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Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

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Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#361

Post by arcticbull »

smabie wrote: post #251
fabianhjr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All shorting consists on 5 steps: 1. Borrow 2. Sell 3. Wait 4. Buy back 5. Close There is USDT lending available. Even more, there is decentralized collateralized lending available. If someone wanted to short USDT there are plenty of opportunities to do so. (And there might be a lot of people doing so, specially now that the shadyness is being reported on some of the more reputable traditional newspapers)

Also you can trade the USDT/USD swaps as well

You can only do that at exchanges that are seriously exposed to systemic Tether risk and will also collapse if USDT goes down. So even if you're right, you won't get paid on USDT/USD swaps. Shorting USDT at Bitfinex is like shorting Caesars chips at Caesars. News flash: if Caesars goes bankrupt just which cashier do you think is gonna give you which dollars?

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#362

Post by arcticbull »

ikeboy wrote: post #241
fny wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how exactly do you short stablecoins? You can't and even if you did the game is heavily rigged against you. If you remember in the movie, Cohodes got his ass handed to him as banks margin called him out of his position and that's in a regulated market. These guys own their market and the exchange on which it originates. There's no way to even verify if they received dollars for every tether issued and by some mir…

Very easy to do on FTX or aave for basically as much size as you'd like. Yes, it costs 4-5% a year to short. If it blows up in the next few years you'd make a killing though.

If USDT blows up FTX goes down with it, and they won't pay you out. That's just a 4-5% annual donation to SBF.

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#363

Post by arcticbull »

qeternity wrote: post #349
arcticbull wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Separately from all this, there are SPX options, they're cash-settled European index options (for those on the sidelines American options can be exercised any time up to expiry, European only on the day of expiry) with a $100/tick notional contract value. They're super useful if you want to trade indices (as compared to say SPY options) because you don't have to deal with dividend-triggered exercise risk and they off…

Yes, you've got the CBOE crap, you've got a gazillion other smaller venues, and you've got desks at every bank which will write you options on whatever you like. OP is talking about trading ES and SPX, and it was more likely they had confused it with SPY given the other confusion around tick sizes and given the size of the big daddy SP contract (and the language suggested this person had just gone to the CME site and…

Thanks for your perspective! I always love hearing what finance folks think about all this.

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#364

Post by johanneskanybal »

wpietri wrote: post #207
FireBeyond wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Bitfinex uses Deltec as their bank. A bank that claimed at the start of this year that they were "55 years old and whose customers were predominantly asset managers and high net worth individuals", until they did a website redesign (more on that below) and overnight were "70 years old". A bank that had a 33 year old "Deputy CEO" who gave interviews from his gaming rig. Who claimed to have graduated from HEC Lau…

> I keep waiting for Yakety Sax to start playing, but to the true believers, it never does, and apparently all us nay-sayers are just neanderthal and don't see "the vision". It reminds me of the initial dot-com bubble, where anybody who asked questions was also painted as not getting it. Ditto the mortgage bubble, come to think of it. Then when the inevitable crash comes, nobody apologizes. It's either "who could hav…

I don't think that's fair, these concerns have been around for probably five years plus and get a lot of media attention. As someone invested in this area it does get a bit old and counter productive being scared of the various boogie mens while missing all the enormous upside so far.

After all, tether is 3% of total market cap, I think it's fair to say the effect if they disappeared tomorrow would be a bit bigger than that in an emotional market, might see a 40% dip or so but after that greed would make a recovery pretty fast and then grind to all time highs like allways. my five cents.

edit: As the Dothraki slaves would say it, tether has pretty scummy people behind it, it is known. but that's ok.

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#365

Post by acdha »

cinntaile wrote: post #217
acdha wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who outside of the cryptocurrency industry would notice if they disappeared? Who outside of the automotive industry would notice if cars disappeared? That's your answer: pollution is still a concern but only one of those is balanced against significant real-world benefits for people other than the sellers.

I was thinking about miners, they get bitcoins as a reward for helping to keep the network secure. So what I'm saying is that they get rewarded for their work in much the same way that all the cogs in the supply chain machine get rewarded for their work. There are just fewer steps. There's interplay with other actors of course, the people that trade bitcoin are one of those actors. This kind of interaction also exist…

> But yes if cars would disappear this would have an impact on more people simply because there are more people involved in the manufacturing process.

I was thinking more about the impact on users, not just producers. There are millions of people living in low-density housing where they have limited alternatives to go to work, shop, etc. – maybe e-bikes could be an option for some but in most cases you’d be talking redesign of entire cities. Many, many businesses would be disrupted - some fatally.

That’s what it looks like for people outside of an industry to depend on a technology. This can be seen especially in the case of the web: 30 years ago, a company in San Francisco making a mistake would not have meant that people in cities around the world would have trouble communicating or taking orders from customers. People find WhatsApp so useful that they based their daily life on it. Repeat for online ordering, advertising, support, etc.

Contrast with Bitcoin: statistically, almost nobody uses it for business or personal transactions and the few who do almost always have alternatives — usually cheaper and faster, if ideologically unsatisfying. If it disappeared tomorrow, there would be no lines at stores, no accountants wondering how to pay suppliers, nobody waiting for their paycheck or unable to get a mortgage.

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#366

Post by smoyer »

hedberg10 wrote: post #350
smoyer wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow ... I'm realizing what a completely unremarkable education and career I have. I've been a CTO twice but perhaps this shows what it would take to be a deputy CEO.

Well, I'll have you know I graduated summa cum laude from Lemönade Ständ Universität, which is a very prestigious institution in Luxemburg, when I was 6.

Whoa ... I can tell it's prestigious because it has three accented letters in its name!

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#367

Post by sinsterizme »

r_power_user wrote: post #271
qeternity wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Binance: buy $1m BTC/USDT CME: short $1m BTC futures (which are dollar settled and thus BTC/USD) On Binance you are long BTC, and short USDT. On CME you are short BTC and long USD (implicitly on the fiat legs). So if we add that up, the BTC positions net off and you’re just left with short USDT and long USD which is the desired outcome. In practice, if Tether implodes I would expect everyone to sell Tether (by buying…

I'm not quite sure I follow - in the event that Tether implodes, if you expect the long $1m BTC/USDT exposure to be worthless (assuming you lose the money you had on Binance, and Binance goes under), and your short BTC/USD exposure to make money (since it's a short position, you can only make 100% gain at maximum), doesn't that net out to zero PnL (-$1m loss in long BTC/USDT, and +1m gain in short BTC/USD)? Unless I'…

I think because shorting futures is a leveraged position so max profit is more than 100%

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#368

Post by beefield »

drfxyjhdyfrhgc wrote: post #296
dustintrex wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you gamble your entire investment on that? If Tether collapses, there will be major outflows from all stablecoins, and we'll find out which ones have been swimming naked.

I would. I'd wager Tether's collapse would cause inflows to other stablecoins. It's also worth noting that smart contract based stablecoins, such as DAI, are incapable of being under-collateralized.

>are incapable of being under-collateralized.

Knowing pretty much zero about DAI (and honestly, not too interested to spend any time to learn), this still sounds incredible. Does that incapability hold even if prices of whatever underlying assets are not continuous? Like, at one point of time the asset is trading at 100 dollars, and at the very next moment it trades at 1, with no possibility for anyone to trade at 50 at any point in between?

I very much assume not. If you think that is laughably stupid to assume that prices would not be continuous, well, you are in good company, even some Economics Nobelists have fallen on that trap. And lost billions. In that case you may want to spend some time researching what comes up when you search for LTCM.

Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?

#369

Post by saalweachter »

adflux wrote: post #136
Ice_cream_suit wrote: post #120

LOL ! "The chief financial officer is Giancarlo Devasini, a former plastic surgeon from Italy who was once described on Tether’s website as the founder of a successful electronics business. The only reference to him that turned up in a search of Italian newspapers showed he was once fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software. Elsewhere on the website, there’s a letter from an accounting firm stating that Tether…

Tether most likely holding CHINESE paper. The kind that probably lost a lot of value in the past weeks. Follow BennettTomlin on Twitter, he has been researching tether for years.

I assumed their "$30B of commercial paper" was just the owners' other company.
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