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Comment by wils1245 | Hacker News Reader

At this point the arguments for or against the idea of cryptocurrency are pretty irrelevant. Bitfinex has injected millions of dollars of fake money into the ecosystem, users are reporting an ability to withdraw money from it on Reddit, and their Twitter account's last message was reports of a DDoS two days ago with no updates.

https://twitter.com/bitfinex https://www.reddit.com/r/bitfinex/comments/7fx9z9/bitfinex_w...

Perhaps Bitcoin will recover from this fraud or another cryptocurrency will take the lead in the space, but we are headed for a crash.

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"Bitfinex has injected millions of dollars of fake money into the ecosystem"

please, explain what money is "fake" and what "injected" and "ecosystem" mean.

I'm not clear on the the details, but if you wanted to look in to it a lot stems from their "Tether" crypto currency which is supposedly backed by real US Dollars, but many suspect that they created new unbacked "tethers" to buy and bid-up BTC.

In a sense people are worried that they're literally making up money on the promise they have US Dollars so they can buy up BTC and sell it to maybe regain the missing USD? Unclear.

Need to remember that this is the same place, I believe, that was "hacked" and they spread the losses across all their customers if their costs were actually lost or not. Details have been hard to come by which is where the suspicion seems to have really started.

While bitcoin stores value in fiat, eventually that may not be the case and bitcoin will just be worth bitcoin. I know that day is likely very far off but if enough economies collapse, price stabilized and people adopt bitcoin as a currency, we may stop caring what a bitcoin is worth in USD, Yen, AUD, what have you.

Bitfinex controls Tether, a single source cryptocurrency supposedly backed by and pegged to the US dollar. The market cap of Tether has risen $188 million dollars to $678 million in one month:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

If Tether is what they say it is, this can only come from investments of US dollars. Ie nearly $400 million dollars of investment in one month.

On November 21 Tether announced a hack in which they lost $30 million.

Bitfinex is extremely likely to be insolvent at this point. Users are complaining of an inability to withdraw funds on Reddit, and Bitfinex's Twitter has a days old announcement of a supposed DDoS attack, with no updates:

https://twitter.com/bitfinex

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitfinex/comments/7g8cp3/eth_withdr...

Tether has been traded on other exchanges for other cryptos, meaning that these other cryptos have been inflated by purchases with fake money.

This is a good outline of the scenario I think is about to play out:

https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/11/26/the-bear-case-for-crypto...

Bitfinex'ed is an anonymous Twitter and Medium account that is explaining the Tether fraud much better than I can:

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed

Tether announced a hack in which they lost 30 million USDT, not USD. As they don't plan to redeem those USDT to USD, in no sense Tether lost 30 million USD. As far as I can tell, Tether lost nothing.

Do you still think the Tether is still held by the thieves? They traded it for other cryptocurrencies, out of Bitfinex, the second they stole it.

That is, of course, if it actually was a theft, and it was actually for $30 million. It's a single source currency, no one but the people running Tether knows what's actually behind it.

the topic is - bitcoin (Bitcoin hits $10,000). how is tether related to bitcoin? there are hundreds of coins of various credibility.

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