The money stuff newsletter is less sensationalistic and more interesting and forward looking: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-07/matt-l...
… and sourced from the same Bloomberg article under discussion.
Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
411–420 of 492 posts
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve seen this happen in companies with stupid projects. Same thing happened with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Anyone who dares ask questions is ignored, sidelined, or fired. Seems to be a general pattern when there is an economic or policy “bubble” and big players in an organization or sector are holding the bag. Everyone who holds cryptocurrency is holding Tether’s bag of poo. No they are not even the majority of…
> Everyone who holds cryptocurrency is holding Tether’s bag of poo. Or they recognize you can't time the market, and see upside despite a nearly-inevitable tether crash? If investors had been waiting for tether to crash they would have missed the run from $1k - $30+k, and I don't think you can claim with a straight face that was all tether manipulation. Again, can't time the market.
What you describe is timing the market though? Specifically, getting in on a run with confidence you can get out before the crash.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#413Seems there is a (very large) market for a legit version of Tether. What's stopping some other company from doing what Tether does with more traditional commercial paper / US based short term loans / govt. bonds / etc.?
There are multiple alternatives that are far more trustworthy.
What I don’t understand is why market participants don’t use those rather than Tether. If I had a bunch of Tether today, why wouldn’t I move it to USDC or similar?
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#414The biggest news, buried near the bottom: "After I returned to the U.S., I obtained a document showing a detailed account of Tether Holdings’ reserves. It said they include billions of dollars of short-term loans to large Chinese companies—something money-market funds avoid. And that was before one of the country’s largest property developers, China Evergrande Group, started to collapse. I also learned that Tether ha…
So they are doing banking, lending deposits at interest, without any regulation or oversight. I think we know from history how that story ends.
Not uncommonly, what looks like a shortcoming of existing systems to an innovator, is actually an important feature that you will suffer from the absence of. Sometimes cryptocurrencies seem like they're recapitulating the history of money and banking, without having learned any of the lessons from it.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
So your logic is that big, known entities can’t go bankrupt or be scams?
No, the logic is that it is less likely. Anyways, Coinbase allows on-demand conversion of USDC to USD so you really only have to hold the USDC (and Coinbase’s counterparty risk) for about a day for that process to complete. At some point that window might close but given that Coinbase is a publicly traded stock in the US and must report financials, there is quite a bit less risk compared to Tether.
Bernie Madoff was the chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. Being a known entity with cred doesn’t mean anything.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
This happens for most things which are critical of cryptocurrencies, unproven COVID-19 treatments, etc. There's a group of people who try to flag them off of the homepage but the moderators appear to block that after confirming that the article is of legitimate interest.
It's a shame folks flagging things in bad faith have that much power.
Yeap – I think it also shows how a lot of our traditional management techniques were more effective when it was more mischief or small-scale campaigns, rather than when a lot of people have an ideological or financial motive to coordinate. The Metafilter approach is expensive to scale, not everyone wants it, and I don't see too many other successes dealing with this.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#417Soylets, have you seen the gold in fort knox?
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely you can provide a source for that (where exactly this was said)? As far as I have seen they dont show anything demonstrating this. And this tin foil hat theory about tether pumping btc has been debunked repeatedly.
It was in the NYAG settlement. [1] Transcripts here. [2] Merlin is Bitfinex/Tether CFO Giancarlo Devasini. [3] Oz and CCC is Oz Yosef - their contact at the Panamanian money launderer Crypto Capital Corp. Here, they parked almost $1B of co-mingled funds without a contract at all and had it seized by various world authorities. Merlin [15.10.18 10:01] I need to provide customers with precise answer at this point, can't…
Just to be clear, none of what you've provided concludes that tether manipulated (pumps) the btc market. Its still a tin foil hat theory from people who just dont like cryptocurrecy.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#419Earlier 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'…
The loss is in usdt, which is now worthless and easy to get 1 million units of to repay.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>LPs are not something you have to "be in"; >Uh, if you’re not in it, then you’re not providing liquidity. Why did you cut off the rest of that sentence, which clarifies that I was referring to traders not having to be in an LP to accept an offer (sorry, "remove liquidity")? People who really have some deep, coherent insight don't have to resort to that. Furthermore, the point was that, even though you provide liqui…
Alright, last attempt. I never said anything about other traders being in the same liquidity pool or whatever you think I said. Let me spell it out. Let’s say I want to be a market maker on Binance, in both BTC/USD and ETH/USD. Let’s say that I have a strategy where I can provide $5m in liquidity to each of those markets (i.e. $5m of orders for other traders to aggress) for a total of $10m of liquidity. But because m…
That ... isn't your last attempt, actually. It's your first; you haven't said anything like this before, even though it would have been the natural thing to bring up in any of your three previous replies. Why you didn't, I can't tell.
Now that I see what you're saying, it still doesn't prove what you think it does. If you can remember back to the original point, the question was whether DEXes can be manipulated to the point of forcing margin calls. I was skeptical, since we have seen localized flash crashes on CEXes (when you insist are not possible because of super-easy inter-CEX arbitrage) that forced liquidations, while we have not seen that on DEXes [1].
I further expressed skepticism since any manipulation would have to be via "stupidly" overpaying in one direction on one LP, which would just draw traders -- from the entire market -- in to exploit the price difference, and correct it.
You kept appealing to the MM capital-inefficiency issue, but that isn't relevant because my point was that the counteracting force is from liquidity consumers, not providers -- the traders that accept the LPs' (formulaic) offers, and profit from the attempts to artificially push the price one direction across the entire market.
Your latest reply feels like a further confusion, because (AFAICT) you're effectively saying, "Don't worry, CEXes are more manipulation-resistant because I can falsely represent myself as being able to trade in $10m when I only have $1m".
If anything, that would mean they're more vulnerable to false signals about price support/resistance: If you can't actually put in $10m, you weren't really providing $1m of liquidity, and DEXes simply make this transparent.
[1] though arcticbull mentions a case where the value could be propped up for a similar kind of attack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28798110