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Tether Critical Announcement

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Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#281

Post by Kazamai »

cperciva wrote: post #29
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…

Trust in exchanges is what keeps Bitcoin prices up. This is bad for Bitcoin and all digital assets.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#282

Post by wyldfire »

foxhop wrote: 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…

> One of the early promises of cryptocurrency was to "sick it to the man and governments". Now its powered largely by greed and consuming our most important resources in breakneck speeds.

There is a really critical distinction between truly trustless currencies like bitcoin and "managed" [centralized, trusted] assets like the ones Ethereum offers. Interesting that once you start to grant some amount of trust there are options that don't leverage proof-of-work at all, so the waste is not necessarily a concern.

Proof-of-work is "only" necessary if you want trustless coin w/egalitarian distribution. Some folks would argue that it's not necessary to be truly trustless (perhaps bootstrapping a new bitcoin node could suffer a DoS from a sybil false-chain attack, at which point you would trust someone authoritative's copy of the blockchain).

No matter how you slice it, you should be very, very suspicious of any new cryptocurrency and super extremely suspicious of any new "crypto-asset".

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#283

Post by wyldfire »

nadam wrote: post #253
foxhop wrote: 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…

Proof of work is not the only scheme to ensure consensus. There are multiple projects based on some kind of proof of stake. One of the most promising such projects is EOS in my opinion. I suggest you not to gain knowledge about cryptocurrencies on HN. Yes, cryptocurrency forums may be an echo chamber, but HN seems to be the other way around. Lot of HN-ers are extremely cynical about cryptocurrencies, so you will most…

New coins using proof-of-stake should look to Peercoin for guidance. It's the oldest PoS coin, had no premine/developer fee. (note that it does use PoW for distribution).

> Lot of HN-ers are extremely cynical about cryptocurrencies

I think cryptocoins are great but we can all see folks dumping their money into assets that they have no hope of understanding, guided by FOMO. As a whole it seems like there's not enough cynicism.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#284

Post by jackstraw14 »

Nursie wrote: post #142
hvk wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without making a comment on the crypto/tether aspect, I just want to express that it seems to me that the "cause of keeping track of 'who owns what'", as you put it, is precisely the singular technological achievement which has enabled the "human condition" to evolve to its current state. Money is literally the decentralized, asynchronous, dynamic, and continuous computation that has evolved to process the combinator…

Really? You really think that having only 30% of output go into actual, productive endeavour would be a good thing? It just screams of a completely broken system to me, and inefficiency. I could understand if your attitude was that, well, it seems it had to be this way, it's the best we can do. But to actually celebrate a ~2:1 ratio of fund-shuffling busywork over production seems crazy. Don't get me wrong, I work in…

Just what exactly is your definition of an "actual, productive endeavour"?

Is it really that ridiculous that we dedicate a lot of resources to keeping track of who owns what? We're a mostly capitalist society, right? In a system where private ownership reigns supreme, you absolutely need to keep track of who owns what or we'd have even greater wealth inequality than we have now. Personally, I'd like to see some kind of anarcho-syndicalist structure but let's be honest our greatx10 grandchildren will probably still be capitalists.

This article is a little over-the-top in some spots, but the main point is correct. Cryptocurrency is an innovation in accounting: https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...

Cryptocurrencies are trying to make trustless transactions a reality so we don't need a human workforce to keep it all mostly accurate. Don't get too disappointed yet, this stuff is just getting started.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#285

Post by ambicapter »

MrRadar wrote: post #276
mancerayder wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Coinbase? (I ask as a naive fool with a bit of money stored there).

Mostly that if anything goes wrong their support tends to be incredibly unresponsive. Also make sure you're not using SMS-based 2-factor authentication with them since there's a long history of people getting their phone numbers stolen and then their Coinbase accounts drained within minutes.

Well, thank god their two-factor has always failed to setup for me.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#286

Post by daxorid »

MrRadar wrote: post #276
mancerayder wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Coinbase? (I ask as a naive fool with a bit of money stored there).

Mostly that if anything goes wrong their support tends to be incredibly unresponsive. Also make sure you're not using SMS-based 2-factor authentication with them since there's a long history of people getting their phone numbers stolen and then their Coinbase accounts drained within minutes.

> tends to be incredibly unresponsive

Correction, there is no support. I have a bit of money permanently locked in a coinbase account because their support does not reply at all.

At some point I will just have to convert it all to BTC and send it elsewhere. Caveat Emptor.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#287

Post by mancerayder »

MrRadar wrote: post #276
mancerayder wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Coinbase? (I ask as a naive fool with a bit of money stored there).

Mostly that if anything goes wrong their support tends to be incredibly unresponsive. Also make sure you're not using SMS-based 2-factor authentication with them since there's a long history of people getting their phone numbers stolen and then their Coinbase accounts drained within minutes.

Noted.

On the account draining -- well, there's a latency in setting up new bank accounts there. So I'm surprised it's that easy to just yank money out.

Although I did notice there's no account verification. For example, on Vanguard or other platforms they do a small deposit of a few cents and ask you to verify the payment amounts, a process which has a latency of a day or two.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#288

Post by mancerayder »

mancerayder wrote: post #287
MrRadar wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly that if anything goes wrong their support tends to be incredibly unresponsive. Also make sure you're not using SMS-based 2-factor authentication with them since there's a long history of people getting their phone numbers stolen and then their Coinbase accounts drained within minutes.

Noted. On the account draining -- well, there's a latency in setting up new bank accounts there. So I'm surprised it's that easy to just yank money out. Although I did notice there's no account verification. For example, on Vanguard or other platforms they do a small deposit of a few cents and ask you to verify the payment amounts, a process which has a latency of a day or two.

Ah, so people just yank money out by sending it to some wallet. Makes sense.

Are there any ways to make coinbase safer other than a very secure password?

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#289

Post by pault »

daxorid wrote: post #286
MrRadar wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly that if anything goes wrong their support tends to be incredibly unresponsive. Also make sure you're not using SMS-based 2-factor authentication with them since there's a long history of people getting their phone numbers stolen and then their Coinbase accounts drained within minutes.

> tends to be incredibly unresponsive Correction, there is no support. I have a bit of money permanently locked in a coinbase account because their support does not reply at all . At some point I will just have to convert it all to BTC and send it elsewhere. Caveat Emptor.

I had the same experience. Got locked out of 2FA, spent two weeks waiting for a reply from support, only to be told that I should just make a new account. Unfortunately I haven't found an easier option for buying BTC.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#290

Post by massaman_yams »

mancerayder wrote: post #288
mancerayder wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noted. On the account draining -- well, there's a latency in setting up new bank accounts there. So I'm surprised it's that easy to just yank money out. Although I did notice there's no account verification. For example, on Vanguard or other platforms they do a small deposit of a few cents and ask you to verify the payment amounts, a process which has a latency of a day or two.

Ah, so people just yank money out by sending it to some wallet. Makes sense. Are there any ways to make coinbase safer other than a very secure password?

Software-based 2FA, rather than SMS-based.
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