Some Tether Info

Ah, confused the circulating supply

That is one of the worst memes that Veeky Forums has ever had, and I've thought that way ever since it appeared all those years ago. So, no, I'm not.

It happens.

> knowing what lr is

Either fed or old school.

I see you are a man of culture enough to be too cultured to enjoy someone saying they consider you a man of culture as well as well.

It's simply that you have very low standards of expecting people to know the slightest bit about anything.

On Veeky Forums? Yes of course I do. Why wouldn't I? That'd be ignorant of myself and dangerous.

I didn't say you shouldn't do that.
It's simply that as a heuristic, it isn't always right.
I entirely agree. I was stating the obvious.

Can you separate the printing before and after the hack.

Well since we both know what lr is. Would it be tether going or btc? Cause there both currencies in a sense.

I think the first mention of tether on MSM is a good indicator to hold USD till the dust settles

All of crypto collapses if Tether gets exposed in the mainstream.
Literally all of it. People will never trust it again.

Which "hack"?
A more applicable separation would be when they lost banking, but I didn't bother.
All that was issued was quarantined from that.
Just look at the date the "hack" occurred and see how much since then.

I don't think Bitcoin is going anywhere.

What if, yes, they're scam artists, but they're also doing fractional reserves?

Like they blew $900m on coke and yachts, but left behind $100m to pay for redemptions and shit.

If they are doing fractional reserves, then they are lying on their site about being back 1:1 USD.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kübler-Ross_model
You're at bargaining.

As for Tether as a "store of value", look at those intraday changes in percent, as reported by CoinMarketCap anyway.

Normal person:

> A: I have 1.1 billion USD on my bank account
> B: Prove it!

Retard:

> A: I have 1.1 billion USD on my bank account
> B: Ok, I believe you.

Sorry, to be clear, I do agree with you. 100% guaranteed they're scamming.

My point was if they have fractional reserves, that'll stave off any bank runs or whales trying to call their bluff by redeeming $50m in Tether at once or whatever. The scam would end up lasting 2 years instead of 6 months or whatever.

Ah, but that's where you are wrong.
You CAN'T redeem Tether. It says so in their terms of service. USDT is not redeemable for anything.

I mean, you can certainly TRY to redeem it, but good luck. Kraken technically has USDT-USD, but good luck trying to do anything with that at scale.

tether.to/legal/

Purchase and Redemption of Tethers: The Site is an environment for the purchase and redemption of Tethers. Once you have Tethers, you can trade them, keep them, or use them to pay persons that will accept your Tethers. However, Tethers are not money and are not monetary instruments. They are also not stored value or currency.
There is no contractual right or other right or legal claim against us to redeem or exchange your Tethers for money. We do not guarantee any right of redemption or exchange of Tethers by us for money. There is no guarantee against losses when you buy, trade, sell, or redeem Tethers

I know. It just sounds to me like they're allowing themselves to back out of redemption at any time (e.g. stopping after redeeming $100m or whatever fraction of money they actually have).

or at $0

If you could give yourself unlimited money and seem to get away with doing so, would you?

Keep in mind that by doing so, you can buy Bitcoin or whatever else and retail shops that accept it will essentially be giving you everything for free.

can someone please explain what is happening w/ tether? why is this even a crypto? it seems super sketchy

Yeah, I think we agree. I dunno, this is like 2007 and we're both saying "these subprime mortgages are complete dogshit. none of these bonds are AAA."

The timing of the defaults & exact percentage of dogshit-ness might inform us when to bail, but, I dunno, what next?

If they're smart, they realize they can keep the scam going and print even more by keeping a modicum of "yeah you can totally redeem for USD". The question is whether they're smart.

If your method was transparent and you could easily get caught would you still do it?

It's a crypto for people who can't traffic in actual dollars in a real banking system but need something roughly as stable to transact with in crypto land.

Theoretically the issuer only prints more USDT when they get more USD and the 1:1 match is audited and everything. Except they're fly-by-night people in Taiwan and no one's actually confirmed any auditing.

Total crypto market cap is about $550 billion and there are about $1.1 billion Tether. For comparison, in 2008 the ratio of subprime defaults:credit market as a whole reached about 1:25.

In addition, it's used for arbitrage because it's moved much more quickly than actual USD.

Bitfinex may as well be all USDT since can't deposit or withdraw USD from there, despite the pair saying USD. That vastly increases the amount of volume. Basically doubles it.

I guess what I am confused about is that they should have equivalent assets in crypto even if they don't have USD to match correct?

example: I send 1 bitcoin to tether for 10,000 USD that they don't have. they still have 1 bitcoin that they can sell for USD when necessary if enough of their customers demand the USDT to USD conversion, correct?

That's irrelevant since can't withdraw USD.
Also, Americans aren't allowed on Bitfinex any longer.

>example: I send 1 bitcoin to tether for 10,000 USD that they don't have. they still have 1 bitcoin that they can sell for USD when necessary if enough of their customers demand the USDT to USD conversion, correct?

Correct. They'll also have plenty of USD proper (from peoples' initial deposits, where they got back newly printed USDT).

The question is, since they're not audited, whether they've obediently sat on over a billion dollars worth of USD/BTC/etc. Or whether they're blowing some/all of it on coke and yachts.

If it's just "some", that's the fractional reserving I mentioned here:

>They'll also have plenty of USD proper (from peoples' initial deposits
Seems unlikely that they've received over $1 billion USD after losing their USD banking partners. Before losing their USD banking partners, they were only at 6.5 million USDT issued.

oh okay. thank you for the explanation

...

Jesus, that low? I had no idea.

So do we know how much of the rest is "backed" by non-USD/Taiwanese Dollars that got deposited (at whatever exchange rate) and how much are flat out printed out of nothing?

...It's all of them, isn't it?

>Jesus, that low? I had no idea.
It was back in April., so you can just look at how much was issued by 2017 on the spreadsheet. I guess I should add that. Should be able to just highlight and it provides a count.

*by April 2017

Oops, I looked at it wrong. Lack of commas is silly. 65 million rather than 6.5 million. Since not that much compared to 1 billion + though.

*Still not that much