Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
481–490 of 492 posts
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there is not sufficient USD to back them then its fraud. People purchased these securities relying on the representations they made about it being backed by USD.
Fraud does not automatically make it a Ponzi, and no custodial service will have sufficient USD on-hand at all times to cover everyone withdrawing their funds. The specific claim that was made by GP, and the claim that I see bandied around, is that Tether is a Ponzi scheme. Tether doesn't appear to share any characteristics with a Ponzi scheme, which is why I am puzzled to see people so adament it is one. The most im…
You give your money to X in order to facilitate buying Y. Y is a potential investment opportunity that promises explosive growth. X promises that your money is backed by cash, so there's nothing to lose. People give their money to X and purchase Y. Some people make loads of money and cash out.
How exactly is X making a profit when they're just working as an intermediary? Why do they absolutely refuse to show their finances? How exactly are they getting the resources to do all this?
Now, am I talking about Ponzi or Tether?
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#483Earlier 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 Everyone who holds Tether is holding Tether’s bag. If you don’t own tether, this doesn’t directly affect you. Most of the people I know don’t own (and have never owned) Tether.
How many people who didn’t invest directly in CDOs or subprime mortgages were affected by the Great Recession in 2008?
Tether (or a substitute stablecoin) is currently a requirement for lots of the Wall Street investment in cryptocurrencies. If it turns to poo, lots of that Wall Street investment does too and it creates huge liquidity/ volume issues.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody "fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software" almost certainly ran a whitebox computer shop, and was successful enough to get noticed and charged in a period where almost everybody's home computers ran pirated Windows and you could buy it on any street corner. In Italy to boot.
Yeah, it was common, but that doesn’t exactly help his case to regulate a currency taken as an equivalent of the US Dollar
Not arguing that, just saying he probably did run a successful electronics business for some time.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re criticism is based on payments you have not been paying attention to the space for the last 5 years. Anyway, it’s easy to make a circular argument of “people buy it because they are fools, and they are fools because they buy it.” You’ll be right whether it goes up or down so there’s not much of a debate to be had..
Well I'm glad we agree that Bitcoin has failed in its original purpose. Perhaps you can set straight all the people who argue otherwise? Because there sure are a lot of them. The trouble is, it doesn't actually have another one, not a practical one.
Payments is..part of the original purpose. And I think for everyday transactions Bitcoin has failed, so far. Lightning is a step in the right direction though, but it's not there in terms of UX. And volatility is obviously an issue.
If you are actually unaware, and not just arguing in bad faith, most development right now is happening on Ethereum and DeFi apps running on Ethereum. You can get collateralized loans, there are decentralized prediction markets, stuff like that.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone who holds cryptocurrency is holding Tether’s bag of poo Everyone who holds Tether is holding Tether’s bag. If you don’t own tether, this doesn’t directly affect you. Most of the people I know don’t own (and have never owned) Tether.
How many people who didn’t invest directly in CDOs or subprime mortgages were affected by the Great Recession in 2008? Tether (or a substitute stablecoin) is currently a requirement for lots of the Wall Street investment in cryptocurrencies. If it turns to poo, lots of that Wall Street investment does too and it creates huge liquidity/ volume issues.
"Then, this year, Tether Holdings started putting out a huge amount of digital coins. There are now 69 billion Tethers in circulation, 48 billion of them issued this year. That means the company supposedly holds a corresponding $69 billion in real money to back the coins—an amount that would make it one of the 50 largest banks in the U.S., if it were a U.S. bank and not an unregulated offshore company."
A Tether crash would take down a lot of stuff.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and live life to the fullest. Are we exchanging cliches now?
No, but you’re strongly implying that there’s significantly more chance of making a large return than losing a lot of money, which you have no way of knowing. The reason the rest of us on the other side of this fence aren’t being as loud is not because we consider the jury to be out - it’s because we’re being responsible with our claims. It’s why no-one is countering you with a claim that it’s all going to zero - as…
Skilled crypto day traders make money whether it goes up or down, that's what a large volatility makes possible. In fact, a real pro flips the charts: green when down, red when up.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I'm glad we agree that Bitcoin has failed in its original purpose. Perhaps you can set straight all the people who argue otherwise? Because there sure are a lot of them. The trouble is, it doesn't actually have another one, not a practical one.
Payments is..part of the original purpose. And I think for everyday transactions Bitcoin has failed, so far. Lightning is a step in the right direction though, but it's not there in terms of UX. And volatility is obviously an issue. If you are actually unaware, and not just arguing in bad faith, most development right now is happening on Ethereum and DeFi apps running on Ethereum. You can get collateralized loans, th…
Payment was the entirety of the original purpose. As the original paper says, "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash". The first sentence of the introduction starts with "Commerce on the Internet" and ends with "process electronic payments". It has failed both on "peer-to-peer" and "electronic cash". It makes no material difference to internet commerce. It has signally failed in its original purpose.
And yes, more development is always happening. Success is always in the future. Never mind that M-Pesa and Venmo and Android and Tesla all started around the same time. Uber and Lyft and Twitch and TikTok all launched years later. They all have actual success. None of them are hammers blundering around in search of a nail. None of them have to keep blowing smoke about the incredible future ahead.
But in the same way that Bitcoin is making no difference today in the real-world payment markets, none of that development is making a difference today in their equivalent markets. Colateralized loans, if they work, are 0% of the total colateralized loan market. Prediction markets have existed for more than 20 years. Adding "decentralized" doesn't make them better. Most of that "innovation" is in the category of dancing bears: the impressive part is not that the bear dances well, just that it's a bear doing the dancing.
But since you can't name a purpose, I'll just tell you: The actual current purpose of the whole circus is to enable assorted grifts. When Bitcoin got popular, that's what drove it: people seeking unearned wealth, and the people preying on the suckers with money to lose. That has kept snowballing, grift upon grift and with massive effort to create more suckers to keep the grifts going just a little longer.
Are there reasonable people caught up in this? Sure. As Madoff showed, many of the people involve on both sides of a Ponzi scheme are perfectly sincere believers. But neither their belief nor their sincerity changes the underlying truth: there is no value being created. Nobody can admit that, of course, so they just claim that the value creation is just down the road if only you hodl and believe hard enough.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
Payments is..part of the original purpose. And I think for everyday transactions Bitcoin has failed, so far. Lightning is a step in the right direction though, but it's not there in terms of UX. And volatility is obviously an issue. If you are actually unaware, and not just arguing in bad faith, most development right now is happening on Ethereum and DeFi apps running on Ethereum. You can get collateralized loans, th…
Payment was the entirety of the original purpose. As the original paper says, "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash". The first sentence of the introduction starts with "Commerce on the Internet" and ends with "process electronic payments". It has failed both on "peer-to-peer" and "electronic cash". It makes no material difference to internet commerce. It has signally failed in its original purpose. And y…
> Prediction markets have existed for more than 20 years. Adding "decentralized" doesn't make them better.
Prediction markets have probably existed for thousands of years, but this is where we disagree. Decentralization is a fundamental improvement to a betting market, because there is no longer a counterparty who is incentivized to cheat you when you win, or incentivized to take on so much risk that they cannot pay you back if they lose.
> Colateralized loans, if they work, are 0% of the total colateralized loan market.
You sure about that? There's nearly $100B locked in DeFi, although admittedly that's more than just collateralized loans.
You can disagree with that but the snarkyness of "you can't name a purpose" isn't necessary, I've named multiple. It's easy to find cases where a company took much longer to become successful that Uber and Lyft and ended up doing much better than both. I don't find that argument very compelling do you?
I think folks on either extreme of "cryptocurrency is going to eat the world" and "cryptocurrency is literally a trillion dollar scam" should really try to second guess themselves a bit. I think emotions get in the way a bit.
Re: Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
"Market cap" is not a real thing here, because it implies that there is an asset to value. Cryptocurrencies are synthetic commodities with no use value. Your basic theory here is that bubbles always keep going up, even if sometimes they go down. But that's not how bubbles work. Tulip bulbs did not "grind to all time highs like allways". Neither did Beanie Babies. They both fell back to something approximating their u…
The only part I agree with is the market cap part but my post already accounted for that and for good measure inflated the effect from 3% to 40%. Replace tulips in your sentence with money supply or assets and you'll get a different picture. You seem to have an unshakable opinion without having read the first thing about the subject, suggesting anything by Andreas Antonopoulos. edit: maybe something like "history of money", your "bubble" has been going since before writing.