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Fears grow over Tether ‘printing press’ as auditors part ways

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Re: Fears grow over Tether ‘printing press’ as auditors part ways

#61

Post by elif »

joosters wrote: post #11
elif wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is /possible/ that their books add up, in a technical sense which would make wall street blush. They never claim that USDT are backed up by USD. They claim that every USDT is backed up 1:1 by "Assets." Here's the scene: BFX is hacked, loses banking, and has tens of thousands of crypto millionaires ready to sue them. What they /do/ have is cold storage of lots of crypto under their control. Say they start with 0 ho…

From their homepage: Every tether is always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves

traditional is not a technical qualifier, as far as i'm aware.

If you were trying to assert that something was equivalent to dollars, and were backing it by dollars, would you say "traditional currency"? or would you say "US Dollars"?

Re: Fears grow over Tether ‘printing press’ as auditors part ways

#62

Post by tim333 »

Animats wrote: post #29

How's Kraken doing? They have a market for USDT/USD, and claim they will do a wire transfer to a US bank for $5. Do they actually deliver on that? Or do they stall and make excuses? It would be worthwhile for some trader to deposit a few hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin with Kraken, convert it to USD, and order a wire transfer. Repeat this every few days to see how well the process works. (In the real world, when you…

I'm fairly sure Kraken is ok. They just treat USDT as another coin. They also let you short USDT, the only place you can I think.

Re: Fears grow over Tether ‘printing press’ as auditors part ways

#63

Post by tim333 »

Jasper_ wrote: post #55
vkou wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well there's a notional $2.2bn worth of Tether that someone's holding on to, which is certainly enough to have got the price of a perceived buy-and-hold asset like BTC moving a lot. This is what I don't get - who on Earth thinks that being long USDT is a good idea. Are they expecting the USD to dissapear? USDT to go to the moon? I understand having to own USDT to get your money out of exchanges that don't deal with…

People are holding Tether and don't realize it. Most BTC/USD exchanges aren't BTC/USD exchanges, they're BTC/USDT exchanges, but that "T" is stuffed behind an asterisk. People that want to make profits don't realize they're not actually cashing out for $10k, they're cashing out for 10k USDT. As soon as they wired USD to one of these exchanges, they were stuck holding USDT. They could take the BTC and run to another e…

The fees for cashing out via Kraken are way less than 10%.

Also checking just now bitcoin is trading for about usd 8100 on Kraken and usdt 8060 on Kucoin so there doesn't seem much problem at the moment there.

Re: Fears grow over Tether ‘printing press’ as auditors part ways

#64

Post by tim333 »

vkou wrote: post #60
Jasper_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are holding Tether and don't realize it. Most BTC/USD exchanges aren't BTC/USD exchanges, they're BTC/USDT exchanges, but that "T" is stuffed behind an asterisk. People that want to make profits don't realize they're not actually cashing out for $10k, they're cashing out for 10k USDT. As soon as they wired USD to one of these exchanges, they were stuck holding USDT. They could take the BTC and run to another e…

That is amazing. So, the exchanges turn USD into USDT, and the reason they sucker people into that trade is because you can buy more BTC on them... Because BTC is the only way that you can get wealth out of the exchange. So, USDT is not actually useful to anyone, except people trying to fleece crypto-traders. I love we are re-inventing all the best parasitic parts of the fiat financial ecosystem.

Well not really - the main reason exchanges use USDT rather than USD is so as to not to have to deal with KYC like regulations associated with holding USD.

Re: Fears grow over Tether ‘printing press’ as auditors part ways

#65

Post by tim333 »

lowdest wrote: post #46
notahacker wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there's a notional $2.2bn worth of Tether that someone's holding on to, which is certainly enough to have got the price of a perceived buy-and-hold asset like BTC moving a lot. If you can issue yourself newly minted Tether notionally worth a dollar and exchange your own BTC for it on your own exchange it's also dead easy to start pumping the price with wash trades (in theory you could do this by faking USD trans…

How does a wash trade pump the price any differently than just using a large buy order?

Large buy orders are normal and may execute leading to you buying stuff. Wash trades are fakery to make it look like money's being invested when it isn't.
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