| I'll probably be downvoted into oblivion for hating on the latest hot internet rumor, but here is why I believe the tether rumors should be ignored: The tether situation has been twisted into a PR campaign against bitcoin by the bcash supporters (formally the segwit2x) supports. When the segwit2x fork was cancelled, /r/btc (a segwit2x and bcash community) and a number of popular twitter accounts suddenly started picking up the bitfinex'd anti-tether campaign. This includes a large group of what are most likely twitter bot accounts (have not tweeted in a long time, all joined around the same time, etc). Tether/Bitfinex is working on an audit but this takes considerable time. The auditing group will not put their stamp of public approval on an audit until it has gone through the most stringent reviews. Tether has been receiving significant "institutional" money over the past few months specifically trying to exploit the bitfinex USD lending market. Given how Wells Fargo and other large banks have been treating any company related to the bitcoin space, it is not in Tether's best interests to publicize which banks they are using. Hopefully someday this situation will improve, but for now if you run a company in the cryptocurrency space your fiat banking is tenuous at best, therefore you do not advertise your industry to your banking partners. Bitfinex is making $5m or more per day on a slow day, and has been for quite a while. This revenue stream can be used to support Tether if needed. Tether's USD pair on Kraken has remained close to $1. This would be the first market to go crazy if there were an actual issue with Tethers as the tether holders would rush to redeem them at Kraken instead of via Tether themselves. The "printing" of Tethers is now largely being sent to Bittrex and Poloniex in order to support their customers' tether balances. Tethers are a public blockchain, do the research and follow them to their actual destination. Even if every single tether were being used to borrow margin funding on bitfinex and buy bitcoin, it would hardly make a dent in the daily BTC volume at Bitfinex. Tether "followers" make a big deal about a 15m or 30m tether generation event, but even with this being used for 3x margin on bitfinex it would hardly make a dent on the > 2.5B usd trading volume. There are many more arguments supporting or attacking tether. I will not be responding to any comments because I have a feeling this will turn into a mess but I just wanted to throw some more information / opinions into the mix. The whole cryptocurrency world has been completely fueled, almost lives off of, FUD and rumors that would push a price up or down. This feeds right into that. BUT: At the end of the day you should trust no exchange, the entire point of cryptocurrency is that you control your own holdings. |