I released a paper earlier this year talking about how we can reasonably lock cryptocurrency to fiat, but unfortunately the space is still rather immature. A single provider of USD tokens is extremely dangerous. Best case scenario would be if there were many companies like Tether and you could spread your token purchases between them automatically to minimize counterparty risk. Stellar and Ripple are closest to solvi…
Tether Critical Announcement
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Re: Tether Critical Announcement
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Dump large amounts of ANY asset and it will crash. It's only crypto that gets accused of having a "fake" market cap though.
Re: Tether Critical Announcement
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Banks can be robbed, museums can be swindled, even credit bureaus like Equifax can get hacked. There's no such thing as hack-proof. That some cryptos will hard fork and adjust shows that the system can heal itself and not be in a permanent state of disrepair. That's not a bad thing at all.
It’s a bad thing to the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account. Why not just run it in your favorite RDBMS? That way we’d at least save a bunch of CO2 emissions.
This is just giving sentimentality an economic value. Forking should constantly be considered, you should always be looking to maximize the value of your stake.
Imagine two coins A & B with exactly the same distribution, except in coin A a real jerk has 10% of the coins and you know his addresses. You also know almost all of the holders also consider this guy a jerk who will not contribute to positively to the value of the coin (at least not 110%). Its in everyone's best interest to just erase this jerk from the ledger and choose B, everyone ends up with 110% of their original stake.
Re: Tether Critical Announcement
#214The 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…
Don't forget that decentralized currency is a rather new technology, and is constantly seeing progress being made on all fronts. You can even mine Grid coins doing SETI and Protein folding work!
Re: Tether Critical Announcement
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
5 BILLION dollars worth of bitcoins are sold every day. The trading volume is higher and the orderbooks are deeper than you think...
Re: Tether Critical Announcement
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might also be that the central banks are printing money like hell, and people look for places where their value stays better. For example ECB (european central bank) is issuing 60 billion euros new money each month, and buying bonds with it. That is half of the bitcoin market cap.
The ECB QE program keeps bond yields down (especially long term [riskier] ones), thereby pushing "interest rate" down, which has an inflatory effect. Now, the CPI in the Eurozone is about 1.3% now http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/hicp/publications/news-rele... .. and it was about 0.5% last year: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5v91Y9WQAEyM0j.jpg Yes, this drives bank savings account rates down to nothing, thus people ar…
Re: Tether Critical Announcement
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really see a difference between the two. 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.
Murdering your wife is wrong by nature. Moving some money around without telling the government is only illegal because it's illegal. To me, the difference is whether or not there is a victim. No victim, no wrongdoing.
If you knowingly helped a murderer dispose of a body, that’s wrong by nature right? Money laundering is the financial equivalent of that.
Re: Tether Critical Announcement
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google "Wash Trading"
Doesn't work in crypto markets. Taker fees are typically > 0.20%, with the notable exception of BitMex.
Re: Tether Critical Announcement
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
But since Tether Limited are the ones who back the tokens with real dollars, they can effectively unilaterally pressure anyone to upgrade the client. Those who don't upgrade and accept stolen tethers will be left with worthless unredeemable tokens.
Read this lawsuit: Tether only has $50 mill and their wires have been frozen by Wells Fargo since March 2017. So the remaining $600 mill tokens are backed by nothing. http://article78againstnydfs.com/docs/317-cv-01882-BitfinexC...
Re: Tether Critical Announcement
#220The 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…
Proof of work was the first, crude consensus algorithm for crypto-currencies. A lot of more eco-friendly consensus algorithms have been proposed. Ethereum, the second largest crypto-currency in the world, is currently moving towards a Proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, instead of the old proof-of-work one. Don't forget that decentralized currency is a rather new technology, and is constantly seeing progress being ma…
* has been moving for years with no end in sight