71–80 of 327 posts
Crypto has made it easy for people to essentially start a bank, without actually thinking too much about or knowing how to build a vault properly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if "a whole bunch of people" equates more than 5 extremely vocal people on twitter and reddit. Tether published an audit a month ago.
It's time for a new kind of bank - a transparent bank. Exchanges could publish a daily report of their bank account balances for each currency along with a daily message signed by each cold-storage key. And the transparent bank would publish a daily record of balances for each account, which ties out to the bank's balance sheet. We wouldn't need to rely on historical audits, because we could do our own automated audi…
My guess is that the costs of doing this (security is quite hard: anything that can sign messages using cold storage keys can obviously also empty the cold storage, since transactions are simply signed messages) does not outweigh the demand for this. Most traders don't care (and subsequently get burned).
> And the transparent bank would publish a daily record of balances for each account
I think this is a terrible idea though. Even if done anonymous it gives way too much information about a market and its participants. IMO just use a merkle tree so everyone can check their own balance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who gave them all that USD? Where are they keeping it? They've been shunned by their US banking partners. They've basically been printing Tethers 50m at a time. The only thing they've released which attempted to show that they actually had the USD was something they called an "audit" which explicitly said "this is not an audit" [0] on the second page. When you go to withdraw from Tethers it basically says "if you don…
> When you go to withdraw from Tethers it basically says "if you don't have more than $50k in claims, go away" [1]. Suffice it to say that most of their customers don't have that. This is not how most people redeem tether, they go to any of a wide range of exchanges (kraken, poloniex, bittrex, etc) and trade whatever amount (from a dollar or whatever the minimum trade amount is).
If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters: Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times) about the level of involvement. The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for…
That is some backward logic there.
If there was 600 mio. USD of fake money used to trade bitcoin, it would have driven the price of bitcoin up (and the price of USD down).
Now we get that thing in reverse.
I'm super pumped and bullish about crypto and the whole idea of a decentralized world, but there's so much money involved right now (most of it speculative money, and arguably lots of illegal money), that there needs to be some real measures to ensure the security around it. Crypto has made it easy for people to essentially start a bank, without actually thinking too much about or knowing how to build a vault properl…
If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters: Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times) about the level of involvement. The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for…
This is incredible. How many times have cryptocurrency evangelists railed against phony fiat currency, only to be perfectly fine with an abstracted token that is backed by either fiat currency or nothing.
If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters: Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times) about the level of involvement. The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for…
Post-script: Is this good news for Bitcoin? ... That is some backward logic there. If there was 600 mio. USD of fake money used to trade bitcoin, it would have driven the price of bitcoin up (and the price of USD down). Now we get that thing in reverse.
If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters: Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times) about the level of involvement. The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system, which makes it impossible for…
Basically everything about the parent comment is factually incorrect. I'm not sure why it's so upvoted. I guess people just like scandal in the cryptocurrency world and would prefer to believe what comports with their preconceptions.