Ah, finally, will Tether get its day in the litigious sun? It's well known in cryptocurrency circles that their coin is not backed 1:1 to USD, similar to FTX, only that FTX crashed and this was found out the easy way. Cracking Tether will be much harder as they resist audits.
Here's a fascinating piece of history that sheds light on the Bitfinex/FTX/Tether shenanigans. Originally a Medium post that was removed at some point, here's an archived copy. It details how Bitfinex/Tether manipulated BTC to make serious $$.
I think the article also points to the origins of the FTX fraud: was Sam Bankman Fried involved in these BTC manipulations? Or inspired by it to create his own exchange?
TL:DR
"USDT was used to pump other traded pairs in order to avoid raising the price of BTC directly.
Once BTC was obtained from the pumps of these currencies, it was then sold immediately for USD, which ‘flooded’ the market and depressed the price of BTC."
As the article states, nothing has been proven. Didn't read further than that.
Tether is an operation that is a money printing machine on its own. They absolutely don't need to play pump'n'dump tricks to make money. It doesn't make any sense. Pump'n'dump schemes are risky. Tether has many options to make money with way less risk.
> Cracking Tether will be much harder as they resist audits
If Tether is sanctioned, they can't hold most dollar-denominated assets. Certainly none of the safe or liquid ones. Figuring out why it failed may take some digging. But causing it to fail is trivial.
Banks have like 10% or even less the dollars that they are supposed to be holding, but still are doing all fine.
Personally I don't think these tether conspiracy theories were ever true. Maybe they aren't 1:1 backed, but they have always been financially well off enough to keep the company running. And after the interest rates went up, they are probably making a killing. Typical bank has minimal reserves compared to them, and everyone is fine with that.
Reserve requirements are completely different from capital requirements. US banks are required to hold about $108 in assets for every $100 they hold in deposits, and their actual holdings are typically in the range of around $110 to $115 in assets per $100 of deposits. Central bank reserves are one type of asset that commercial banks can hold; a 0% reserve requirement just means that commercial banks can hold all of that ~$108 in other assets if they choose to.
In contrast, Tether has historically admitted to having as little as $100.20 in assets per $100 in liabilities [0], with a significant fraction of it in crypto and other assets that effectively wouldn't even count toward banks' capital requirements. It has probably dropped below $100 in assets per $100 in liabilities - i.e., been insolvent - at some point, and even taking its latest audit [1] at face value, it has far less capital than would be needed for a bank with the same asset profile in the US or other developed countries.
> It's well known in cryptocurrency circles that their coin is not backed 1:1 to USD
Its well known in the legal space and has already been addressed by multiple US courts. They're not looking for that and this isn't controversial.
Those court cases already happened in 2018-2020. Tether just needed to update its language. A financial institution not backed 1:1 to USD isn't a problem in any part of the banking sector, they just need a disclaimer that says that, and Tether updated their's and moved on. Those court cases were also about specific periods of time and were very intelligent and more nuanced than the Tether discourse in crypto spaces. Tether has periodically had more assets available, and its only controversy was about whether those were USD and US Treasuries amongst other things.
This is a probe about violating AML laws and sanctions. Which would likely only involve specific addresses in crypto and some onramps. But otherwise crypto-crypto trading won't be a part of this.
> a probe about violating AML laws and sanctions. Which would likely only involve specific addresses in crypto and some onramps. But otherwise crypto-crypto trading won't be a part of this.
You think a dollar stablecoin won't be affected by being prohibited from touching dollars or the dollar financial system?
I didn't say that, that statement doesn't imply that or suggest that.
The result of this probe likely won't be that as the DOJ is just emboldened by their Binance and CZ conviction, where the founder spent a couple months at a Southern California Federalbsummer camp and the DOJ got a few billion dollars, and Binance continues to operate as before and no further regulatory overhang is above them and all the money coming in and out is magically seen as clean.
> It's well known in cryptocurrency circles that their coin is not backed 1:1 to USD, similar to FTX, only that FTX crashed and this was found out the easy way.
Being speculated about is not the same as “known”. In fact every tether investigation seems to end up showing they are even over capitalize and hold more than 1:1!
My understanding of the audit situation was that the big accounting firms have refused to do it, presumably due to pressure from someone to not get involved.
The NYAG settlement you keep posting didn’t find that Tether was unbacked or below 1:1. It focused on transparency issues and the fact that funds were not always properly segregated. There were periods when reserves included assets like receivables or funds temporarily seized by authorities (e.g., Crypto Capital), but there was NO finding that USDT wasn’t fully backed. In fact, Tether has often shown it holds more than the necessary reserves, as evidenced in various attestations and reports post-settlement, and even in the report you keep posting NEVER they claim USDT isn’t fully solevent!
It’s funny how the no-coiner crowd keeps pushing the idea that Tether is some crypto scam destined to collapse, yet every single investigation, including the NYAG’s, has failed to back up that narrative. The reality is Tether has proven time and again that their USDT is fully backed and their business is profitable. The desperation to prove otherwise is just not supported by the facts.
It would be very simple for Tether to just hold $1 for each 1 Tether coin. They could invest their cash in safe assets like treasury bills that yield 4% or more. Meanwhile, they pay no interest in Tethers. So they get a 4% return for doing nothing at all.
As far as I know, there is no evidence that they are doing anything else. (There is some evidence that they did something else in the past, when interest rates were way lower.) But this hasn't stopped tons of people from speculating that they are.
> there is no evidence that they are doing anything else
There is a lot of evidence they aren't just buying Treasuries. The only times people looked, the money was being held in weird stuff, including frozen deposits at non-FDIC insured banks and private loans [1].
> It would be very simple for Tether to just hold $1 for each 1 Tether coin.
It would not be "very simple" for them to do this. No commercial bank lets you walk up to the teller with $1B and ask to deposit it, much less $93B. The financial system doesn't work that way. They have to cycle it through bonds on the repo market, which is what most huge firms do.
This seems like annoying pedantry. Holding same-as-cash assets is not rocket science, there are plenty of professionals who could help you with that. On Vanguard you can buy things like T-bills with a few clicks. (I am not suggesting that they're using Vanguard specifically)
But it’s more complicated because the current trading value of a bond is not the same as the expected return you’d get if you hold it to maturity. Last year Silicon Valley Bank and others got into trouble for this reason.
Let’s say you invested $100M into a 10-year bond when interest rates were at 2%. With interest, you’ll be getting back about $122M in ten years. Nice.
But what if you’re a bank and suddenly every depositor wants to withdraw that $100M? You can’t wait ten years. You need to sell the bond. Now you face the problem that interest rates are at 4%. Somebody with $100M can invest it in a 10-year bond that will return $148M instead of your measly $122M. So nobody will pay full price for your 2% bond because they can get a better return elsewhere.
> I would also point out they hold excess reserves in Bitcoin.
Regardless of whether that is true or not, seems like a terrible idea. Tether doesn't need backing on the crypto side of the ledger - they can create new tether there. If there is a depeg, it'll be from a large amount of money flowing from Bitcoin -> USD or the like. It is highly likely that will correlate to the price of bitcoin dropping (possibly substantially in the event of a Tether depeg). So I'd expect the valuation of their reserves to correlate in a bad way with the chance of them needing to sell those reserves.
Presumably they're doing this for operational reasons but I wouldn't put much weight to it in a discussion on Tether's resilience.
Plus, being a cynic I'd treat that as evidence against Tether being fully backed. Crypto that Tether owns directly could easily have been purchased without any fiat money entering the crypto ecosystem.
Isn't the whole argument against Tether that they print Tether out of nothing, buy Bitcoin with it, and now have Bitcoin (and increased the price of Bitcoin)?
Actually, the NYAG settlement doesn’t support that conspiracy theory. The investigation found no evidence that Tether printed USDT ‘out of nothing’ to manipulate Bitcoin. The issues raised were about transparency in Tether’s reserves during specific periods when funds were managed by third parties, not about unbacked issuance. Tether has since updated its policies, making clear the types of assets backing USDT.
That is a wallet with a lot of Bitcoins in it. We don't know to what degree it's controlled by Tether. We don't know the degree to which it's otherwise encumbered. If I recall correctly, FTX also pointed to wallets with Bitcoins in them from time to time.
To be clear, I am not saying Tether is committing fraud. Just that to the extent there have been investigations, they came up short, and that them being short is not even among the main risks to their existence.
The issue is that "stablecoin" doesn't mean anything legally. US regulators have collectively abdicated their responsibility to create fair rules that encourage innovation while protecting investors and creditors.
Tether publishes their reserves [1], only 4% are Bitcoin. 84% is "cash & cash equivalents & other short-term deposits", 3% is precious metals, 5.55% is "secured loans". They report $5B in net equity, ~4.2%. So basically, if their collection of assets declines in value by 4.2%, they become unable to redeem every coin. There are a _lot_ of ways for that to happen with 87% of their assets in T-bills and money market funds. If the shortest T-bill is 4 weeks to maturity, they have plenty of time to incur interest rate risk (e.g.: Silicon Valley Bank).
One metric of how bonds are susceptible to interest rate changes is duration [1].
My calculations show that for a 4 week to maturity T-bill, the duration is approximately 0.077, meaning that if interest rates go up by 1%, it loses 0.07%. So even if rates go up by 5% in a week, they only lose 0.35%.
The problem with SVB is they weren’t holding very short dated bonds. Pretty much every large company has to deal with interest rate risk but as long as they keep the average duration low it doesn’t tend to be an issue.
Zeke Faux's Number Go Up (https://www.amazon.com/Number-Go-Up-Cryptos-Staggering/dp/05...) started as an investigation into Tether. He found some extremely suspect clues, but he wasn't able to crack it. Hopefully the feds are able to shed some light on it.
Tether was launched in 2014 [1]. It has over $120bn in outstanding liabilities against unknown assets [2]. When it fails, it will rival the fourth-largest 'bank' failure in U.S. history [3].
This has been a complete failure of U.S. regulatory bodies.
Exactly - a massive failure of regulatory bodies. I wonder why. It was similar with Madoff - there were people literally sending documents showing it's a fraud, and they did nothing for years.
I don't follow crypto lately, but it seems that Tether is printing money in high interest rate period.
But back before that, it was a complete joke - it was so apparent that they published only made up numbers that didn't really add up, pretended to get legitimate transfers of billions of $ on Sundays etc.
They were investigated once by a US A.G. and found out to have lied on the reserves in the past, but nothing really serious happened. They got a fine and were forced to published a pseudo balance sheet, which was a joke (still a bit better than FTX's Excel spreadsheet).
Free money and failure to regulate means scammers have never been more flush and able to talk with money. It's not a great space to be in, glad this administration placed Lina Kahn and others, without competition free markets can't operate efficiently. Both regulatory capture and natural monopolies all jam up the works. People don't remember it but one of the best things that ever happened to tech was the anti-trust suit brought against M$, anti-competitive behavior is such a drag on tech innovation, that combined with the incremental win for right to repair is all great progress.
> Exactly - a massive failure of regulatory bodies. I wonder why. It was similar with Madoff - there were people literally sending documents showing it's a fraud, and they did nothing for years.
For this to mean much (unfortunately), we have to know how many legitimate companies are being constantly reported as fraudulent. Similar to the FBI's flawless "they were on our radar" after every mass shooting event... if everyone is on the radar then it's not that informative that this person was too.
Madoff's returns were so egregious that they definitely should've been looked into despite any of this^ though. Arguably Tether should be looked into if only because of the systemic risk it (allegedly?) produces for the crypto universe more broadly. But then again... no one seems to eager to spend a bunch of investigative resources to bail out an economy of anti-government gamblers/degenerates.
Aren't you comparing the wrong values. Those banks that failed had more assets than tether has liabilities.
However, the actual difference between assets and liabilities was significantly less than 120bn for those banks. With Tether, I imagine the collapse will go from 1:1 redemptions day 1 to "oops all gone" day 2.
So I expect Tether to be the largest "bank" failure in US history by terms of loss of value.
> really is just a bank without any of the regulatory safeguards
A "bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans" [1]. Tether doesn't offer demand deposits--withdrawals are subject to a minimum and fee [2]. It's thus not a bank, but a bank-like shadow bank [3].
"backed" is a somewhat unclear term. Given tether don't only hold cash their securities will have mark-to-market valuations. At purchase prices, in a legitimate operation, they should be "backed", but if they were forced to finance redemptions at losses from purchase price then I suppose might not be "backed".
However, they must have been sitting on so much interest up to now given where rates went recently that, provided they ran a fairly conservative operation, they should have plenty of reserves.
I'm very curious to see how this investigation plays out, especially considering the debt situation here in the US. It appears (according to tether's audit reports) that tether went from about 64 billion in treasuries mid-2023 to about 92 billion mid-2024. That's 27 billion in demand for treasuries over that one year period which (if my math and research is correct) is about 3% of all treasury demand for roughly that time period.
It does appear that tether holds short-term maturity treasuries, and I don't know how that fits into the larger demand picture.
Is it actually just those two paragraphs, or is something not rendering correctly?
If that's all there is, it's not a great defense. Maybe they felt like the WSJ article was just so unfair it didn't deserve a response, but then... just don't respond. This kind of righteous indignation with no actual rebuttal isn't persuasive.
Federal investigators should probably also probe who controls that sizeable chunk of dormant bitcoin that's projected to be valued higher than a significant chunk of the US economy in a few years.
This used to be a non-serious question. But now we've got presidential candidates calling for national debt ceilings that will result in a default on US debt, and therefore crash the US dollar. Bitcoin's getting integrated into every payment app as if these companies are readying for an eventual modern equivalent of a run on the banks. Except with everyone moving their money to crypto instead of getting 'real dollars' to stuff into their mattresses.
There's a 99.99%+ likelihood that Satoshi just.. lost his wallet one day, or died, or whatever.
BUT -- assume a 0.01% possibility that there is something else at play with that early-mined bitcoin. Assume the _impact_ of a negative outcome with it will eventually be on the order of entire economies.
If you use common practice to calculate security risk by multiplying the likelihood of risk by it's potential impact, there is certainly enough at play here to justify the US government putting a couple agents on a search for a week to figure out who this guy is/was, and who now controls all of those apparently-lost coins.
I don't know why, but the one thing cryptobros fear is OFAC. They shrug off fraud, securities violations, and money laundering but when sanctions are mentioned people start running away. We saw this with Tornado Cash and hopefully Tether will get OFACed next.
BTW, Tether probably is backed 1:1 or better because they bought $XXB of US treasury bonds at >4% which return billions in profit per year. BTC is also (currently) near all time highs. Whatever hole they had was probably filled in.
The U.S. federal government is investigating Bureau of Engraving and Printing's "US Dollar" notes for possible violations of sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules, according to people familiar with the matter.
The criminal investigation, run by prosecutors at the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, is looking at whether notes "tethered" to the Federal Reserve's "dollar" have been used by third parties to fund illegal activities such as the drug trade, terrorism and hacking—or launder the proceeds generated by them.
The Treasury Department, meanwhile, has been considering sanctioning the Federal Reserve because of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's currency notes' widespread use by individuals and groups sanctioned by the U.S., including the terrorist group Hamas and Russian arms dealers. Sanctions against the Federal Reserve would generally prohibit Americans from doing business using the notes.
Jesus only 6 or 7 years late! It was OPENLY KNOWN and ADMITTED IN COURT they never had the cash backing and were just printing tokens to inflate prices. Why start an investigation now?
AIUI it's not an investigation about whether tether has the USDT or not but an investigation as to whether or not allowed customers to launder dirty money.
Tether is in a country that has a long history of doing monkey business, including monkey business with drug trafficking money and arms trafficking money. Even the CIA was tied to that monkey business.
To me there's zero doubt there's actual money laundering ongoing and I really wouldn't be surprised if, once again, some three letter agencies were implicated in monkey bahamian business.
> Tether is in a country that has a long history of doing monkey business, including monkey business with drug trafficking money and arms trafficking money.
I never forget the farcical interview with Deltec Bank's "Deputy CEO":
At the start of 2021, according to their website, it was a 55 year old bank. By the end of 2021, it was a 70 year old bank!
The bank's website is a WordPress site. And their customers must be unhappy - online banking hasn't worked for nearly two years at this point - take a look at the HTML source, there's no way it could actually work.
Anyway, their Deputy CEO gave this hilarious interview from his gaming rig. A 33 year old Deputy CEO, who by his LinkedIn claimed to have graduated HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Master of Science at the age of 15... celebrating his graduation by immediately being named Professor of Finance at a university in Lebanon. While dividing his spare time between running hedge funds in Switzerland and uhh... Jacksonville, FL.
The name of his fund? Indepedance [sic] Weath [sic] Management. Yeah, okay.
In this hilariously inept interview, he claimed that people's claims about Deltec's money movements being several times larger than all the banking in their country was due to them misunderstanding the country's two banking licenses, the names of which he "couldn't remember right now" (the Deputy CEO of a bank who can't remember the name of the banking licenses where they operate), and he "wasn't sure which one they had, but we might have both".
Once the ridicule and all this started piling on, within 24 hours, he was removed from the bank's website leadership page. When people pointed out how suspicious that looked, he was -re-added-.
The bank then deleted the company's entire website and replaced it with a minimally edited WordPress site, where most of the links and buttons were non-functional and remained so for months thereafter.
I mean fuck it, if the cryptobros want to look at all that and say "seems legit to me", alright, let em.
How bitcoin got huge was basically tether money printing. since it wasnt backed by anything, they just printed tether and bought bitcoin. a group did it behind the scenes, got massively wealthy.
My unsubstantiated conspiracy theory on this is that not only is Tether not backed 1:1 USD > USDT but that they are so disproportionately not backed that they basically printed money during the peak of the pandemic, causing real measurable inflation in the crypto markets
> Tether effectively evaded future SEC oversight by withdrawing from the U.S. market and operating outside U.S. jurisdiction
U.S. "jurisdiction is triggered when a payment in U.S. dollars [takes] place and the U.S. financial system [is] used" [1].
EDIT: Tether withdrew from New York State's jurisdiction as part of its settlement with the New York AG [2], not to be confused with the U.S. attorney based in Manhattan.
U.S. attorneys are under no obligation to tell people they are investigating that they are under investigation. That doesn't prove the Journal's assertion. But it's nonsense to the point of suspicion to conclude from not having been noticed that there is no investigation.
Yeah that's not how investigations work. USAOs don't publicize ongoing investigations for obvious reasons. Once they wrap up an investigation but before convening a grand jury to indict, they may send a target letter, but they typically don't. Most often, people don't find out until they're indicted.
Tether CEO additional statement on X - “At Tether, we deal regularly and directly with law enforcement officials to help prevent rogue nations, terrorists and criminals from misusing USDt. We would know if we are being investigated as the article falsely claimed. Based on that, we can confirm that the allegations in the article are unequivocally false.”
Again, that's not how it works. They wouldn't know if they're being investigated unless the USAO told them. And if the USAO had told them they're a target of an investigation then they'd say that instead of this garbage quote. Hell they may even be working with the sdny on some investigations, but in no way does that mean they would know if they themselves are the subject of another investigation. In other words, unless Tether is somehow working with the investigators on an investigation into Tether, Tether wouldn't know they're being investigated.
If Tether is a fraud then the entire financial system is clearly a fraud as well. What kind of financial system allows a fraud of this size to continue for over a decade? Let me guess, nobody knew anything. Yet the government knows about every transaction over $600 on all our accounts. It's clown world.
This is just another example of how shorting Bitcoin during market hours is such an effective strategy, which is as profitable now at $60k as it was at $20k. This takes advantage of the tendency of bad news to drop when the stock market is open. Federal government offices are closed on weekends, so if bad news is dropped or a rumor of bad news, it will be on a weekday and when the market is open, as has been the case.
Good news can also drop, but there is a major asymmetry favoring bad news and liquidations, and consequently sudden drops of the Bitcoin price. You don't have to work at a hedge fund to find great methods like this.
It also shows why Bitcoin is an inferior investment compared to tech stocks, in which investors do not have to worry about these regulatory risks (except for antitrust, which is a slow, drawn-out process and this can be mitigated with diversification). QQQ has far outperformed Bitcoin even as far back as 2020.
Both presidential candidates have signaled that they are pro-crypto scams (and one thinks that has something to do with the welfare of black men.) It's too late. Bitcoin has entered the house price zone, where people are elected to office on promises to make housing as expensive as possible. We'll have to wait until crypto brings down the entire economy. And after it does, the people who hold it will be bailed out:
"Do you know how many disadvantaged minorities are invested in crypto? Especially after we allowed them to invest their social security into it, with matching contributions from the state if they agree to hodl? Are you a racist monster?"
Meanwhile 90% of black people will have 90% of their savings in crypto, accounting for less than 2% of all crypto holdings.
FTX so far was barely a speedbump. All it taught politicians is that there's a lot of money in doing what crypto whales say, and absolutely no consequences even if it goes belly up in the worst way.
One, because the consequences of an AML failure are immediately catastrophic: a dollar stablecoin can't reasonably survive without access to the dollar financial system. Tether's unregulated status means enforcement options are zero or ban. (Banks can be fined and put under compliance regimes.) Running a perfect AML programme indefinitely is impossible. There is no indication Tether runs much of an AML programme at all.
Two, because bank-like structures are inherently unstable. Asset values fluctuate. The banks they hold cash or assets at will fail, sometimes beyond deposit insurance limits. Unlike banks, Tether has the benefit of being able to block redemptions. But they can only do that so many times before a regulator takes notice.
In summary, Tether exists at the pleasure of American regulators and the consequences of losing favour are collapse. They're compliance-wise and financially unstable. The consequences of a single failure won't be catastrophic. But eventually they will fail for the same reason every bank without deposit insurance will, eventually, fail.
Good timing, along with the election. Going by history there's the likelihood of a ~20% dip in the BTC price before it takes a couple of big steps up in the last few months of the bull run part of the 4-year cycle.
Why would I accumulate something which has so much risk and so much downside when I can just buy tech stocks like TSLA or NVDA which actually go up, with less risk and less volatility? Meta, Nvidia, QQQ have beaten bitcoin for years now. The time to have bought bitcoin was pre-2017 or so. those days over for good. Bitcoin is weak and bloated, never goes up anymore, too many old wallets and whales dumping. Too much regulation.
Depends on your timescale and when to buy and sell.
Depending on the reason, I'd also say it would be worth buying Meta, NVDA, TSLA, etc. on a 20% dip, especially if they were going into a season where, historically, they makes their largest gains.
For those doubting that Tether is fully backed, note that Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgeral, one of the largest investment banks and a public company, has stated that Cantor Fitzgeral manages Tether’s money and indeed the money is all there and invested in US treasury bonds
> Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgeral, one of the largest investment bank and a public company, has stated that Cantor Fitzgeral manages Tether’s money and indeed the money is all there and invested in US treasury bonds
Source? I'm seeing Fitzgerald say "Cantor Fitzgerald manages 'many many' of" Tether's assets (not all) and that he can vouch for their balance sheet [1]. But not that Cantor manages all of its assets nor that it's all in Treasuries.
What are the incentives at work here? What is their risk exposure to a collapse of tether? What would be the reputation al risk to their firm if tether was a scam?
I personally would take this with a grain of salt as they have a direct financial interest in Tether looking solid and prestigious and continuing its present operations.
I am old enough to remember when investment banks touting their mortgage backed securities business before the collapse in 2008.
The incentives at work here are that if a CEO of a public company makes false statements of this kind goes to jail.
This is like the CEO of the bank that held Bernie Madoff's money going on record before Madoff's fall saying he holds Bernie's money and it's all there.
If Tether is unbacked Howard Lutnick is going to jail, so it is irrational to believe Tether is unbacked at this point.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/federal-investigator... has the article
Ah, finally, will Tether get its day in the litigious sun? It's well known in cryptocurrency circles that their coin is not backed 1:1 to USD, similar to FTX, only that FTX crashed and this was found out the easy way. Cracking Tether will be much harder as they resist audits.
Here's a fascinating piece of history that sheds light on the Bitfinex/FTX/Tether shenanigans. Originally a Medium post that was removed at some point, here's an archived copy. It details how Bitfinex/Tether manipulated BTC to make serious $$.
I think the article also points to the origins of the FTX fraud: was Sam Bankman Fried involved in these BTC manipulations? Or inspired by it to create his own exchange?
https://web.archive.org/web/20180620111632/https://medium.co...
TL:DR "USDT was used to pump other traded pairs in order to avoid raising the price of BTC directly.
Once BTC was obtained from the pumps of these currencies, it was then sold immediately for USD, which ‘flooded’ the market and depressed the price of BTC."
As the article states, nothing has been proven. Didn't read further than that.
Tether is an operation that is a money printing machine on its own. They absolutely don't need to play pump'n'dump tricks to make money. It doesn't make any sense. Pump'n'dump schemes are risky. Tether has many options to make money with way less risk.
Pump'n'dumps are far less risky than running a massive ponzi?
> Cracking Tether will be much harder as they resist audits
If Tether is sanctioned, they can't hold most dollar-denominated assets. Certainly none of the safe or liquid ones. Figuring out why it failed may take some digging. But causing it to fail is trivial.
It was formerly understood that Tether was not backed 1:1.
My people in the space now believe that they have made up the hole thanks to juicy interest rates (where Tether keeps all the yield).
How is that possible? They were thought to have less than half of the dollars they’re supposed to be holding!
Banks have like 10% or even less the dollars that they are supposed to be holding, but still are doing all fine.
Personally I don't think these tether conspiracy theories were ever true. Maybe they aren't 1:1 backed, but they have always been financially well off enough to keep the company running. And after the interest rates went up, they are probably making a killing. Typical bank has minimal reserves compared to them, and everyone is fine with that.
> Banks have like 10% or even less…
That’s completely untrue, and Tether isn’t a bank.
Yeah, banks hold much less than 10%, as of 2020 the reserve requirement is 0%.
Reserve requirements are completely different from capital requirements. US banks are required to hold about $108 in assets for every $100 they hold in deposits, and their actual holdings are typically in the range of around $110 to $115 in assets per $100 of deposits. Central bank reserves are one type of asset that commercial banks can hold; a 0% reserve requirement just means that commercial banks can hold all of that ~$108 in other assets if they choose to.
In contrast, Tether has historically admitted to having as little as $100.20 in assets per $100 in liabilities [0], with a significant fraction of it in crypto and other assets that effectively wouldn't even count toward banks' capital requirements. It has probably dropped below $100 in assets per $100 in liabilities - i.e., been insolvent - at some point, and even taking its latest audit [1] at face value, it has far less capital than would be needed for a bank with the same asset profile in the US or other developed countries.
[0] https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/1np5dpcwuHrWJ4AgUg...
[1] https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/6h4YWqZOXbwtBaPtYg...
Banks have extreme requirements on that ratio though, and have been regulated to death (for good reason) for a hundred years
> It's well known in cryptocurrency circles that their coin is not backed 1:1 to USD
Its well known in the legal space and has already been addressed by multiple US courts. They're not looking for that and this isn't controversial.
Those court cases already happened in 2018-2020. Tether just needed to update its language. A financial institution not backed 1:1 to USD isn't a problem in any part of the banking sector, they just need a disclaimer that says that, and Tether updated their's and moved on. Those court cases were also about specific periods of time and were very intelligent and more nuanced than the Tether discourse in crypto spaces. Tether has periodically had more assets available, and its only controversy was about whether those were USD and US Treasuries amongst other things.
This is a probe about violating AML laws and sanctions. Which would likely only involve specific addresses in crypto and some onramps. But otherwise crypto-crypto trading won't be a part of this.
> a probe about violating AML laws and sanctions. Which would likely only involve specific addresses in crypto and some onramps. But otherwise crypto-crypto trading won't be a part of this.
You think a dollar stablecoin won't be affected by being prohibited from touching dollars or the dollar financial system?
I didn't say that, that statement doesn't imply that or suggest that.
The result of this probe likely won't be that as the DOJ is just emboldened by their Binance and CZ conviction, where the founder spent a couple months at a Southern California Federalbsummer camp and the DOJ got a few billion dollars, and Binance continues to operate as before and no further regulatory overhang is above them and all the money coming in and out is magically seen as clean.
Fair enough. That said, Binance can co-operate with authorities in a way Tether may be technically limited in being able to.
> It's well known in cryptocurrency circles that their coin is not backed 1:1 to USD, similar to FTX, only that FTX crashed and this was found out the easy way.
Being speculated about is not the same as “known”. In fact every tether investigation seems to end up showing they are even over capitalize and hold more than 1:1!
My understanding of the audit situation was that the big accounting firms have refused to do it, presumably due to pressure from someone to not get involved.
> every tether investigation seems to end up showing they are even over capitalize and hold more than 1:1
The one adversarial investigation I know of found the opposite [1].
> presumably due to pressure from someone to not get involved
Not how audit works.
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
The NYAG settlement you keep posting didn’t find that Tether was unbacked or below 1:1. It focused on transparency issues and the fact that funds were not always properly segregated. There were periods when reserves included assets like receivables or funds temporarily seized by authorities (e.g., Crypto Capital), but there was NO finding that USDT wasn’t fully backed. In fact, Tether has often shown it holds more than the necessary reserves, as evidenced in various attestations and reports post-settlement, and even in the report you keep posting NEVER they claim USDT isn’t fully solevent!
It’s funny how the no-coiner crowd keeps pushing the idea that Tether is some crypto scam destined to collapse, yet every single investigation, including the NYAG’s, has failed to back up that narrative. The reality is Tether has proven time and again that their USDT is fully backed and their business is profitable. The desperation to prove otherwise is just not supported by the facts.
It would be very simple for Tether to just hold $1 for each 1 Tether coin. They could invest their cash in safe assets like treasury bills that yield 4% or more. Meanwhile, they pay no interest in Tethers. So they get a 4% return for doing nothing at all.
As far as I know, there is no evidence that they are doing anything else. (There is some evidence that they did something else in the past, when interest rates were way lower.) But this hasn't stopped tons of people from speculating that they are.
> there is no evidence that they are doing anything else
There is a lot of evidence they aren't just buying Treasuries. The only times people looked, the money was being held in weird stuff, including frozen deposits at non-FDIC insured banks and private loans [1].
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
How about you find anything other the NYAG settlement that you keep mischaracterizing?
> It would be very simple for Tether to just hold $1 for each 1 Tether coin.
It would not be "very simple" for them to do this. No commercial bank lets you walk up to the teller with $1B and ask to deposit it, much less $93B. The financial system doesn't work that way. They have to cycle it through bonds on the repo market, which is what most huge firms do.
This seems like annoying pedantry. Holding same-as-cash assets is not rocket science, there are plenty of professionals who could help you with that. On Vanguard you can buy things like T-bills with a few clicks. (I am not suggesting that they're using Vanguard specifically)
HSBC has had money laundering scandals with amounts in excess of 1b$
If it was that easy then we'd probably see more banks that do just that.
That is what banks do.
But it’s more complicated because the current trading value of a bond is not the same as the expected return you’d get if you hold it to maturity. Last year Silicon Valley Bank and others got into trouble for this reason.
Let’s say you invested $100M into a 10-year bond when interest rates were at 2%. With interest, you’ll be getting back about $122M in ten years. Nice.
But what if you’re a bank and suddenly every depositor wants to withdraw that $100M? You can’t wait ten years. You need to sell the bond. Now you face the problem that interest rates are at 4%. Somebody with $100M can invest it in a 10-year bond that will return $148M instead of your measly $122M. So nobody will pay full price for your 2% bond because they can get a better return elsewhere.
But banks also make loans, and do fractional reserve banking, so obviously owning bonds isn't enough.
The Fed doesn't let banks do this because it would be "too safe"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow_banking
What you describe is their actual business model.
Tether makes the most profit per employee of any company in the world. Their transparency, speed, and market success is renown.
This thread is full of tether truthers living in 2017.
Can you link one of these investigations that show that tether is backed more than 1:1 with the USD?
I will try to find it. I would also point out they hold excess reserves in Bitcoin.
My guess is nobody can get them on not being 1:1 but this idea of AML violations as the attack vector makes a lot of sense.
> I would also point out they hold excess reserves in Bitcoin.
Regardless of whether that is true or not, seems like a terrible idea. Tether doesn't need backing on the crypto side of the ledger - they can create new tether there. If there is a depeg, it'll be from a large amount of money flowing from Bitcoin -> USD or the like. It is highly likely that will correlate to the price of bitcoin dropping (possibly substantially in the event of a Tether depeg). So I'd expect the valuation of their reserves to correlate in a bad way with the chance of them needing to sell those reserves.
Presumably they're doing this for operational reasons but I wouldn't put much weight to it in a discussion on Tether's resilience.
Plus, being a cynic I'd treat that as evidence against Tether being fully backed. Crypto that Tether owns directly could easily have been purchased without any fiat money entering the crypto ecosystem.
Isn't the whole argument against Tether that they print Tether out of nothing, buy Bitcoin with it, and now have Bitcoin (and increased the price of Bitcoin)?
Actually, the NYAG settlement doesn’t support that conspiracy theory. The investigation found no evidence that Tether printed USDT ‘out of nothing’ to manipulate Bitcoin. The issues raised were about transparency in Tether’s reserves during specific periods when funds were managed by third parties, not about unbacked issuance. Tether has since updated its policies, making clear the types of assets backing USDT.
> they hold excess reserves in Bitcoin
We had precisely the same amount of information about FTX's Bitcoins as we do for Tether, for what it's worth.
bc1qjasf9z3h7w3jspkhtgatgpyvvzgpa2wwd2lr0eh5tx44reyn2k7sfc27a4
Isn’t that the public Tether bitcoin address with over 75K coins?
https://platform.arkhamintelligence.com/explorer/address/bc1...
That's precisely A LOT more than anyone knew about FTX's non-existent Bitcoin.
That is a wallet with a lot of Bitcoins in it. We don't know to what degree it's controlled by Tether. We don't know the degree to which it's otherwise encumbered. If I recall correctly, FTX also pointed to wallets with Bitcoins in them from time to time.
To be clear, I am not saying Tether is committing fraud. Just that to the extent there have been investigations, they came up short, and that them being short is not even among the main risks to their existence.
The issue is that "stablecoin" doesn't mean anything legally. US regulators have collectively abdicated their responsibility to create fair rules that encourage innovation while protecting investors and creditors.
Tether publishes their reserves [1], only 4% are Bitcoin. 84% is "cash & cash equivalents & other short-term deposits", 3% is precious metals, 5.55% is "secured loans". They report $5B in net equity, ~4.2%. So basically, if their collection of assets declines in value by 4.2%, they become unable to redeem every coin. There are a _lot_ of ways for that to happen with 87% of their assets in T-bills and money market funds. If the shortest T-bill is 4 weeks to maturity, they have plenty of time to incur interest rate risk (e.g.: Silicon Valley Bank).
[1]: https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports
One metric of how bonds are susceptible to interest rate changes is duration [1].
My calculations show that for a 4 week to maturity T-bill, the duration is approximately 0.077, meaning that if interest rates go up by 1%, it loses 0.07%. So even if rates go up by 5% in a week, they only lose 0.35%.
The problem with SVB is they weren’t holding very short dated bonds. Pretty much every large company has to deal with interest rate risk but as long as they keep the average duration low it doesn’t tend to be an issue.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duration_(finance)
This is the most recent one linked on their site[1]:
https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/6h4YWqZOXbwtBaPtYg...
Edit: to save people a click, the report shows 125 Billion in assets vs 113 Billion in liabilities. Approx 81 Bil in T-bills
[1]https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports
This is just Tether's unaudited financial statements.
Zeke Faux's Number Go Up (https://www.amazon.com/Number-Go-Up-Cryptos-Staggering/dp/05...) started as an investigation into Tether. He found some extremely suspect clues, but he wasn't able to crack it. Hopefully the feds are able to shed some light on it.
Tether was launched in 2014 [1]. It has over $120bn in outstanding liabilities against unknown assets [2]. When it fails, it will rival the fourth-largest 'bank' failure in U.S. history [3].
This has been a complete failure of U.S. regulatory bodies.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tether-usdt.asp
[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_bank_failures_...
Exactly - a massive failure of regulatory bodies. I wonder why. It was similar with Madoff - there were people literally sending documents showing it's a fraud, and they did nothing for years.
I don't follow crypto lately, but it seems that Tether is printing money in high interest rate period.
But back before that, it was a complete joke - it was so apparent that they published only made up numbers that didn't really add up, pretended to get legitimate transfers of billions of $ on Sundays etc.
They were investigated once by a US A.G. and found out to have lied on the reserves in the past, but nothing really serious happened. They got a fine and were forced to published a pseudo balance sheet, which was a joke (still a bit better than FTX's Excel spreadsheet).
Free money and failure to regulate means scammers have never been more flush and able to talk with money. It's not a great space to be in, glad this administration placed Lina Kahn and others, without competition free markets can't operate efficiently. Both regulatory capture and natural monopolies all jam up the works. People don't remember it but one of the best things that ever happened to tech was the anti-trust suit brought against M$, anti-competitive behavior is such a drag on tech innovation, that combined with the incremental win for right to repair is all great progress.
> Exactly - a massive failure of regulatory bodies. I wonder why. It was similar with Madoff - there were people literally sending documents showing it's a fraud, and they did nothing for years.
For this to mean much (unfortunately), we have to know how many legitimate companies are being constantly reported as fraudulent. Similar to the FBI's flawless "they were on our radar" after every mass shooting event... if everyone is on the radar then it's not that informative that this person was too.
Madoff's returns were so egregious that they definitely should've been looked into despite any of this^ though. Arguably Tether should be looked into if only because of the systemic risk it (allegedly?) produces for the crypto universe more broadly. But then again... no one seems to eager to spend a bunch of investigative resources to bail out an economy of anti-government gamblers/degenerates.
Aren't you comparing the wrong values. Those banks that failed had more assets than tether has liabilities.
However, the actual difference between assets and liabilities was significantly less than 120bn for those banks. With Tether, I imagine the collapse will go from 1:1 redemptions day 1 to "oops all gone" day 2.
So I expect Tether to be the largest "bank" failure in US history by terms of loss of value.
It really is just a bank without any of the regulatory safeguards. A disastrous outcome is inevitable.
> really is just a bank without any of the regulatory safeguards
A "bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans" [1]. Tether doesn't offer demand deposits--withdrawals are subject to a minimum and fee [2]. It's thus not a bank, but a bank-like shadow bank [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank
[2] https://tether.to/en/redeem-tethers-to-fiat-currency/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banking_system
Just another reason why crypto is inferior. So much risk , no upside. like investing in mortgage/ bank stocks in 2007.
No upside?
Historically, or purely in the context of this article, assuming it's true?
what has the price done over the past 8 months, past 3 years?
At least you've done enough research to very specifically cherry pick your time spans.
That kind of research could have earned you some good money.
Also, I can cherry pick too:
1st Jan 2023 - 31st Dec 2023: 256%
Cherry picking is meaningless. Research and knowledge are where the (digital?) gold is.
yeah that is just to recover the 2022 losses lol
Tell that to all the Bitcoin billionaires and millionaires, lol.
some people win the lottery too
"backed" is a somewhat unclear term. Given tether don't only hold cash their securities will have mark-to-market valuations. At purchase prices, in a legitimate operation, they should be "backed", but if they were forced to finance redemptions at losses from purchase price then I suppose might not be "backed".
However, they must have been sitting on so much interest up to now given where rates went recently that, provided they ran a fairly conservative operation, they should have plenty of reserves.
I'm very curious to see how this investigation plays out, especially considering the debt situation here in the US. It appears (according to tether's audit reports) that tether went from about 64 billion in treasuries mid-2023 to about 92 billion mid-2024. That's 27 billion in demand for treasuries over that one year period which (if my math and research is correct) is about 3% of all treasury demand for roughly that time period.
It does appear that tether holds short-term maturity treasuries, and I don't know how that fits into the larger demand picture.
https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/63oJePOHqIvrcnXWMP...
https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/6h4YWqZOXbwtBaPtYg...
https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...
From what I’ve seen, they waited a couple years longer than they should have. I expect tether deleted evidence by now
Tether's press release: https://tether.io/news/tether-slams-wsjs-irresponsible-repor...
Is it actually just those two paragraphs, or is something not rendering correctly?
If that's all there is, it's not a great defense. Maybe they felt like the WSJ article was just so unfair it didn't deserve a response, but then... just don't respond. This kind of righteous indignation with no actual rebuttal isn't persuasive.
Federal investigators should probably also probe who controls that sizeable chunk of dormant bitcoin that's projected to be valued higher than a significant chunk of the US economy in a few years.
This used to be a non-serious question. But now we've got presidential candidates calling for national debt ceilings that will result in a default on US debt, and therefore crash the US dollar. Bitcoin's getting integrated into every payment app as if these companies are readying for an eventual modern equivalent of a run on the banks. Except with everyone moving their money to crypto instead of getting 'real dollars' to stuff into their mattresses.
There's a 99.99%+ likelihood that Satoshi just.. lost his wallet one day, or died, or whatever.
BUT -- assume a 0.01% possibility that there is something else at play with that early-mined bitcoin. Assume the _impact_ of a negative outcome with it will eventually be on the order of entire economies.
If you use common practice to calculate security risk by multiplying the likelihood of risk by it's potential impact, there is certainly enough at play here to justify the US government putting a couple agents on a search for a week to figure out who this guy is/was, and who now controls all of those apparently-lost coins.
I don't know why, but the one thing cryptobros fear is OFAC. They shrug off fraud, securities violations, and money laundering but when sanctions are mentioned people start running away. We saw this with Tornado Cash and hopefully Tether will get OFACed next.
BTW, Tether probably is backed 1:1 or better because they bought $XXB of US treasury bonds at >4% which return billions in profit per year. BTC is also (currently) near all time highs. Whatever hole they had was probably filled in.
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The U.S. federal government is investigating Bureau of Engraving and Printing's "US Dollar" notes for possible violations of sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules, according to people familiar with the matter.
The criminal investigation, run by prosecutors at the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, is looking at whether notes "tethered" to the Federal Reserve's "dollar" have been used by third parties to fund illegal activities such as the drug trade, terrorism and hacking—or launder the proceeds generated by them.
The Treasury Department, meanwhile, has been considering sanctioning the Federal Reserve because of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's currency notes' widespread use by individuals and groups sanctioned by the U.S., including the terrorist group Hamas and Russian arms dealers. Sanctions against the Federal Reserve would generally prohibit Americans from doing business using the notes.
https://archive.is/bCRd3
Jesus only 6 or 7 years late! It was OPENLY KNOWN and ADMITTED IN COURT they never had the cash backing and were just printing tokens to inflate prices. Why start an investigation now?
AIUI it's not an investigation about whether tether has the USDT or not but an investigation as to whether or not allowed customers to launder dirty money.
Tether is in a country that has a long history of doing monkey business, including monkey business with drug trafficking money and arms trafficking money. Even the CIA was tied to that monkey business.
To me there's zero doubt there's actual money laundering ongoing and I really wouldn't be surprised if, once again, some three letter agencies were implicated in monkey bahamian business.
> Tether is in a country that has a long history of doing monkey business, including monkey business with drug trafficking money and arms trafficking money.
I never forget the farcical interview with Deltec Bank's "Deputy CEO":
At the start of 2021, according to their website, it was a 55 year old bank. By the end of 2021, it was a 70 year old bank!
The bank's website is a WordPress site. And their customers must be unhappy - online banking hasn't worked for nearly two years at this point - take a look at the HTML source, there's no way it could actually work.
Anyway, their Deputy CEO gave this hilarious interview from his gaming rig. A 33 year old Deputy CEO, who by his LinkedIn claimed to have graduated HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Master of Science at the age of 15... celebrating his graduation by immediately being named Professor of Finance at a university in Lebanon. While dividing his spare time between running hedge funds in Switzerland and uhh... Jacksonville, FL.
The name of his fund? Indepedance [sic] Weath [sic] Management. Yeah, okay.
In this hilariously inept interview, he claimed that people's claims about Deltec's money movements being several times larger than all the banking in their country was due to them misunderstanding the country's two banking licenses, the names of which he "couldn't remember right now" (the Deputy CEO of a bank who can't remember the name of the banking licenses where they operate), and he "wasn't sure which one they had, but we might have both".
Once the ridicule and all this started piling on, within 24 hours, he was removed from the bank's website leadership page. When people pointed out how suspicious that looked, he was -re-added-.
The bank then deleted the company's entire website and replaced it with a minimally edited WordPress site, where most of the links and buttons were non-functional and remained so for months thereafter.
I mean fuck it, if the cryptobros want to look at all that and say "seems legit to me", alright, let em.
How bitcoin got huge was basically tether money printing. since it wasnt backed by anything, they just printed tether and bought bitcoin. a group did it behind the scenes, got massively wealthy.
And at stupid numbers that cryptofans just ate up like it was perfectly logical.
"Oh, you're banking $700M PER DAY in deposits for Tether? Sounds legit to me!"
delete
My unsubstantiated conspiracy theory on this is that not only is Tether not backed 1:1 USD > USDT but that they are so disproportionately not backed that they basically printed money during the peak of the pandemic, causing real measurable inflation in the crypto markets
deleted. I have to figure out the exact agency and repost sorry. I thought it was the sec, but I am wrong.
> Tether effectively evaded future SEC oversight by withdrawing from the U.S. market and operating outside U.S. jurisdiction
U.S. "jurisdiction is triggered when a payment in U.S. dollars [takes] place and the U.S. financial system [is] used" [1].
EDIT: Tether withdrew from New York State's jurisdiction as part of its settlement with the New York AG [2], not to be confused with the U.S. attorney based in Manhattan.
[1] https://www.ziv.unibe.ch/unibe/portal/fak_rechtwis/c_dep_pri...
[2] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
delete
https://x.com/paoloardoino/status/1849876338573799912
CEO of Tether - “As we told to WSJ there is no indication that Tether is under investigation. WSJ is regurgitating old noise. Full stop.”
U.S. attorneys are under no obligation to tell people they are investigating that they are under investigation. That doesn't prove the Journal's assertion. But it's nonsense to the point of suspicion to conclude from not having been noticed that there is no investigation.
Going to screenshot that incase it ages like milk.
yup. his words mean little
Yeah that's not how investigations work. USAOs don't publicize ongoing investigations for obvious reasons. Once they wrap up an investigation but before convening a grand jury to indict, they may send a target letter, but they typically don't. Most often, people don't find out until they're indicted.
https://x.com/paoloardoino/status/1849930663278833822
Tether CEO additional statement on X - “At Tether, we deal regularly and directly with law enforcement officials to help prevent rogue nations, terrorists and criminals from misusing USDt. We would know if we are being investigated as the article falsely claimed. Based on that, we can confirm that the allegations in the article are unequivocally false.”
Again, that's not how it works. They wouldn't know if they're being investigated unless the USAO told them. And if the USAO had told them they're a target of an investigation then they'd say that instead of this garbage quote. Hell they may even be working with the sdny on some investigations, but in no way does that mean they would know if they themselves are the subject of another investigation. In other words, unless Tether is somehow working with the investigators on an investigation into Tether, Tether wouldn't know they're being investigated.
"trust me bro"
Someone tipped off the WSJ, and more will probably be developing
If Tether is a fraud then the entire financial system is clearly a fraud as well. What kind of financial system allows a fraud of this size to continue for over a decade? Let me guess, nobody knew anything. Yet the government knows about every transaction over $600 on all our accounts. It's clown world.
This is just another example of how shorting Bitcoin during market hours is such an effective strategy, which is as profitable now at $60k as it was at $20k. This takes advantage of the tendency of bad news to drop when the stock market is open. Federal government offices are closed on weekends, so if bad news is dropped or a rumor of bad news, it will be on a weekday and when the market is open, as has been the case.
Good news can also drop, but there is a major asymmetry favoring bad news and liquidations, and consequently sudden drops of the Bitcoin price. You don't have to work at a hedge fund to find great methods like this.
It also shows why Bitcoin is an inferior investment compared to tech stocks, in which investors do not have to worry about these regulatory risks (except for antitrust, which is a slow, drawn-out process and this can be mitigated with diversification). QQQ has far outperformed Bitcoin even as far back as 2020.
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Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
Ask Cantor Fitzgerald if they aren’t the largest US treasuries purchasing outfit... with larger balances than many countries much less banks.
Both presidential candidates have signaled that they are pro-crypto scams (and one thinks that has something to do with the welfare of black men.) It's too late. Bitcoin has entered the house price zone, where people are elected to office on promises to make housing as expensive as possible. We'll have to wait until crypto brings down the entire economy. And after it does, the people who hold it will be bailed out:
"Do you know how many disadvantaged minorities are invested in crypto? Especially after we allowed them to invest their social security into it, with matching contributions from the state if they agree to hodl? Are you a racist monster?"
Meanwhile 90% of black people will have 90% of their savings in crypto, accounting for less than 2% of all crypto holdings.
FTX so far was barely a speedbump. All it taught politicians is that there's a lot of money in doing what crypto whales say, and absolutely no consequences even if it goes belly up in the worst way.
It's just pandering. Neither candidate will do anything. Existing regulation will stay in place or tighten.
Trump launched an actual Shitcoin.. will be interesting to see what happens to that.
Yearly Tether obituary thread
> Tether obituary thread
Timing its collapse is foolhardy. Concluding it must collapse isn't. It's a shadow bank run without deposit insurance nor AML.
Why must it collapse?
> Why must it collapse?
One, because the consequences of an AML failure are immediately catastrophic: a dollar stablecoin can't reasonably survive without access to the dollar financial system. Tether's unregulated status means enforcement options are zero or ban. (Banks can be fined and put under compliance regimes.) Running a perfect AML programme indefinitely is impossible. There is no indication Tether runs much of an AML programme at all.
Two, because bank-like structures are inherently unstable. Asset values fluctuate. The banks they hold cash or assets at will fail, sometimes beyond deposit insurance limits. Unlike banks, Tether has the benefit of being able to block redemptions. But they can only do that so many times before a regulator takes notice.
In summary, Tether exists at the pleasure of American regulators and the consequences of losing favour are collapse. They're compliance-wise and financially unstable. The consequences of a single failure won't be catastrophic. But eventually they will fail for the same reason every bank without deposit insurance will, eventually, fail.
Governments don’t like stable coins so even if it is perfectly 1:1 they will still try to find a way to go after them.
Other commenters have hinted the path is “sanctions” for not enforcing some controls..
Personally I can’t wait for governments to go after stable coins, then Bitcoin will really “moon”!
> Governments don’t like stable coins so even if it is perfectly 1:1 they will still try to find a way to go after them
There are plenty of regulated stablecoins [1]. Hell, my state is launching one [2].
Governments usually have to subpoeana banks to get transaction records. With a stablecoin, those records are centralised.
[1] https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/StableCoinReport_...
[2] https://www.ledgerinsights.com/state-of-wyoming-plans-stable...
It's more "every four years" at about this time isn't it?
Good timing, along with the election. Going by history there's the likelihood of a ~20% dip in the BTC price before it takes a couple of big steps up in the last few months of the bull run part of the 4-year cycle.
If it happens, accumulate.
Don't buy a pizza with it, or help Aunt Mildred with an expense, or loan your brother $4k though, because it's useless for any practical purposes.
I'm aware of these things, but good points to know for the uninitiated.
Why would I accumulate something which has so much risk and so much downside when I can just buy tech stocks like TSLA or NVDA which actually go up, with less risk and less volatility? Meta, Nvidia, QQQ have beaten bitcoin for years now. The time to have bought bitcoin was pre-2017 or so. those days over for good. Bitcoin is weak and bloated, never goes up anymore, too many old wallets and whales dumping. Too much regulation.
Depends on your timescale and when to buy and sell.
Depending on the reason, I'd also say it would be worth buying Meta, NVDA, TSLA, etc. on a 20% dip, especially if they were going into a season where, historically, they makes their largest gains.
For those doubting that Tether is fully backed, note that Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgeral, one of the largest investment banks and a public company, has stated that Cantor Fitzgeral manages Tether’s money and indeed the money is all there and invested in US treasury bonds
> Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgeral, one of the largest investment bank and a public company, has stated that Cantor Fitzgeral manages Tether’s money and indeed the money is all there and invested in US treasury bonds
Source? I'm seeing Fitzgerald say "Cantor Fitzgerald manages 'many many' of" Tether's assets (not all) and that he can vouch for their balance sheet [1]. But not that Cantor manages all of its assets nor that it's all in Treasuries.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-16/tether-s-...
The most comprehensive and forceful statements are in this video: https://youtu.be/IjR3Hj0aRW4?si=s2D0wjQOIS5uiFKh
8:45
What are the incentives at work here? What is their risk exposure to a collapse of tether? What would be the reputation al risk to their firm if tether was a scam?
I personally would take this with a grain of salt as they have a direct financial interest in Tether looking solid and prestigious and continuing its present operations.
I am old enough to remember when investment banks touting their mortgage backed securities business before the collapse in 2008.
The incentives at work here are that if a CEO of a public company makes false statements of this kind goes to jail. This is like the CEO of the bank that held Bernie Madoff's money going on record before Madoff's fall saying he holds Bernie's money and it's all there. If Tether is unbacked Howard Lutnick is going to jail, so it is irrational to believe Tether is unbacked at this point.
That's nonsense. If they want to remove doubts that the money is all there they should get an audit. Refusing to get an audit is an enormous red flag.
They have $118.4 billion in USD reserves?
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