281–290 of 492 posts
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It's very easy to short stablecoins on any defi lending platform. Here are some examples: https://app.fulcrum.trade/trade https://app.cream.finance/ https://app.aave.com/markets 5% is a low cost for a short position that you believe will eventually pay out 100%.
That 100% payout will be in crypto, whose value in USD terms is going to tank if Tether implodes. And that's assuming the lending platform in question survives the carnage.
I 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…
It's very easy to short tether, it costs around 4-5% a year. You can do it directly on FTX, or you can do it on ethereum by borrowing tether on aave against, say, USDC, and then selling it for USDC. You can do this in significant size, 8 figures+ if you'd like.
I’m no expert, but wouldn’t this be unrealizable?
If tether were to fall it’s not crazy to think it would take with it most exchanges, given how most of them use USDT for maintaining operations.
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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 ki…
It’s not a ponzi per se. My guess is that they take the money from exchanges, mint more tokens at no cost to themselves and buy a bunch of junk bonds with high yields and pocket the 8% or whatever they make in those. Given their market cap that is a lot of money. They always use precise wording about their holdings “commercial paper”. I’m guessing it’s not US treasury bonds equivalents or they would say that explicit…
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The difficult part seems to be getting someone lending you $1m in USDT, isn't it? From their POV, you're getting exposed to BTC volatility, and the collateral is likely to be too high to make this practical.
You’ve missed something, but I’m not sure what. Nobody is lending us anything in the above example (well, Binance perps and CME futs have embedded leverage but that’s another story).
This is what I'm trying to figure out too.
Basically, how do you buy $1m worth of BTC/USDT perps without depositing $1m of USD into Binance? Let's say if we put in $100k USD with a 1:10 leverage, it means the position on Binance is wiped out if BTC drops by more than 10%. So the only way for this to work is to deposit $1mil of USD into Binance and opening the position. But this means we lost a whole $1m when Binance implodes, cancelling our gain in the short position.
Otherwise, we need to borrow $1mil of USDT to open the Binance BTC/USDT position.
What did I miss?
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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 ki…
People have been yelling about Tether for years, myself included. But nothing seems to stop it. Not lawsuits, not major news articles. The conclusion I draw is that, yes, the game is rigged - AND EVERYONE IS OK WITH IT. As long as it's making everyone money, no one will really complain. What I also find interesting, is that if tether ever DOES crash, the result might be a big boost for Bitcoin. If you hold Tether, an…
There is no world in which a major tether depeg leads to a boost in BTC price. It will not happen.
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It's very easy to short stablecoins on any defi lending platform. Here are some examples: https://app.fulcrum.trade/trade https://app.cream.finance/ https://app.aave.com/markets 5% is a low cost for a short position that you believe will eventually pay out 100%.
That 100% payout will be in crypto, whose value in USD terms is going to tank if Tether implodes. And that's assuming the lending platform in question survives the carnage.
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So your logic is that big, known entities can’t go bankrupt or be scams?
No, the logic is that it is less likely. Anyways, Coinbase allows on-demand conversion of USDC to USD so you really only have to hold the USDC (and Coinbase’s counterparty risk) for about a day for that process to complete. At some point that window might close but given that Coinbase is a publicly traded stock in the US and must report financials, there is quite a bit less risk compared to Tether.
If this goes on for a few more years, with broader investment from traditional investors (ETF), when Tether collapse I half-suspect that the cryptocurrency markets will bring the NYSE down with it in the fall as people sell to cover losses
It's actually an interesting thought experiment to try to figure out what would (will?) happen when all this comes crashing down. I am an extreme skeptic on all things crypto, I don't hold any and I think it's basically a gambling fad. But, with that said, I grudgingly recognize that it now has some powerful establishment interests behind it and things that have that tend to defy the laws of gravity, often forever. S…