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Tether Critical Announcement

tether.to

321–327 of 327 posts

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#321
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They claim that they don't. If they do, that is a serious problem. Some of the exchanges have, but there is no evidence i'm aware of that points to any of the current major exchanges running a fractional reserve.

The issue is that once there is evidence there is a bank run. Mt Gox wasn't supposed to, but they did. And there are others out there that I hear rumours about having 5 or 10% of their reserves stolen from hot wallets. Sure it's fine if there is never a run, but it's worth pointing out that this is a real threat vector.

Ya, no argument from me there. It's definitely a threat. I just don't think it should be stated as fact that they do run fractional reserves without evidence of that.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#322
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>so, there's some of that carbon expenditure going into computers and networks to manage these transactions?

Yes, but a bit less, with high confidence.

>Banks also use your money to make more money for themselves, does that bother you at all?

Not really, miners in bitcoin also make money, don't they?

Additionally, European Banks announced they're starting SCT Inst, SEPA transactions which are confirmed in 15 seconds instead of overnight. My bank doesn't charge me fees for it.

Why bother with bitcoin's immense carbon footprint when it can't beat the lower effective carbon footprint of banks if they are faster and cheaper?

>but they're definitely a step in the right direction.

I can agree with that, but they need to fix things to be applicable for a wider audience.

> we can certainly observe the current networks and come up with better ones in the future.

I'm currently somewhat invested in Ethereum since they plan to go into PoS which would be immensely more efficient.

>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?)

No at all, just refuting that you can decreaser net entropy.

>Also, "net increase" in what system?

In the closed system that is the reachable universe. In any closed system, net entropy increases over time. That's nothing inherently bad, just a property of closed systems.

You can somewhat "cheat" and decrease entropy in some parts of the system but the entire system will increase or not decrease it's entropy.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#323
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ECB QE program keeps bond yields down (especially long term [riskier] ones), thereby pushing "interest rate" down, which has an inflatory effect. Now, the CPI in the Eurozone is about 1.3% now http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/hicp/publications/news-rele... .. and it was about 0.5% last year: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5v91Y9WQAEyM0j.jpg Yes, this drives bank savings account rates down to nothing, thus people ar…

CPI is fairly useless anyway. It ignores where the huge money displacements are actually going: hint, not bread and circuses. The money the ECB is displacing is institutional investors money and causes inflation in things like housing, stock markets, VC funds, and yeah, probably cryptocurrency.

Rent is included in the CPI, and it usually co-moves with housing prices .. and yet .. it means no difference: https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/other/mb201008_focus06.en.... (it's much more drastic in the US CPI - probably because more people own their homes in the EU and gentrification and other effects are a lot slower too? who knows..)

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is going to deposit 600 mill in a hacked exchange via Tether crypto-Hawala using Taiwanese shell bank accounts. People with real money would instead wire the funds to Gemini or ItBit or even a terribly managed company like Coinbase. KISS

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

Never store money on an exchange. Once you are done trading, get it out of there.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#325
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to the Mt Gox account holders... they don't seem too happy that their BTC claims have been converted to JP¥

They were plenty happy with it when BTC was crashing. People just like to whine. Converting to JPY in MtGox's case and USD in Bitfinex's case was the reasonable thing to do. Denominating massive debts in cryptocurrency is an insane thing in a market this young and volatile.

I don't think this was terribly good for them when bitcoin was crashing either, because it still ate into the amount they'd get paid out since the underlying assets were still partially in bitcoins. The bankruptcy trustee basically gave Mark Karpeles free options on bitcoin with all the customers he'd screwed over as forced counterparties.

Re: Tether Critical Announcement

#327
post #207

Tether is handling this completely wrong. They should not hard fork Omni and force everyone to blacklist addresses. Instead, tell everyone to halt on-chain trading, take a snapshot of the chain, then create a new tether token and send them to everyone holding the old tethers (minus the thief). I think the bitcoins Tether would have to pay in transfer fees would be a fitting punishment for their poor security.

Tether uses the Bitcoin blockchain (omnilayer) to store transactions. To do that they'll need to rewrite the block chain (150gb).

Not the entire chain or even the entire omni chain, they only need to send coins to the current endpoints holding tether.
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