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

$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 540 posts

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#371

Post by mdorazio »

mrb wrote: post #344
mgfist wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's actually a pretty bad transactional currency because it costs so much to transfer btc. So it's kinda the opposite, where people mostly hold it instead of transacting. The argument for a store of value is that of gold but easier to store and transfer, better security etc.. Whether it's a good one is for you to judge.

"costs so much to transfer btc" That's not true. The typical credit card processing fee ranges from about 1.3% to 3.5%. Average international remittance fees are about 7%. For comparison the average Bitcoin fee is about $1 right now, so 1% on a $100 transaction. So Bitcoin compares favorably to its competitors.

1) why are you comparing to credit cards? The average ACH transfer costs zero dollars.

2) why did you pick $100 as your basis? If I try to buy a $5 sandwich in Bitcoin and have to pay 20% transaction fee that is not a good platform for transactions.

I like some parts of crypto, but transaction fees on most coins right now are not one of those parts.

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#372

Post by throwanem »

vageli wrote: post #327
snovv_crash wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said on the other thread, there is a government with a police force backing fiat. They also guarantee they will buy the fiat currency and in exchange give you the continued use of the land you own. This is why it is called 'fiat', which means backed by law or authority.

Governments have demonstrated that they do not have to accept their own currency [0] and have demonstrated a willingness to drive the value of their currency down. [1] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932022_Turkish_curr...

Fortunately, one side effect of being long BTC is that the owner of the position becomes immune to bullets, batons, laws, liens, and civil actions.

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#373

Post by GaylordTuring »

j245 wrote: post #278
DonHopkins wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In a sense, the market is going to take that as kind of bullish. The Levenshtein distance from bullish to bullshit is only 3.

And the distance between love and glove is only 1.. who cares ?

No post body was provided.

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#374

Post by jtbayly »

vmception wrote: post #346
stingraycharles wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that it’s the plan, do they have any evidence (like transaction ids) that it actually happened? I haven’t followed this a lot but from what I gathered there’s not a lot of transparency around this. If so, why not?

There are transaction IDs to the exchanges There wont be transaction IDs after that because its not onchain You and the community could ask for an audit by an accounting firm like Deloitte, like the rest of the business world uses, itll come out a quarter or two from now leaving us all in exactly the same spot for now. The transparency expectations make almost no sense or lack inspiration.

Please explain why I should believe that the money was used for this purpose in a field where every other example I can find is a scam.

It seems incredibly unreasonable to assume that these particular people are goodies, when everybody they are with are baddies.

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#375

Post by TheAlchemist »

celestialcheese wrote: post #143
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 3.87% of Tether was backed by dollars: https://siliconangle.com/2021/05/13/tether-releases-reserve-... So it could drop pretty far.

That's a bit old - https://tether.to/en/transparency/#reports Closer to 50% tbills and cash. All caveated with if you trust MHA Cayman auditors. The other 50% could be anything, and likely sketchy as they are chasing yield and extremely cagey about revealing anything about their holdings.

It's not an auditor. They just signed an attestation, which is not even remotely close to an audit, saying that they saw the numbers Tether showed them - that's it !

If my memory is good, they even specifically mention in the attestation that they didn't see the details (just the aggregated numbers) and they didn't check the process by which the management calculated those numbers.

So yeah, it's taking much longer than most people expect, but the issue is certain - Tether will collapse to 0 at some point.

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#376

Post by romeros »

eric_cc wrote: post #90
snovv_crash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me, what assets exactly are backing BTC which stop it from crashing just like Luna?

LUNA minted trillions of brand new tokens within the span of a day or so rendering the token worthless. This is due to the way LUNA was tied to the algorithmic stablecoin UST. It was a true ponzi. BTC's max supply is capped and the release schedule of new coins is fixed and predictable. There is no possible way that trillions of new bitcoins could suddenly be created.

Polycat finance only had 3 Million Tokens. That's the max supply. There will never be more than 3 Million Tokens. And yet the price tanked and will never ever recover. It traded at $60 a piece. Now it is trading in cents.

Quant has only 12 Million Tokens. No new tokens will ever be created. It topped at $400 a piece. Now it is trading at $72. It could go down all the way to fractions of cents.

Reality doesn't matter. Perception of reality is all that matters. Likewise, Bitcoin could only ever have a 21 M supply cap and it could end up trading in fractions of cents just like the above two coins in the future.

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#377

Post by rubyfan »

snovv_crash wrote: post #201
eric_cc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LUNA minted trillions of brand new tokens within the span of a day or so rendering the token worthless. This is due to the way LUNA was tied to the algorithmic stablecoin UST. It was a true ponzi. BTC's max supply is capped and the release schedule of new coins is fixed and predictable. There is no possible way that trillions of new bitcoins could suddenly be created.

Luna crashed because people lost trust in it. The only reason people have trust in BTC is because other people have trust in it. If that ever changed, there is no actual use for a BTC, and they are thus intrinsically worthless. Fiat currency has the backing of a government. The government demands certain payments of this currency in order to own land, and also for some extra rights like mineral extraction, fishing li…

A better argument might be fiat currency is stable because governments hold a monopoly on violence.

But governments can be poorly run so I suppose “stable” is not the right word.

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#378

Post by GaylordTuring »

snovv_crash wrote: post #76
eric_cc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'this is good for bitcoin' A total ponzi scam coin crashed. This IS good for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not Luna nor is it one of the thousands of other garbage scam coins. The faster those coins are proven scams the better. Too many people falsely equate "Bitcoin === Crypto".. or "a fan of bitcoin is a fan of all crypto". So I'd bounce this back to you: How is Luna's Ponzi crash NOT good for bitcoin?

Tell me, what assets exactly are backing BTC which stop it from crashing just like Luna?

Nothing, but I guess I don’t have to tell you that, since your question seems rhetorical in Nature. However, what keeps BTC from crashing is the same psychological effect that keeps Twitter, Facebook, Nike, or Coca-Cola from crashing: Brand awareness.

Bitcoin sucks compared to many other cryptocurrencies, still it’s the most popular one because it was the first, because people know about it, and because people know that other people know about it.

Even if you could fork Twitter and put it behind a different domain name, for example , Twutter, and you would add some functionality that everybody would like to have (let’s say an edit button), most people would still go to Twitter.

If you could sell the rights to use the name Coca-Cola or Nike, even if you had to make it clear to the customer that the new product that you sold had nothing to do what so ever with old product, the names alone would be worth a couple of fortunes.

So what’s stopping Bitcoin from crashing is the brain virus (or meme if you want) that has infected hundreds of people around the globe and made them believe that other people will know about and believe that Bitcoin is valuable.

And since Bitcoin isn’t hooked up to a doomsday device like Luna and UST was, it can’t destroy itself.

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#379

Post by kemotep »

gardenhedge wrote: post #333
TomSwirly wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is still 1 BTC in this scenerio. You simply do not understand finance. Consider Eurodollars as another example: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eurodollar.asp

> You deposit 1 BTC, they loan it out to someone else. Boom, 2 BTC. Do you mean "they" purchase a second bitcoin with the second person's loan money? if not, where does the second bitcoin come from? (Hint: think about the blockchain)

Bitcoin is fungible. That Bitcoin doesn’t have to be *exactly* yours but they update their ledger and loan 1 BTC to someone after you deposit your 1 BTC into the bank account. Based on the interest rate of that loan, the bank is giving you a cut in Satoshis. If you choose to withdraw the 1 BTC before the other person’s loan is pid back, they must provide you 1 BTC. They can choose to take that 1 BTC from someone else’s account or use the profits they make in loans and other financial transactions to provide you that 1 BTC.

On the blockchain, there only exists the 1 you deposited, the 1 that was loaned, and the 1 that was generated as profit by the bank. The blockchain tracks these transactions. The bank only has to settle these transactions when someone withdraws and when someone is depositing. Internally, there can be as many or as little transactions are as necessary.

Re: $3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save UST from collapse

#380

Post by sudosysgen »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #322
j245 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the distance between love and glove is only 1.. who cares ?

This is actually a decent joke, buried under a dismissal.

Indeed. Similarly, the levenshtein distance between wrap and tap is 2.
Post reply on HN