotten kicked out of their banks.
Recent wires from Bitfinex have been associated with a rural bank in Poland which is normally only used only by farmers.
https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/11/22/bitfinex-reveals-new-p...
Summary for newbs: Bitfinex is a crypto exchange kinda based in Hong Kong and kind of based in Taiwan (this seems to change depending on convenience.) Taiwan recently started becoming more rigorous about monitoring international USD wires, and lots of Bitfinex users had their money stranded in Taiwan. Bitfinex stopped supporting US customers because of these difficulties (AFAIK most customers did eventually get their…
There you go. The raids are coming. Called it long ago and downvoted to oblivion here.
So, to those who are skeptical of Tether...you know that you can convert Tether 1:1 for USD by depositing it at Bitfinex, right? They'll then wire you that USD to any Taiwanese bank account[1] (the only banks that haven't frozen their wires). AFAIK, there are no reports from Taiwanese account holders of trouble with these wires. [1] - https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/203
For the time being, we will only process requests above $50,000 in size. We believe that by the time we are able to get to the smaller withdrawals, other, less cumbersome
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There are a bunch of decentralized cryptocurrency exchange projects coming. My favorite so far are https://loopring.org and https://0xproject.com , but there are like a dozen out there. This is just the beginning. As centralized exchanges start having all sorts of problems (CoinCheck, Bitfinex, maybe Bittrex and Poloniex soon), more people will start looking into decentralized exchanges and thus increase their liquid…
> especially if this integration is "permissionless", by simply allowing the cryptocurrency developers to support its protocol and then have the cryptcurrency automatically appear on the exchange. A shortage of shitcoins isn't the biggest problem currently for the cryptospace.
No single exchange can keep up with every new cryptocurrency, so people start creating accounts with all the exchanges, and then start preferring the new ones if they also bring overall site improvements over the incumbents, and eventually dump the incumbents. This is healthy for the cryptocurrency market. If this wouldn't have happened, things could have been a lot worse with centralized exchanges.
I don't know what the "final form" of this ecosystem will be, but I hope it will be something like the internet. Decentralized exchanges essentially being "protocols" like TCP, which link all the cryptocurrencies (servers) and users (clients) with each other, and everyone can "exchange" (connect) one cryptocurrency to another.
But unlike the internet, I hope there will be a much bigger emphasis on P2P connections/transactions, and that we won't sacrifice that just to get a little more performance or more convenience. There will be such more centralized cryptocurrencies, too, just like today's internet continues to have huge walled gardens like Facebook, but hopefully it won't be the majority of them.
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You're skipping a key bit here; billions of Tethers magically appeared on the market in the last month and were used to buy BTC in suspiciously regular fashion, in 100 million USDT amounts, and with no clear evidence that it was actually purchased by anyone using real USD.
Here’s what I don’t understand. You can exchange bitcoins for fiat currency. But afaik you can’t exchange USDT for fiat. So why is anyone willing to take the risk of holding on to USDT? Why are any exchanges even willing to touch it?
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Exactly. There is some circumstantial evidence that Tether printing may be inflating bitcoin prices: http://www.tetherreport.com/ But it is just circumstantial at this point. There are a lot of ifs related to Tether, but it has that fishy feeling to it. While I think there is a very good chance that Tether is not backed by USD, I think the regulators may actually be more interested in USDT being used for money launde…
That would be the SEC's domain. If CFTC is getting involved it's probably because they are potentially manipulating the price on a regulated futures contract.
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That's where I also get confused. So far the reasons I could come up with are: - the exchange got bought out silently and is now owned/controlled by the people behind tether - the exchange got paid to use tether (for example 0.5% of the volume as incentive) - the exchange holds a part of tether's fiat as guarantee - the exchange is run by people who are inexperienced in appraising counterparty risk - the exchange is…
What risks does the exchange incur from allowing the trade of tethers? Exchanges make their money from people trading--not by holding their own reserves and betting on their values. If Tether value drops to zero, anyone holding Tethers would be upset, but exchanges would just have been profiting from all the trades necessary to bring that value down to zero.
As to why end users would touch it, that's obvious - a (potentially misguided) belief that things will work out fine.