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Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
221–230 of 492 posts
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who outside of the cryptocurrency industry would notice if they disappeared? Who outside of the automotive industry would notice if cars disappeared? That's your answer: pollution is still a concern but only one of those is balanced against significant real-world benefits for people other than the sellers.
The automotive industry, and the machines they create, produce orders of magnitude more pollution than crypto. It’s a poor choice of comparison for whatever point you’re trying to make.
Note that I didn’t say otherwise but rather that cars have beneficial effects for people outside of the automotive industry. I’d love to ban them personally but that would negatively impact millions of people unless we first made massive investments in transit, bike/pedestrian infrastructure, etc. - quite the contrast with cryptocurrency, which could disappear tomorrow without any noticeable impact outside of speculators.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#223I don't understand how Tether has survived this long. Bitfinex and Tether sure look transparently like a fraud, all the way back to the "no really we have $1 in the bank for every Tether but you can't audit us" days. And yet it continues to occupy its role as the underpinning of most cryptocurrency markets. Why hasn't it blown up yet? My best guess is that it's useful to everyone taking in money from new retail inves…
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Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't entirely understand this; could you provide a concrete example, or actual trades, that could be involved in such a position? (I'm just curious how it would actually look like in practice.)
Binance: buy $1m BTC/USDT CME: short $1m BTC futures (which are dollar settled and thus BTC/USD) On Binance you are long BTC, and short USDT. On CME you are short BTC and long USD (implicitly on the fiat legs). So if we add that up, the BTC positions net off and you’re just left with short USDT and long USD which is the desired outcome. In practice, if Tether implodes I would expect everyone to sell Tether (by buying…
> So the price of BTC on Binance goes to the moon, and the price on CME collapses.
How long could this arbitrage oppportunity exist? It doesn't sound all that reasonable, in my opinion.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bennett has done a fantastic job. There WILL be a movie about this company when investors lose faith. Like next decades, "the big short".
But how exactly do you short stablecoins? You can't and even if you did the game is heavily rigged against you. If you remember in the movie, Cohodes got his ass handed to him as banks margin called him out of his position and that's in a regulated market. These guys own their market and the exchange on which it originates. There's no way to even verify if they received dollars for every tether issued and by some mir…
All shorting consists on 5 steps:
1. Borrow 2. Sell 3. Wait 4. Buy back 5. Close
There is USDT lending available. Even more, there is decentralized collateralized lending available.
If someone wanted to short USDT there are plenty of opportunities to do so. (And there might be a lot of people doing so, specially now that the shadyness is being reported on some of the more reputable traditional newspapers)
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#226LOL ! "The chief financial officer is Giancarlo Devasini, a former plastic surgeon from Italy who was once described on Tether’s website as the founder of a successful electronics business. The only reference to him that turned up in a search of Italian newspapers showed he was once fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software. Elsewhere on the website, there’s a letter from an accounting firm stating that Tether…
Anybody "fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software" almost certainly ran a whitebox computer shop, and was successful enough to get noticed and charged in a period where almost everybody's home computers ran pirated Windows and you could buy it on any street corner. In Italy to boot.
Bold! Bold pushback! To use a Fawlty Towers Basil line: "Sooo .... that's all sorted out" knowing full-well it isn't. Don't know Fawlty Towers? Let's go the Monthy Python direction:
JC: "It's not much of a bank."
MP: "Well, it's very clean, sir"
JC: "It's certainly uncontaminated by crypto-backed dollars."
Now I enjoy American TV too but I can't think of an All-in-the-Family, Nightcourt, or Scubbs scene here. But if you know the "aaaaannnnnnnd it's gone" ... line well you can riff from there.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#227I don't understand how Tether has survived this long. Bitfinex and Tether sure look transparently like a fraud, all the way back to the "no really we have $1 in the bank for every Tether but you can't audit us" days. And yet it continues to occupy its role as the underpinning of most cryptocurrency markets. Why hasn't it blown up yet? My best guess is that it's useful to everyone taking in money from new retail inves…
Keep in mind that the original Ponzi scheme ran for quite a while and even had the media defending it as a great investment. Tether (and most crypto) seems like someone copied Ponzi's original scheme 1:1. Put in some money, transfer it to another format (Tether to other crypto, with Ponzi it was stamps), then eventually pull out loads of cash. Some people will undeniably get rich off it. But it's not sustainable.
The part I have never seen elaborated on in the "Tether is a Ponzi" claims is at what point will people using Tether make money? Tethers are IOUs to facilitate moving USD between financial institutions (mainly between exchanges, and mostly used by the exchanges themselves).
You can spend $1 USD to get 1 Tether that is "redeemable" (by trade, not through the Tether company) for exactly $1 USD. A Ponzi requires some kind of promised payout, no?
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#228LOL ! "The chief financial officer is Giancarlo Devasini, a former plastic surgeon from Italy who was once described on Tether’s website as the founder of a successful electronics business. The only reference to him that turned up in a search of Italian newspapers showed he was once fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software. Elsewhere on the website, there’s a letter from an accounting firm stating that Tether…
Anybody "fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software" almost certainly ran a whitebox computer shop, and was successful enough to get noticed and charged in a period where almost everybody's home computers ran pirated Windows and you could buy it on any street corner. In Italy to boot.
Yeah, it was common, but that doesn’t exactly help his case to regulate a currency taken as an equivalent of the US Dollar
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#229Are there any legitimate stable coins?
Checkout xUSD from https://havenprotocol.org/knowledge/
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#230The biggest news, buried near the bottom: "After I returned to the U.S., I obtained a document showing a detailed account of Tether Holdings’ reserves. It said they include billions of dollars of short-term loans to large Chinese companies—something money-market funds avoid. And that was before one of the country’s largest property developers, China Evergrande Group, started to collapse. I also learned that Tether ha…
Of note, Tether values their reserves at redemption value. So if they have a loan to an insolvent company that trades at 25 cents to the dollar, Tether’s attestation values it at 100%. See emphasis of matter, page 2 of their attestation https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/tether_assuranc...
That’s such an insane, non-GAAP way to value fixed income securities. Almost boggles the mind