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Tether Critical Announcement

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Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#21

Post by pera »

floatingatoll wrote: post #16
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…

For the motivated amongst us, the SEC "Tips, Complaints, and Referrals" portal is here: https://denebleo.sec.gov/TCRExternal/disclaimer.xhtml They accept anonymous reports, and pay out whistleblower penalties in some circumstances. I can't tell if Tether is a US company or not, but regardless, it's still worth reporting if y'all care to - that USD has to get into the country somehow, and it sure is interesting how it…

AFAIK they are from Hong Kong.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#22

Post by crazypyro »

bousaid wrote: post #20
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…

Could you go into more detail on what happened to Mt. Gox during final months?

Mt.Gox started having issues withdrawing funds to "real" fiat currencies, people got scared, wanted to pull out their bitcoin, suddenly their account says they have a balance, but there's not bitcoin backing up the balance. (In Mt.Gox case, this was because a significant amount of bitcoins were stolen from their treasury.

Similar thing could happen with people redeeming USDT for USD if they don't have enough to cover the already issued USDT.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#23

Post by patio11 »

bousaid wrote: post #20
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…

Could you go into more detail on what happened to Mt. Gox during final months?

I suppose I could: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7304479

The short version: Mt. Gox stopped paying out USD-denominated claims, because (as was correctly perceived by many people) they were insolvent. They continued paying out BTC-denominated claims. The only way to get value out of Mt. Gox was to either go through yen (which the vast majority of customers couldn't do [0]) or buy Bitcoin and withdraw, which caused the price of Bitcoin to gallop upwards in late 2013.

[0] I got a number of interesting business propositions that year: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/423869016776933376

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#27

Post by tfha »

Isn't tether the one that screwed up? They are the ones who got stolen from, why do other exchanges have to bend over backwards and issue updates?

If the attacker is moving fast enough, exchanges probably can't even respond in time. That shouldn't mean that they lose money. If tether reserves the right to delist coins at any time without much notice, why would you ever consider that a safe asset to accept?

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#28

Post by Jd »

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.

No one really knows how much of that corresponds to actual USD or if anyone can actually withdraw. A famous twitter account (https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed) points out every day the ostensible discrepancies between the supposed AUM and public amounts.

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.

Full disclosure: I know and am friends with some of the current Tether team and was recruited for RealCoin in the early stages of the project. They are working on a hard problem (asset-backed cryptocurrency on the way that gets the most traction in the market at present, not necessarily the way that inspires the most confidence.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#29

Post by cperciva »

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…

Post-script: Is this good news for Bitcoin? Oh this is great news for Bitcoin. If you don't believe Bitfinex's $600 million in liabilities are worth a copper shilling, the only option for getting your value out of Bitfinex is to swap your liability for Bitcoin, which drives up the price of Bitcoin at the margin.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but this seems to be an argument for BTC/USD going up on Bitfinex -- but not necessarily elsewhere. Is the market failing to price in the fact that "USD on account at Bitfinex" has a value which is not identical to that of "USD in a regulated US bank account"?

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#30

Post by pbnjay »

chrisco255 wrote: post #14
pbnjay wrote: post #11

$30M here, $30M there... by all means, please keep proving to me how secure and stable smart contracts are! I'm indifferent on bitcoin, it's a cool idea but there seem to be a lot of these "hammer everything" types that are doing it a disservice across the board.

Tethers are not smart contracts. It's a separate crypto blockchain currency from Bitcoin and it claims to have a near 1:1 ratio with the USD, hence the name...it's "tethered" to the USD. This is not unlike some foreign currencies.

Touché. But the Omni Core Layer mentioned in the announcement implements them.
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