[sine]

For anyone who hasn't been following, the prevailing theory is that the largest Cryptocoin exchange "Bitfinex" also runs an altcoin called "Teather" which was marketed as being backed 1:1 by USD. So far they've created 2.8 BILLION USDT and coincidently the times they create millions of these happens to be in the middle of extreme market crashes.

See this chart: https://i.imgur.com/Uo07d1d.jpg

More details here:

https://medium.com/cryptomedication/uncovering-the-real-cart...

https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/latest

https://medium.com/@mattcollburner/bitmex-insiders-caught-in...

[zby]

For anyone who hasn't read the article - I wish Tether was investigated too - but this article is not about that: "The illicit tactics that the Justice Department is looking into include spoofing and wash trading"

[api]

This could be working up to that.

[arcticfox]

Also the same people running Tether and Bitfinex are highly suspected of also spoofing / wash trading.

[DINKDINK]

If there was a problem redeeming Tether for USD, you'd expect that the market price distortion of Tether. But it hasn't[1]

https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=POLONIEX:USDTUSD

>they've created 2.8 BILLION USDT

Absolute numbers are meaningless and less eye catching when they're compared to the entire market. 2.8 ~~Billion~~ USDT is only 0.5%-0.8% of the market. Do you really think that a 300-500 billion dollar market is being propped up by less than pennies on the dollar?

What can be said about Tether: it's a trusted third party that's vulnerable to fractional reserve (like all other exchanges). I wouldn't recommend people use it but to point to the tether creation as proof positive of manipulation rather than discussion fractional reserve issues I think is people confusing lurid facts with silent evidence threats.

Other reading: https://medium.com/crypto-punks/tether-misconceptions-298443...

[dzdt]

The mechanics are probably this: suppose someone goes to Bitfinex to redeem 10million USDT into USD. Since Bitfinex is behaving fraudulently, they don't actually have the 10million USD they promised they would hold to back the USDT. But they do have the ability to issue new unbacked USDT.

So they issue 11million unbacked USDT and use it to buy bitcoin. They sell the bitcoin for 10million USD on one of the exchanges that allows bitcoin to hard currency exchange. The 10% loss is because you have to pay a premium to exchange bitcoin to real currency. Bitfinex then pays the 10million USD to the customer in exchange for the 10million USDT which is retired.

The net results are 1million new unbacked USDT have been printed, and the illusion that USDT is backed by USD has been maintained.

Possibly the "Bitfinex issues unbacked USDT to buy bitcoin" step is being done not based purely on customer demand, but on a periodic basis when bitcoin price is falling.

Maybe Bitfinex has a hope to preserve their fraud by propping up bitcoin, or to dig out from under the fraud by building a big long bitcoin position and hoping it will rise in value.

Or maybe the timing of USDT issues with market drops is just that bitcoin price falls when there are more sellers than buyers, which is the same time there are more USDT redemptions. So to carry out the mechanics above, Bitfinex has to print tether to fund the redemptions at the time of the drops.

[seppel]

> So they issue 11million unbacked USDT and use it to buy bitcoin.

Who is selling them BTC for USDT apart from a few daytraders? Where is the sink of 2.8 billion USDT?

[mancerayder]

That's a very interesting and plausible hypothesis.

One wonders whether the prolonged slump might lead to some sort of bursting of outfits like Tether/Bitfinex. It seems like a downward spiral of people selling BTC and Bitfinex doing the dance you described, and a bigger hole being created.

[evilDagmar]

The other allegation (which is pretty viable) was with large reserves to play with, they could cause crashes or spikes in order to gobble up their users risky shorts. Shorts they would know the exact number and values of.

[olefoo]

Well, I could see how the government might not like people printing their own money without going through the central bank.

[mortdeus]

yeah, i thought it was a ponzi scheme too.

[tptacek]

No, not necessarily. Ponzi schemes can survive redemptions for years or even decades; they blow up when there's finally a run.

[DINKDINK]

You're confusing a Ponzi scheme and fractional reserve. Two very different systems.

[vkou]

A fractional reserve bank is a bank where:

Cash on hand < Outstanding liabilities (Deposits)

Cash on hand + Investments > Outstanding liabilities (Deposits).

A ponzi scheme is where:

Cash on hand + Investments < Outstanding liabilities.

A fractional reserve bank doesn't have the cash to let 100% of its depositors withdraw their accounts tomorrow. It does have the assets to let 100% of its depositors withdraw their accounts once its investments mature, or if they are sold at market value.

A ponzi scheme can't do either of the above. It's a pure scam.

[DINKDINK]

>It does have the assets to let 100% of its depositors withdraw their accounts once its investments mature

This line of thinking is what caused the 2008 crisis. The two metrics are interdependent. If a bank doesn't have liquidity, it can't make loans, which cant support the prices of the assets it owns which results in financial collapse.

Ponzi schemes are 'investment' promises that require ever growing layers of patsies to be recruited for each patsies' pay off to occur. Fractional Reserve is a practice where an institution leverages themselves by only keeping the expected liquidity needs in reserve and using the other capital for other means. Eventually they blowing up, when the market demands the apparent liquidity.

A ponzi scheme has to continue to grow or else it will collapse. Frantional reserve risks can perpetuate indefinitely until the liquidity is request:

StableCoin takes $100MM in USD deposits. Issues 100MM StableCoins. StableCo notices that it's 'never' had more than $10MM in USD of liquidity tapped. It decides "Hey we could make a stack of cash investing the remaining $90MM USD in XYZ" not until X years later does the fractional reserve issue arise as 'unforeseen circumstances' cause a liquidity demand of $15MM

[vkou]

Yes, what led to the 2008 crisis was a misvaluation of investments. Fortunately, there exist solutions to that problem, built into the system. Short-term interbank loans, the FDIC, and nationalization. Notice how not a single American bank stole it's depositor's money... And that the rules of fractional reserves were changed, to reduce the likely hood of such a catastrophe.

There is a world of difference between that and a Ponzi scheme. How many investors took a haircut from Madoff's little game, again?

[coinme]

Tether is claimed to be fully backed by USD. If it is not then it quickly ends up being an effective Ponzi scheme.

[DINKDINK]

Ponzi schemes are 'investment' promises that require ever growing layers of patsies to be recruited for each patsies' pay off to occur.

Fractional Reserve is a practice where an institution leverages themselves by only keeping the expected liquidity needs in reserve and using the other capital for other means. Eventually they blowing up, when the market demands the apparent liquidity.

[CyberDildonics]

The only difference is that ponzi schemes promise a positive return on investment while fractional reserves just make the people holding the fractional reserve more money.

[Nursie]

> USDT is only 0.5%-0.8% of the market.

This is false. Market cap is a meaningless statistic when applied to cryptocurrencies. If I create a billion 'FOOCoins' and sell one to a friend for $1, FOOCoin now has a 1 billion market cap, but only a single dollar has changed hands. He sells it back to me for $2, now FOOCoin has a cap of $2 billion! With only $3 having changed hands.

This is clearly an exaggerated scenario, but it does show that the market price multiplied by the number of coins is not meaningful.

> Do you really think that a 300-500 billion dollar market is being propped up by less than pennies on the dollar?

I don't think it's a 300-500 billion dollar market.

In fact the article you linked to goes on to explain this very phenomenon! That in fact it's possible that only around $6 billion in inflow has gone into cryptocurrencies, ever. This puts tether at around 1/3 of the entire inflow. Is that still trivial?

[dragonwriter]

> If I create a billion 'FOOCoins' and sell one to a friend for $1, FOOCoin now has a 1 billion market cap, but only a single dollar has changed hands. He sells it back to me for $2, now FOOCoin has a cap of $2 billion! With only $3 having changed hands.

Only $1 has changed hands in this.

[ceejayoz]

$1 changed hands, but the trading volume is $3.

There's a lot of speculation that this sort of "wash trading" happens in Bitcoin - some exchanges permit buying/selling to yourself, which lets someone boost both price and volume trivially.

[Nursie]

Well true, in aggregate. But we may have used up to three different notes :)

[sireat]

Did you read the article you posted?

It makes the point that it is in fact possible to influence the market with pennies on the dollar.

Remember that market cap is meaningless while no matter how USDT were created(backed or not) those represent at least some fiat inflows.

My personal opinion: Tether initially had some USD backing maybe not 100%. Now, I'd be surprised if Tether has backing in excess of 10%.

That is still enough to control Tether if you have issuing authority and can limit redemptions for fiat.

In fact Bitfinex/Tether has done exactly that. You would be hard pressed to redeem Tether for dollars.

[tomjakubowski]

> What can be said about Tether: it's a trusted third party that's vulnerable to fractional reserve

What? Isn't the entire friggin point of Tether that it's _not_ a fractional reserve system?

From their own FAQ (emphasis mine):

> All tethers are pegged at one-to-one with matching fiat currency (e.g., 1 USD₮ = 1 USD) and are backed 100% by actual assets in our reserve account.

https://tether.to/faqs/

[cjbprime]

Their FAQ also promises to have audits of their USD reserves, which as I understand it they've since reneged on.

[AndrewBissell]

I think by "vulnerable to fractional reserve," he means that since there is no way to transparently verify or audit their USD reserves, they could run a fractional system while claiming to be fully backed, like Mt Gox did.

[tomjakubowski]

Ah. I guess that my reading was "vulnerable to [bank runs, due to] fractional reserve."

[pathseeker]

If tether isn't a scam, why have then not yet found an auditor willing to actually audit them?

[ttul]

This.

[CPLX]

A fractional reserve means you keep a fraction of your total assets in cash and the rest of your assets in loans or investments that are less liquid, but entirely real.

It doesn't mean that you have assets that all total up to be a fraction of your liabilities. You're severely misunderstanding what fractional reserve means.

[thoraces]

What I wonder is: Even if it is totally a ponzi scheme/scam, it seems like the price holds even if people have little faith on whether or not it's properly backed.

So, has it _psychologically_ managed to create price stability? So long as there isn't a giant run on the currency where they actually did run out of the necessary US Dollars (as well as insufficient people stepping in willing to pay $1 for 1 USDT), does it actually matter whether or not they have fully collateralized the currency?

I find that to be sorta interesting.

[all_blue_chucks]

Fractional reserve BANKING is when a bank keeps a fraction of its deposits on hand while the rest is being INVESTED so that they can earn money to pay you interest. The money exists, but most of it is tied up in long-term investments.

Is Tether a bank? Does it invest its reserves? If you answered no to either of those questions, then you have no business comparing it to a fractional reserve banking system.

[HyperTalk2]

They created another $250 million worth just one week ago.

https://omniexplorer.info/address/3MbYQMMmSkC3AgWkj9FMo5LsPT...

[ttul]

So, who are “they” and where is all this fiat going? That’s a great and yet unanswered question. If Tether was real, then KPMG would be glad to audit them..

[mFixman]

I'm lost. Why is it significant that they supposedly create Tether during market crashes?

[imeron]

You can create Tether out of thin air and use it to move the market in a favourable direction.

[mtgx]

But assuming Tether was legitimate, wouldn't they also need to create new Tether units during extreme market crashes because that's when the highest demand for Tether would be, so they'd run out of the existing Tether?

They wouldn't need to create new Tether during bull runs, because nobody cares about putting their money into Tether then.

[bripeace]

No, it's unlikely if Tether was legitimate USDT printing would correlate so closely with bitcoin (crypto) market downturns.

The reason being, assuming tether is legitimate, for every printing they are sourcing additional USD to back the newly minted USDT. The idea they could so consistently find large investors willing to make NEW 100M+ investments while the crypto markets were in free fall is unlikely to say the least.

And it's not as if that's the only complaints about Tether. The fact Bitfinex and Tether has the same management; USDT pretty much acts as a proxy for Bitfinex to maneuver around banking laws; and that USDT supply pretty much grows monotonically are just a few of the other issues that suggest Tether is not legit.

[sunsu]

This is inaccurate. Tether demand INCREASES when the cryptomarkets crash because traders want to escape to non-volatile assets. If everyone converts their crypto to USDT at the same time (which is what happens during big crashes) they MUST print more Tether or the price will increase.

[Nursie]

> If everyone converts their crypto to USDT at the same time (which is what happens during big crashes) they MUST print more Tether or the price will increase.

This doesn't make sense.

You don't "convert" other cryptocurrencies to USDT, you sell your cryptocurrencies to people who have USDT. If there's a big sell pressure on the cryptocurrency, people want to move back to dollars, and there are not enough USD(T) then the price of the cryptocurrency should come down.

By adding more USDT to the picture you're magicking up money out of thin air to prop up a price. You're basically saying that when people want to sell cryptocurrency, dollars should be brought into existence to facilitate this at their preferred price.

[bripeace]

Yes of course demand increases for UDST on downturns which increases the market value of USDT and that's fine.

In fact printing tether to ensure it's market value is $1 is a fine solution. Except for the fact that the bank accounts that BACK the tether with USD are now in deficit compared ot the UDST supply. So while the crypto market value of USDT is $1 it's no longer backed 1-1.

So now, if they're legit, tether must figure out a way to get the missing dollars back into the bank account. The most efficient way to do this is to find an outside investor and trade him all the newly printed USDT for USD. In practice this would be rather difficult to do consistently in sliding markets, difficult enough that the correlation would be low as I pointed out.

You could also exchange USDT for various COINS then sell the coins for USD which then go into those reserve bank accounts. If you have a willing exchange partner with lots of cash and a need for bitcoins then this could work pretty well. Considering Bitfnex is run by the same dudes as tether, if they are legit then this is probably what they are doing. But all that's just IF they are legit and there's plenty of things wrong with USDT outside of whether it's backed 1-1 with USD.

TLDR: Trading volume and market value of USDT does not relieve tether of actually having USD on hand for each Tether that exists.

[sine]

By your logic if that were the case, Tether would need to be destroyed everytime the crypto-markets rise...

Plus, Tether's offical website and documentation state that's not how Tether is intended, they claim it is always 1:1 backed by a real USD reserve in a bank account (which they tell people they will audit, but the auditor backed out after giving a statement that said Bitfinex would not provide the proper documentation and access, later erasing any mention of having been associated with Bitfinex.)

[evilDagmar]

No, they don't need to print more tether to protect the price. The price of tether is locked to $1.

[dragonwriter]

> But assuming Tether was legitimate, wouldn't they also need to create new Tether units during extreme market crashes because that's when the highest demand for Tether would be, so they'd run out of the existing Tether?

BTC crashes inherently would create BTC -> USDT interest, sure, but not inherently create USD availability for backing new USDT.

Creation of legitimate USDT would mainly seem to happen when there is high USD -> BTC interest, because that is, in many cases, realized by USD -> USDT conversion (with, in principle, the USDT created at that time and the USD in reserve backing the new USDT) followed by USDT -> BTC exchange.

You might see new legitimate, large-scale USDT creation in a crash if, say, bargain-hunting new USD money is flowing into BTC, but the people exiting BTC and driving the price down are holding USDT without converting to USD.

> They wouldn't need to create new Tether during bull runs, because nobody cares about putting their money into Tether then.

Yes, they would, unless “bull runs” in the USDT-denominated BTC market are just money already held in USDT rushing back into BTC, rather than new USD flowing into the USDT/BTC market.

[laken]

Day traders use Tether a lot, even during bull runs. Because the market never closes, many full-time traders put their crypto all into tether when they're done trading for the day.

[vkou]

Why not just put it into USD when they are done for the day?

[cdiddy2]

a lot of exchanges don't support USD conversion due to increased hassle of dealing with the dollar/us gov regulations. its easier to be a crypto only exchange than a crypto/fiat exchange

[fastball]

Crypto/Fiat transactions are much more expensive than Crpyto/Crypto transactions. Why impact your bottom line if you don't need to?

[ploggingdev]

What happened to the bitfinexed guy, he's gone silent on social media?

[headsoup]

My first guess would be perhaps he is helping with the investigation...

[seppel]

> So far they've created 2.8 BILLION USDT

Who bought all these USDT? Who is holding them? Why would you hold them?

[qiqing]

My understanding is that there was a confusing UI where people who intended to sell bitcoin for USD actually selected USDT by default.

And one reason they might hold them is because they can't figure out how to exchange them for USD.

I mean, I'm sure there must be some people who bought USDT when that was their intention, but there are also a bunch who bought it by accident.

[seppel]

But you can easily buy BTC using USDT and then sell the BTC somewhere for real USD. Where are the reports of people stuck with USDT?

[ttul]

Nobody will be stuck with USDT until the Ponzi scheme is finally revealed in the form of an indictment. Until then, investors don’t hesitate to hold a few USDT now and then, because the likelihood of being stuck with them when it all goes to hell is small.

[seppel]

> investors don’t hesitate to hold a few USDT now and then

But it is not "now and then". It is 2.8 billion all the time! Maybe they are hold by different people at different times. Yet, they have to be held somewhere by someone all the time, who think that it is a good idea to have USDT instead of USD or BTC.

[CyberDildonics]

You lose a percentage of what you exchange

[tomp]

Don't you have it the wrong way round? The value (in $) of USDT crashes after they create more of it, because they create more of it (i.e. supply increases). I mean, surely it doesn't make sense to increase supply after USDT crashes (and hence depress the value further)?!

[ceejayoz]

If Tether is a scam, they'd care more about the value of Bitcoin and the altcoins being propped up with it (as that's where they'd be actually making their money) than the value of Tether.

[tomp]

Ah, I get it. I thought the parent was implying USDT/USD market crashes, but I didn't notice the `.jpg` that shows BTC/USD price.

[loeg]

Tether, not "teather." As in, tethered to USD (nominally).

[stordoff]

What is the author of the first article attempting to show by including "An actual picture of the area where this account is registered"? That just feels irrelevant.

[throwawaylolx]

They mint Tether during market crashes because that's when there is the highest volume on USDT pairs, and when Tether needs to create tokens to maintain the exchange rate around $1. Have you read their whitepaper?

Further, there is more proof that Tether has the funding to back up the USDT than proof that Tether does not have the funds:

https://blog.bitmex.com/tether/

https://blog.bitmex.com/tether-addendum-new-financial-data-r...

Reddit memes, medium posts with no research, and "correlation implies causation" assumptions does not make rumours true.

[lagadu]

Well, right on tether.to they say, and I quote:

> Our reserve holdings are published daily and subject to frequent professional audits. All tethers in circulation always match our reserves.

They've been around for years and the grand total of independents audits is 0 (zero).

Sure, assumptions don't make rumors true but them flat-out lying about audits and transparency speaks louder than anything else and we're not even getting into how it took the Panama papers leak for the public to find out that several of the people in charge of Tether and the people in charge of Bitfinex being the same.

[anonymouz]

Even worse, they tried to get an audit, but it ended up with them and their auditor ending the process without producing an audit. Apparently they weren't too happy the auditor wanted to actually take a close look:

“We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved. Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success.” - Tether spokesperson

See https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-and-tether-is-unaudi...

[spookthesunset]

The fact that people still support tether after getting fired by their auditor and then releasing the statement you quoted astounds me.

It is the most clear cut indicator that there is some super sketchy shit going on ever.

People seem to be willing to believe whatever they want despise clear signs they are wrong. Especially when there is the possibility of getting lambo-rich with Bitcoin....

[throwawaylolx]

>It is the most clear cut indicator that there is some super sketchy shit going on ever.

Yes, there is something that they're hiding, but there is no evidence that this has anything to do with their 1:1 USD reserve being a bogus. It's far more likely they are encountering regulation problems given the regulation uncertainty surrounding crypto.

>People seem to be willing to believe whatever they want despise clear signs they are wrong.

Or perhaps I'm not willing to commit to conspiracy theories based on baseless speculations.

[SilasX]

So wait, am I reading this right? They want to say that their holdings are audited, but want an auditing process that stops at "yes, this bank account as a $X balance" and doesn't include anything about who actually owns the account or what its liabilities are?

In fairness, I can kind of understand the bind: it seems that use-case of tethers depends on not being a legally enforceable claim to dollars, specifically so they can't legally be regulated as such (which would trigger reporting requirements, accreditation as a money transmitter, etc). But that's a double-edged sword: it also means that no (ethical) auditor will sign off on a statement saying they legally own the assets they claim to have.

[ttul]

For example... let’s say Bitfinex really does have $2.4B (or whatever) in the bank. But they have borrowed $2.3B using the cash as collateral. This is the sort of shenanigans that come out during an audit.

[carrja99]

Their cheerleaders usually reply claiming that they're under no obligation to publish audits and pretend that statement doesn't exist on the website, or is an old outdated webpage they forgot to remove.

[tomjakubowski]

> Sure, assumptions don't make rumors true but them flat-out lying about audits and transparency speaks louder than anything else and we're not even getting into how it took the Panama papers leak for the public to find out that several of the people in charge of Tether and the people in charge of Bitfinex being the same.

An interesting fact is that all of the original RealCoin/Tether founders (Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins, Craig Sellars) are now associated with a pair of connected blockchain startups: BLOCKV[1] and vAtomic[2].

[1]: https://blockv.io/#team

[2]: https://www.vatomic.io/ (this is, incidentally, another of vAtomic's founders, "accused of paying $2.5 million of bribes to two technology executives at the bank, so they would arrange $10.4 million of contracts to inflate his company’s revenue." https://www.reuters.com/article/us-servicemesh-cba-bribery/e...)

[throwawaylolx]

>flat-out lying about audits

Huh? They did do audits https://tether.to/announcement-transparency-update/ and they don't say they must be as public or as comprehensive as the community demands.

[lagadu]

Erm, quoted from the exact announcement you linked (including the typo):

> These consulting services do not constitute anaudit or attestation engagement

They're saying themselves that they weren't audited.

[throwawaylolx]

Not quite--they're saying that the consulting services that Friedman offered on top of the audit procedure they were hired to do are not an audit. Friedman audited Tether, but it was not "a full audit" (https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship-audito...) and, according to Tether, the reason for the that is as follows:

>Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success."

[JumpCrisscross]

> there is more proof that Tether has the funding to back up the USDT than proof that Tether does not have the funds

There is no way Bitfinex has $2.2 billion in bank accounts. If a bank handles U.S. dollars, they are under U.S. jurisdiction. Bitfinex cannot show who own Tether; that makes beneficial ownership tracing, rules surrounding which became stronger twelve days ago, impossible.

Had they picked any other currency, the claim could have been plausible. But $2.2 billion in anonymously digital U.S. dollars? (Physical cash, too, might have been plausible.) Not likely.

[FireBeyond]

Right, not to mention that phase 3-6 months ago where they were supposedly injecting several rapid (a few times a week) multi-hundred million dollar issuances. That's the kind of thing that raises red flags. "Hey, Mr Banker, here's $200M USD", three days later, "Hey, I have another $150M for you", and a few days after that, "Another $150M. Business is go-ooo-d!".

[otoburb]

>>If a bank handles U.S. dollars, they are under U.S. jurisdiction.

I've always thought of Tether as the loose cryptocurrency equivalent of a eurodollar[1] facility. If the eurodollar was Bitfinex's original inspiration, then Bitfinex probably thought that keeping their USD deposits (which allegedly back Tethers 1:1) in custody of foreign banks (i.e. non-US domiciled banks) would place them outside of US jurisdiction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurodollar

[throwawaylolx]

Have you looked at any of the links I posted? https://blog.bitmex.com/tether-addendum-new-financial-data-r...

[hndamien]

I think the supposed trick is that they are not in bank accounts.

[Entangled]

So, BTC created 16 million coins from air and nobody complained. Ripple created 100 billion coins from air and nobody complained. Tron, Stellar, Cardano, Iota, all in the billions. The top 1000 coins were created from air and nobody complained (most are scams).

Why creating Tethers from thin air is now a cause of concern? That's a coin just like every coin out there, like Tron, Verge, EOS, they're created from nothing by a program, they have the value the market decides it has and the creator has all the right to print all the coins they want just like everybody else.

And the market has decided USDT has more value than all other coins combined as it is number two in volume just behind BTC.

People use USDT as a safe harbor when markets collapse, it has its use, a very valuable use. Of course they will print trillions if they could, everybody would print trillions of their shitty coins and cash out tanking the market if they could, that's the nature of cryptocurrencies.

I fail to see why people complain about Tether (highly valuable) and not about the rest of the scam coins that are draining the market from stupid money.

[lambda]

> Why creating Tethers from thin air is now a cause of concern?

If you are claiming they are backed by USD, and you are creating them out of thin air, then that's a scam.

Other coins are only valued based on how the market values them. There is no fraud there; you are not claiming that you will redeem them for something else, they just represent themselves and are valued based on how useful people find that particular kind of cryptocurrency, plus hype.

MtGox was also a scam by the end, since they were trading on their exchange bitcoins and USD that they didn't actually have for people to cash out.

[dTal]

>MtGox was also a scam by the end, since they were trading on their exchange bitcoins and USD that they didn't actually have for people to cash out.

Heh. When a bitcoin exchange does it, it's a "scam". When a bank does it, it's "fractional reserve".

[ufo]

Banks that use fractional reserve should still have balanced assets and liabilities. It is just that some of their money is tied up in loans to be paid back instead of liquid cash. If everyone the bank loaned money to paid back there would be enough cash to allow all the customers to fully withdraw their accounts.

Bitfinex, on the other hand, is just outright insolvent.

[dTal]

Ah, so there is a difference. Thank you for clarifying.

I wish I had phrased my post as a question - as a statement it seems rather unpopular...

[ufo]

You would be surprised how often other people use that exact argument but as a statement they say full of conviction instead of a question :) That might be the source of the confusion here.

[tptacek]

It also helps that banks are insured federally.

[danharaj]

Banks don't pretend that they're not fractional reserve.

[kevingadd]

Fractional reserve is also regulated and deposits are insured up to a certain amount, so it's definitely not comparable to printing imaginary USDT - even if fractional reserve banking has many well-known issues.

[hapnin]

That regulation didn't work so well 10 years ago. Regulation is for us, not the big dogs.

[Tesl]

Its not the same thing because exchanges often trade only Tether/Bitcoin pairs, and don't allow people to withdraw into actual USD. If you can print as many tethers as you like, then you can massively pump the bitcoin price buying it with worthless tether.

This only works as long as people selling Bitcoin have been happy to accept Tether instead of USD, which (inexplicably to me) they have been doing. If Tether is proven to be backed by nothing at all, then there could be a serious crash as people try to get real money out and dump Tether. Your bitcoin being worth 7350 USDT isn't very exciting if your USDT are worth 0 USD.

[tripletao]

What's inexplicable? Tether supplies real value, by allowing people to trade in USD without complying with American (or any other) banking law.

And the alleged fraud is that they're creating USDT out of thin air, and spending them to buy BTC, in order to manipulate the price of Bitcoin upward. If you're a Bitcoin bull, then that's almost a selling point. I don't think any of this ends well, but I see the short-term appeal.

People don't appreciate how slowly government works, especially on financial crimes. Liberty Reserve was blatantly illegal and technically simple, without even the blockchain fig leaf. It operated openly for seven years. Then the government arrested the founder, and sentenced him to twenty years in prison.

[derivagral]

Tether posits that it is worth ~$1/Tether, backed by some mechanism that the exchange hasn't revealed. If you create Tether like any other coin, you probably aren't also creating $1 to correlate.

[celticninja]

the idea being that you create new tether when someone deposits the same amount of USD and when USD is withdrawn from the loop then so should the same amount of tethers. What I dont see happening is the removal of tethers when the USD flows out of the crypto space. Enough people have taken profits at this stage that surely some of those USD should have been used to pay out early investors in BTC, thus some tethers would need to be destroyed to maintain parity. Bitfinex should not even be keeping tethers where they have paid out the USD as they can easily create more when new USD is deposited. if it is a scam I am impressed by how long they have managed to keep it going.

[rtpg]

You don't need the withdrawal step in the current market

I buy BTC w/ USD Bitfinex prints USDT Bitfinex uses USDT to get BTC

In the end of this operation bitfinex has the USD and everyone else is satisfied. Normally Bitfinex needs to hold onto it to settle USDT claims, but so long as there's a USDT-usable market this might not be necessary

Even if USDT is at 50 cents to the dollar it's still a license to print money

[celticninja]

For every buyer there is a seller, bitfinex are not selling you the BTC. So that seller now wants to trade his USDT for USD to withdraw, whether he does that through bitfinex or another exchange using USDT, the end result should be an outflow of USD and a corresponding drop in the number of USDT.

[seppel]

Exactly, I'm wondering the same. Somebody bought 2.8 billion USDT and it is unclear who and why (to me).

[s73v3r_]

"And the market has decided USDT has more value than all other coins combined as it is number two in volume just behind BTC."

No, that just means that there's more of them.