"Absent a reasonable legal justification not to redeem Tether Tokens, and provided that you are a fully verified customer of Tether, your Tether Tokens are freely redeemable... Furthermore, residents of certain U.S. states are not permitted to be customers of Tether; are not permitted to cause Tethers to be issued or redeemed; and, are not permitted to hold Tether Tokens. Beginning on January 1, 2018, Tether Tokens will no longer be issued to U.S. Persons."
So if you hold Tether Tokens but are not a "customer", you have no claim to be paid. I suppose Tether customers (whoever they may be) might be willing to pay you dollars for your coins, but there's no reason for them to give you 1:1, for sure.
And you are required to deposit a minimum of $10,000 USD fiat.
And you are required to wait 3 months for verification.
So, sure, go ahead and do it "right now", subject to those caveats.
No one has provided proof of withdraw from Bitfinex USD or Tether since they've gotten kicked out of their banks.
Recent wires from Bitfinex have been associated with a rural bank in Poland which is normally only used only by farmers.
https://www.trustnodes.com/2017/11/22/bitfinex-reveals-new-p...
Are there even meaningful numbers of Taiwanese customers? Has it been marketed in Taiwan?
For the time being, we will only process requests above $50,000 in size. We believe that by the time we are able to get to the smaller withdrawals, other, less cumbersome
Your only knowledge of this is based on "surely we'd hear of people complaining on English language forums if they weren't able to".
And at the very least, if you do wish to do anything, you are required to maintain at least $10,000 USD (not USDT) and wait for up to 12 weeks for verification.
At least a cursory search of English fluency says that if there are complaints (or compliments) on Bitfinex, most users are certainly not going to be posting them on English-language forums.
Any actual, verified customer of Tether here willing to provide a demo?
1. Bitfinex claims to offer wires to Taiwanese accounts.
2. Bitfinex does redeem Tether 1:1 for USD (nominally, within your Bitfinex account).
3. Bitfinex claims to wire that redeemed USD to any Taiwanese account without delay or haircut.
Now, given that, the price of Tether out to trade at 1:1 with USD. Which, for the most part, it does. If there were lots of Taiwanese customers unable to realize those wires, i'd expect we would hear some complaining from them. But we don't. Therefore it is my presumption that those wires are proceeding uninhibited.
If you have an alternative explanation of the facts, i'm happy to listen to it.
All your other posts on this thread have made these as statements of fact. "Bitfinex offers wires", "Go ahead and open an account right now", etc.
I'm buying this reasoning as evidence towards the hypothesis that they indeed redeem some amounts of USD.
All the other things I've read so far suggests this will turn into a game of musical chairs - some amount of people who make the wire orders first will get redeemed, and the rest will be out of luck.
So in the best case scenario to redeem USDT for USD:
1. You have to have a Taiwanese bank account.
2. You have to gain verified status at Bitfinex's discretion.
3. You have to have a balance over 50k USDT.
Thus it logically follows, they have very little incentive to actually keep 2.3B in USD EVEN if they received 2.3B in USD.
I can buy the explanation that originally Tether planned to have 1:1 USD for each USDT.
However the massive regular printing of Tether really strains the 1:1 claim.
As far as I understand the current conditions for retrieving the real dollars from tether/bitfinex are dissuasive enough that most people won't bother doing that, so they just need to have enough liquidity to pay the small portion that will.