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Tether Critical Announcement

tether.to

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Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#291

Post by massaman_yams »

pault wrote: post #289
daxorid wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I had the opposite experience, though this was before Coinbase created/supported recovery codes for 2fa. My phone with the 2fa app bricked and it was a painless, one-message exchange with Support to work around it, completed in < 1 business day.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#292

Post by elif »

ActsJuvenile wrote: post #93
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…

Tether announcement on their own website mentions their Taiwan banks have frozen all international wire transfer since April 18: https://tether.to/announcement/ Tether has printed $600 million worth of tokens since, so either: 1) Local Taiwanese have deposited $600 million to buy Bitcoins through domestic wires, OR 2) Tether is lying and printing tokens out of thin air. Place your bets gentlemen.

Their curious verbiage makes me think it's not USD. They say they have backing "assets" my guess is they mean BTC, which conveniently gives them more "value" the more they print.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#293

Post by mancerayder »

massaman_yams wrote: post #290
mancerayder wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean Google Authenticator? I have this enabled in addition to SMS.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#294

Post by darawk »

askmike wrote: post #178
darawk wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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:…

If it is raining outside and I take an umbrella with me, I can say it's a solution to the rain. That doesn't say anything about whether I bought the umbrella specifically for today and if I had it longer than today I am lying...

"Their solution: issue a cryptocurrency" implies they issued Tether to solve their wire issues. This is false. They issued it long before.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#295

Post by Nursie »

jackstraw14 wrote: post #284
Nursie wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A "lot" of resources would be 1% IMHO.

If society is burning up not just a lot, but a majority of its effort in servicing its model (resource tracking), it seems to me something has gone very very wrong.

You need to keep track of who owns what. You don't need to make that such a complicated thing that it takes vast portions of available human effort to track, and sucks in vast portions of the fruits of said effort.

You don't have to be an anarchist to think that that's ridiculous.

We can do that with trust and the vast majority of people don't care.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#296

Post by billylindeman »

Jd wrote: post #28

Here's some more context: Tether was originally setup as RealCoin. It originally had a clear bank account relationship with a Taiwanese bank. It had about $30mm. Then the bank cut them off. Since then they've been floating without any announced banking relationship and they also changed their terms of service. Over the same time period they made a partnership with BitFinex and their supposed AUM has gone up over 10x.…

Check out bitUSD (a stable asset on the bitshares platform).

bitUSD is backed by a liquid-market peg and has generally held up fairly well since 2014.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#297

Post by mrb »

joosters wrote: post #230
mrb wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't work in crypto markets. Taker fees are typically > 0.20%, with the notable exception of BitMex.

There is plenty of evidence of wash trading occurring on Bitfinex and other exchanges - there are also many accusations that the exchanges themselves wash trade, to pump up their own volumes. They don't need to pay their own fees!

Taker fees are 0.1-0.2% on Bitfinex. Wash trading would be too expensive.

Where is the evidence the exchange itself is doing it?

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#298

Post by shobith »

zaarn wrote: post #205
shobith wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. The problem is, this estimate is just for Ethereum. It does not account for Bitcoin which must arguably have a much larger energy usage. The thing about these 191K people is that Ethereum uses them just for transactions while people working in the banking industry will mo…

I ran out of HN time yesterday, so here's my delayed response.

> Most modern banks also don't manage transactions with employees anymore, they use computers to transact.

so, there's some of that carbon expenditure going into computers and networks to manage these transactions? Banks also use your money to make more money for themselves, does that bother you at all? considering that this thread started out by looking at things "holistically".

In any case, my point here isn't that crypto currencies are the best thing ever, but they're definitely a step in the right direction. I hope you can see the potential in these ideas and what they're trying to achieve. Basically, we need a system that can't be defeated with fraud, if everyone was honest we could just pass around a piece of paper and ask everyone to write down how much money they have and we'd be good, unfortunately that's not the case, as I see it, most of it is a just the cost of preventing cheating, we can certainly observe the current networks and come up with better ones in the future.

> Making a human is a net increase in entropy. Burning fuel is a net increase in entropy.

> This is not a fight you can win as the amount of energy you need to expend is magnitudes larger than the amount of entropy you decreased, actually, by the law of thermodynamics, any energy you expend to reduce entropy will produce an equal or larger amount of energy as a result. > Entropy may decrease temporarily in a locality but overall it will always increase inevitably.

so, are you suggesting that we stop reproduction and burning fossil fuels and slow down the "advance of entropy"? (or is it just bitcoin you want stopped?)

Also, "net increase" in what system?

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#299

Post by geofft »

3pt14159 wrote: post #278
darawk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...except that Tether long predates Bitfinex's wire issues. They're usable on many of the major exchanges (Bittrex, Poloniex, for example). Tether was explicitly created for the purpose of equalizing prices across exchanges. It's indeed possible that they're insolvent, but there is no real evidence of that, just lots of people speculating incessantly without much justification. Basically everything about the parent c…

I've been in Bitcoin for over 7 years. This type of back and forth is exactly what happened to Mt Gox. And you know what? My friend got the fuck out of Mt Gox before it burst. When you have to choose between following a pre-bankrun rumour or following unsubstantiated pushback, follow the rumour. It costs you maybe 5% to get out vs 100% if you're wrong and banks / money holders compete on assuring people that there is…

On a side note, the fact that bank runs are rational decisions and that no FDIC-style agency exists to change the incentives seems bad for cryptocurrency in general.

(Possible responses include both "the traditional financial system and fiat currency is actually pretty good" and "someone should run a reliable FDIC equivalent as a business for new exchanges and new coins".)

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#300

Post by shobith »

PeterisP wrote: post #248
shobith wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 em…

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

20K people (debatable) and a bunch of computers and networks which need to be managed by more people, and the infrastructure doesn't run on sunshine either (yet).

Without laboring the point, if your position is: * The methods applied by the crypto currencies waste more energy than our current system of currency.

I'll accept this, iff we make sure we've collected data rigorously and we notice that the difference is significant. Even then, there's no reason to give up on the idea of crypto currencies, we just have to make it more efficient.

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