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Tether Critical Announcement

tether.to

241–250 of 327 posts

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#241
post #68

The 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…

I disagree with the approach to just say "this all sucks". It sucks in particular ways, but I do agree with the other comment that this system has gotten humanity this far, so there are certain benefits to it. I hope in the future we'll have better systems than money to be able to allocate resources.

So we need to understand why part of it sucks, why part of it is great, and develop better alternatives that are also great but suck less. For example, it is important to keep track of who owes what to whom, otherwise people can't trust each other to make promises on a large scale with strangers. It's less good that people can gain a lot of profit simply by manipulating numbers and moving financial instruments around. Part of this stems from all value judgements being collapsed down into a single number which of course can never be self-consistent [1], part of it stems from informational differences between actors and other real-world deviations away from what a "perfectly-liquid" market should look like. If financial activity was truly a "market optimisation" mechanism, we ought to be able to replace the entire thing with a neutral algorithm and get rid of bankers and personal profits here completely.

[1] you cannot totally-order a 2-vector (and in general a n-vector) so that the ordering obeys the neighbourhood principle

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#242
post #84
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cau…

Can you explain how this would be "good for Bitcoin" though? Didn't the price crash after the extreme rise? Or was this because the BTC was stolen and unrelated to the USD insolvency? Was the "good for BTC" tongue in cheek?

Bitcoiners say that things are good for bitcoin whenever its price goes up (because they care more about price than anything else in the bitcoin ecosystem). Bitcoin skeptics like patio use that phrase in a more tongue in cheek manner

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#243
post #68

The 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…

The global financial sector is about 13-19% of the global economy, and 20-30% of the global services sector: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030515/what-percent...

Which is higher than it should be, but thankfully not 70%...

The above probably includes the accounting industry but not all employee accountants/cashiers embedded in all companies, but even if it did, it would move the needle only a bit (maybe 10% of employees?)

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has been a bitcoin bear for a long time. Like many people that have been anti bitcoin, they keep jumping on new reasons why it’s a scam or not going to work when their old reasons become irrelevant.

It is probably very painful following it closely and not investing from the around $10 prices or so. Makes you mentally even more tied to the non-investment, and makes you invent better arguments on why you didn't invest.

Regardless of your feelings towards patio11 and his views on Bitcoin, this is not appropriate. Speculating about his emotions like this is a misdirection that dances around de-legitimizing his views without a real rebuttal to his point. Moreover, he’s on this forum, so you don’t need to talk about him like this, as if he isn’t here.

If you have a substantive rebuttal to make, do that instead of engaging in passive aggressive character assassination. What you’re doing is probably satisfying, but it doesn’t convince anyone else that you’re correct who doesn’t already side with you, and it’s insidious in that it steers the course of the conversation away from an individual’s point and onto their identity.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#245
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patrick, I thought you are better than making these "non-proved" claims. I can make claims about Bitstamp or Gdax too. Their order book has increased 10-15 times in value since bitcoin price was in the 1000-1200 range too. Tether certainly has a connection to Finex but they are not its biggest client. Tether is being used by crypto-only exchanges mainly Bittrex and Poloniex to give people the possibility to trade coi…

> Tether certainly has a connection to Finex but they are not its biggest client. This is false. In fact, every "USD" market on Bitfinex is actually a Tether market. It doesn't matter what the label on the ticker is, because USD cannot be deposited or withdrawn from Bitfinex, only Tether. Given that, Bitfinex is by far the biggest Tether market.

That’s also wrong. Biggest tether market is bittrex followed by polo. Finex tether holdings are really minimal and for a good reason.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#246
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Read the post, man, very first paragraph: I've read it a few times now, still can't find where they say they specifically created tether (the system) for this exact purpose. Keep in mind that the issuance of tether is not the creation of the complete tether blockchain/system (they are issuing new tether around the clock). > That's true, except you probably have never tried to actually execute that kind of arbitrage…

> I've read it a few times now, still can't find where they say they specifically created tether (the system) for this exact purpose. Keep in mind that the issuance of tether is not the creation of the complete tether blockchain/system (they are issuing new tether around the clock). > Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for them to clear USD-denominated wires...Their solution:…

Do you think that bitfinex didn't know they'd potentially have wire problems before being officially cut off?

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#247
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.

Not going to try and convince you of Bitcoin or crypto as a whole but calling USDT an example of smart contracts is pretty absurd.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#248
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to rensmart.com, 1KWh is approx. 0.5 kg of CO2 saved/used. A RX480 uses 160W on average according to TomsHardware, mining might pull more but lets use that as a conservative example. A Mining Rig, decent one, might have 4 cards and pull 100Watts for itself (conservative estimate). That puts the total power of the rig at 750Watts (approximately) This will yield a hashrate of about 20MH/s for each card or 80M…

Thank you for the numbers! Assuming those estimates are correct (I haven't verified it), I think it's hard for me to believe that there are fewer than 191K people working to manage an equivalent number of financial transactions in USD. I tried this wolfram query: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+people+workin... Yes, we are increasing entropy outside of ourselves but not within, if the population of hum…

In the banking sector only a small fraction of employees are required to run the payments infrastructure (in one example, 2% of employees ran the business part of payments, and another 2% of employees could be the IT infrastructure part required for that); payments are highly automated and almost everyone is handling the other parts of the banking business e.g. lending and investments.

Visa and mastercard together employ ~20k people and handle much, much, much more transactions than all the cryptocurrencies combined.

The EU SEPA customer payments system handles ~1000 times more transactions than ethereum, and the infrastructure for running that (spread across all the involved banks) likely takes thousands of people, but not 200k, and certainly not the 200 million people that would be required to do so as horribly inefficiently as cryptocurrencies do.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its debatable. If you knowingly helped a murderer dispose of a body, that’s wrong by nature right? Money laundering is the financial equivalent of that.

No, money laundering is the financial equivalent of running a taxi service and not asking any questions about the luggage. It's not necessarily disposing of a body, and punishing people for moving luggage around without asking questions is obviously absurd.

Terrible analogy. The number of people that would even have any desire to put something illegal in taxi luggage is very low. The number of people wanting to launder money because they did something truly evil is very high.

International airlines are a better analogy; should we just let people run weapons, drugs, even children in their luggage, with no mechanism for inspection?

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#250
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tether certainly has a connection to Finex but they are not its biggest client. This is false. In fact, every "USD" market on Bitfinex is actually a Tether market. It doesn't matter what the label on the ticker is, because USD cannot be deposited or withdrawn from Bitfinex, only Tether. Given that, Bitfinex is by far the biggest Tether market.

That’s also wrong. Biggest tether market is bittrex followed by polo. Finex tether holdings are really minimal and for a good reason.

Bitfinex is conflating Tether (USD₮) and USD: “Bitfinex lets you receive USD₮ from a Bitcoin blockchain address and treat them as a USD deposit. Similarly, you can withdraw funds to a Bitcoin blockchain address as USD₮.” [1]

Whether they are holding a lot of USD₮ or not, I don't know. But since they cannot receive USD, by construction their USD holdings are limited.

[1] https://support.bitfinex.com/hc/en-us/articles/213919369-Wha...

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