Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

kalzumeus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 336 posts

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#311

Post by Grimburger »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #298
eis wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that is not what happened. Grimburger did not offer (from his point of view) worse odds than 1:1. And patio11 refused 1:1 because it was apparently not interesting to him. Now one could take that as a salesmans tactic to try and extract better odds from Grimburger but at that point the monetary aspect would become the focus and not the wager itself. A wager between two people who are in it for the sport and b…

Patrick refused because other people were offering worse odds...

25:1 is not _worse_ odds. He wants me to pay $125,000 if he wins the bet, yet if he loses he gives me $5,000. Surely you can see what that says about the level of confidence here.

The emperor is clearly not wearing any clothes.

There's lame horses that get better odds in races than what is being offered to me if Tether collapses (and even recovers in a few days after that) right now.

The peg just needs to collapse for a tiny fraction of the next year for them to win this wager. Why wouldn't anyone take such a guaranteed profit? :)

And to be fair I doubt it's the loss of money that scares Patrick, it's the USDT/USD price on May 21st 2023.

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#312

Post by imtringued »

zionic wrote: post #122
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whether Tether is fully collateralized ultimately doesn't matter. As long as there are well-capitalized parties (Bitfinex, other exchanges) that want to prop up Tether, it will be fine This is true for every pile of toxic crap that's ever been financially engineered. The problem is the entangled financial health of the backer (in this case, Bitfinex and other crypto exchanges) with the backee (Tether). If creditors…

>This is true for every pile of toxic crap that's ever been financially engineered. I have a radical idea that I'm fairly sure would get me killed if I ever stood a chance of implementing it: A complete ban on all non-productive financial schemes. We have an entire parasite class that grown unfathomably wealthy while providing no real value to the rest of society. The "futures trader" extracting value from the system…

This is like the Christian ban on charging interest in theory it is doing it for a worthy cause but in practice just banning something isn't the answer because it doesn't address the source of the problem.

In efficient markets profits trend toward zero so having more traders will accomplish that goal better than banning traders. It is the same with interest, interest goes to 0% if there is enough saved capital to fund all investments banning interest makes it harder for the interest rate to go down.

It would be better if we built an economy that can handle low amounts or even zero profit by eliminating the dependency on yearly growth.

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#313

Post by imtringued »

clairity wrote: post #289
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> banks can be limited to originating loans on 100% security of material personal property such as crops, livestock, cheese, gold, lumber, steel The problem isn't getting loans on one's crops. It's transferring the price risk to someone better able to bear it. Farmers want a guaranteed profit when they plant. Loans don't address that. Futures do. (It's why they were invented, in the 17th century, by the Dutch and Jap…

futures don't guarantee a profit, only a price. it's up to the farmer to decide whether the price is worth the planting (regardless of profit). and the pricing function only works well in an uncorrupt market. the problem isn't the existence of the futures markets, but the same kind of over-consolidation that corrupts every laissez faire market, making them inefficient and brittle in the long-run. if regulation encour…

You mean growth dependence. When you are forced to grow every year and you can't grow by getting new customers you must steal existing customers from other companies by acquiring them.

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#314

Post by imtringued »

api wrote: post #255
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> complete ban on all non-productive financial schemes I surprised myself by how sympathetic I am to this proposal, given I've made a career in finance. The problem, however, is separating productive from unproductive schemes ex ante . > "futures trader" extracting value from the system buying/selling futures has done no "real" work, their profit comes exclusively from making others pay more Great example. In 1958, t…

> I surprised myself by how sympathetic I am to this proposal, given I've made a career in finance. The problem, however, is separating productive from unproductive schemes ex ante. This is just the finance sector subset of the larger problem of bullshit jobs. We know a substantial fraction of jobs are bullshit (non-value-creating), but which ones? I have a strong suspicion this is unsolvable because any metric you s…

>The only foolproof way we know of to reduce the number of bullshit jobs is brutal recession,

That is a very convoluted way of implementing negative yields.

Because people want to avoid losses associated with negative interests they instead do the inflation thing and pretend there are no losses, the discrepancy between book value and real world value grows ever bigger as the book value is not representing losses in the real economy. The moment sentiment even dares to look at a downward trend poof reality has come back from its slumber. Negative yield is coming out of hiding, all at once.

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#315

Post by imtringued »

kristjansson wrote: post #211
steveBK123 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose a ban on all non-productive trips by car. Only good people should be allowed to emit carbon unless for productive reasons that pass the carbon threshhold for the amount of carbon the trips will emit. Good people as defined by a social credit system. I will decide what is a productive reason & what is the carbon threshhold! People totally have the option of living under this type of government - it exists in…

This is a great idea! We could break ones social credit down into units. What to call them ... Rallods, maybe? Everyone could earn Rallods for doing productive, pro-social things. People could even send some of the Rallods to each other, in exchange for taking on productive, pro-social task they'd prefer not to do. Rallods could even be exchanged for goods! Oh wait ...

A lot of rich people want more money not because they need it but rather because they want money to act as social credit and therefore they want to maximize this number even though other people need the money more.

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#316

Post by imtringued »

throwaway0x7E6 wrote: post #183
zionic wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is true for every pile of toxic crap that's ever been financially engineered. I have a radical idea that I'm fairly sure would get me killed if I ever stood a chance of implementing it: A complete ban on all non-productive financial schemes. We have an entire parasite class that grown unfathomably wealthy while providing no real value to the rest of society. The "futures trader" extracting value from the system…

why stop there? lets ban all activity that doesn't produce tangible goods. the number of parasites, i.e. people who consume tangible goods but don't produce them, is probably higher than the number of people who do fields, mines and factories. we don't need anything else

That would eliminate most engineering jobs because engineering doesn't produce tangible goods, only manufacturable designs of tangible goods.

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#317

Post by a2800276 »

kayamon wrote: post #261
a2800276 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there though? Where can I use Bitcoin to buy gift cards redeemable for: milk, underwear, dentist, train tickets, a visit to the barber? ( These being the five everyday purchases I last made.)

bitrefill.com

Don't think my dentist or barber want to be paid in GameStop gift cards and I feel giving some company with an intentionally obfuscated corporate structure non-refundable tokens in the hope they'll purchase a voucher which according to them may or may not pass Amazon's fraud detection Algo the same as "purchasing a gift card".

Ignoring that, it's still about the farthest thing from a "circular economy" imaginable...

I can't really imagine any motivation for buying milk in this fashion unless I'm seriously into tax evasion. So good luck buying day to day shit with gift cards once you've had to move to El Salvador to evade the IRS... Which is incidentally one of the jurisdictions bitrefill.com is incorporated in.

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#318

Post by marvin »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #238
DebtDeflation wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so on March 25, 2020 he predicted that there was going to be a coronavirus pandemic (and that Japan would be impacted)? The WHO had already declared a global pandemic on March 12, 2020 and there was no reason to believe that Japan or any other country would be spared.

> Japan will face a national health crisis within a month. (spoiler: they didn't)

You have a strange definition of national health crisis. Almost every modern economy faced a national health crisis in 2020.

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#319

Post by s1artibartfast »

giaour wrote: post #237
CyanBird wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to stick it to the man for real? Buy Iranian government bonds, Venezuelan government bonds, Bolivian government bonds, etc Will you get a return? Not all that likely (not unlikely either) , but you would indeed be sticking it to "the man" Buying tether? Ha heck no

I'm pretty sure the man will stick it back to you if you follow this advice.

It's not illegal afaik

Re: Tether Required Recapitalization in May 2022

#320

Post by steveBK123 »

imtringued wrote: post #315
kristjansson wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great idea! We could break ones social credit down into units. What to call them ... Rallods, maybe? Everyone could earn Rallods for doing productive, pro-social things. People could even send some of the Rallods to each other, in exchange for taking on productive, pro-social task they'd prefer not to do. Rallods could even be exchanged for goods! Oh wait ...

A lot of rich people want more money not because they need it but rather because they want money to act as social credit and therefore they want to maximize this number even though other people need the money more.

There are a class of people for which money is more of a scoreboard which I think is what you are getting at here.

I think for most rich people, having a lot of money means, as ironic as it sounds, not having to think about money.

Growing up fairly middle class and eventually making a lot of money once I made it out on my own, the types of tortured price comparison shopping & concerns that my parents made (and I did my first 5 years of career) are just not something I worry about.

Being able to just go to a grocery store and fill the basket/cart until I have everything I want (NOT need, and without checking every items price and cross checking every price option for every items competitors), and then pay whatever it rings up to.

Doing weird as it sounds things like - cross shopping a $40k & $120k car because, well, they both sort of hit different parts of my interest lists.. and maybe I just keep my current car + add the $40k, vs trading in towards the $120k.. or really.. who cares, just buy the $120k car anyway.

Being able to knowingly overpay for home repair/renovation contractors because they give you a much higher level of confidence, communication and convenience. We got 3 bids, the guy who was 2x the price of the other guys was just such a professional we decided to go with him. He was like dealing with a professional tech/bank project manager rather than a squirrel guy you can't get hold of.. He started on time, finished days early, went not a penny over budget and gave us start&end of day updates with plans of attack for the next day.

Meanwhile some of our friends who did not have budget to pick the highest bidder had contractors disappearing to do work on other houses, had to call their contractor daily to force him to show up, had guy starting the work day at 2pm and then taking an hour lunch break, and every other crazy home renovation story you hear where 2 weeks of work takes 3 months.

So for those outside the billionaire class, being rich mostly means not having to deal with the inconveniences of being on a budget.

Post reply on HN