[inquirerofsorts]

Tether is literally a short on bitcoin that is quick and cheap to transact in, it is keeping the price down rather than up. There's only 21 million bitcoins, but there's infinite tether. People really need to take a step back from mindlessly repeating things and think about what that actually means.

Go do a search of "tether site:news.ycombinator.com" to see how laughably wrong HN has been for the last 4 years on this subject. The adherents simply refuse to give up and many still identify with this "conspiracy"

I'm not sure we have enough eggs for the number of faces.

[arcticbull]

What conspiracy theories dude? We said it wasn't backed by dollars, lo and behold, $850 million or 30% of the entire backing amount at the time had been siezed by authorities for being the proceeds of money laundering. It was all held by CryptoCapital, give them a quick Google lol.

We said it wasn't backed by dollars, they admitted it wasn't backed by dollars and instead crypto and swaps, and other ious. We said you couldn't redeem them, you can't. We said they didn't have a banking relationship, they don't and didn't. Crypto advocates keep pretending none of this is real because number go up.

The fact it's still around doesn't invalidate a single thing anyone's said and if anything time showed this all to be quite accurate.

[1996]

Ah, articbull as usual.

So after the govt seizes almost one billion from tether, they are not fully backed anymore? Color me surprised!!

[arcticbull]

And yet going from 1:1 backed (ostensibly but not ever audited) to 1:0.7 backed it still traded 1:1. That’s my issue with it. The fact that they got caught with their pants 30% down is the least surprising thing ever imo.

In fact as I recall they continued to tell people they were backed 1:1 for many months after the seizure.

Remember BFX and Tether pretended to be two separate companies until the paradise papers because of course those clowns used Appleby. [1]

[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/paradise-papers-reveal-bitfinexs-de...

[1996]

I agree with you, I just find your consistent and persistent myopia interesting: for you, nothing can ever be good in crypto!

[arcticbull]

Well, I wouldn’t call it myopia (naturally, I suspect anyone with such a myopia wouldn’t haha by virtue of not being able to see past your blinders - but I digress). I’ve done and continue to do a lot of research to challenge my opinions on this subject and any other I feel passionate about. For instance, I’m a lefty and I watch a ton of Fox.

I simply do not believe that the core tenets of crypto (decentralization, trustlessness, irreversible, “hard money,” etc) are good things to have in a currency. I don’t think trustlessness extends past cryptocurrency in a meaningful way beyond things captured entirely on the blockchain as that breaks down at the boundary between on and off chain (ie garbage in garbage out). I believe humans are fallible and trust is a massive optimization - and a system that doesn’t take those into account isn’t worth the NAND it’s stored on.

I’ve yet to see anything solved with a blockchain better than a classical solution - 12 years and billions of dollars scammed later. Such a thing would change my mind, and I would certainly eat my, err, hat (Hi Mr McAffee) and admit publicly, on Twitter, and here, and anywhere, that I was totally and incredibly wrong.

At least I’m on message! :)