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Comment by afishisafish | Hacker News Reader

Some counter arguments https://twitter.com/IamNomad/status/956283471034449920

Do you consider it credible that they have received, this year so far, somewhere between 5 and 10% of the entire volume of fiat currency that has so far been put into cryptocurrency in its entire history so far ? And between 10 and 20% since tether was launched? Without much in the way of formal banking arrangements?

I don't really. And the more you look at their activities the more suspect it looks, tether magically appearing in their hundreds of millions to prop up the markets when they look like falling further, it all looks very, very much like market manipulation and lies.

> Do you consider it credible that they have received, this year so far, somewhere between 5 and 10% of the entire volume of fiat currency that has so far been put into cryptocurrency in its entire history so far ?

Yes I do: if we look at the top exchanges volume wise according to coinmarketcap[1] we can see that 5 out of 10 exchanges only support USDT as anything resembling any type of FIAT, and another one has a direct market for USDT into USD (Kraken).

Number 2 on the list is an exchange (Binance) that was launched less than a year ago and does (according to their own data) 3.5 billion USDT in daily volume and according the tether blockchain owns over 500 million tether (technically their users own them).

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So yes I do believe a ton of money is flowing into the tether ecosystem (mostly to these new exchanges that don't do FIAT like Binance, Bittrex, Poloniex, Huobi, etc).

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/

Where is the audit? Where is the balance sheet? At which banks are those funds held?

Even IF those tethers are 1:1 backed today, they won't be once uncle sam figures it out.

> Even IF those tethers are 1:1 backed today, they won't be once uncle sam figures it out.

I 100% agree, this is also the reason why there is no public audit ;)

So you believe in all honesty that fees and exchange activity amount to 850 million dollars of brand new fiat deposits to the tether company in the last three weeks alone? From exchanges that don't offer actual USD facilities?

This seems absolutely unbelievable to me, and will continue to do so until there is proof of above-board dealing. As it is we have the opposite - the auditors who were previously in the picture have discontinued their relationship with Bitfinex and Tether.

How do you know the total amount of fiat put into crypto?

At this point hearsay from r/tethers that it's around $10 billion, as an estimate from JP Morgan, I'll try to find something more concrete.

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