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Comment by bripeace | Hacker News Reader

No, it's unlikely if Tether was legitimate USDT printing would correlate so closely with bitcoin (crypto) market downturns.

The reason being, assuming tether is legitimate, for every printing they are sourcing additional USD to back the newly minted USDT. The idea they could so consistently find large investors willing to make NEW 100M+ investments while the crypto markets were in free fall is unlikely to say the least.

And it's not as if that's the only complaints about Tether. The fact Bitfinex and Tether has the same management; USDT pretty much acts as a proxy for Bitfinex to maneuver around banking laws; and that USDT supply pretty much grows monotonically are just a few of the other issues that suggest Tether is not legit.

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This is inaccurate. Tether demand INCREASES when the cryptomarkets crash because traders want to escape to non-volatile assets. If everyone converts their crypto to USDT at the same time (which is what happens during big crashes) they MUST print more Tether or the price will increase.

> If everyone converts their crypto to USDT at the same time (which is what happens during big crashes) they MUST print more Tether or the price will increase.

This doesn't make sense.

You don't "convert" other cryptocurrencies to USDT, you sell your cryptocurrencies to people who have USDT. If there's a big sell pressure on the cryptocurrency, people want to move back to dollars, and there are not enough USD(T) then the price of the cryptocurrency should come down.

By adding more USDT to the picture you're magicking up money out of thin air to prop up a price. You're basically saying that when people want to sell cryptocurrency, dollars should be brought into existence to facilitate this at their preferred price.

It makes perfect sense. If many people are trying to BUY USDT (increasing demand for USDT) the price of USDT will increase. Tether tries to prevent this by printing more USDT (increasing supply). They are not "magicking" Dollars, they are magicking a commodity (USDT) pegged to Dollar.

I'm not saying that I'm a big Tether fan or anything. However to say that it "doesn't make sense" when they print more Tether during market crashes is false.

> It makes perfect sense. If many people are trying to BUY USDT (increasing demand for USDT) the price of USDT will increase.

Why? It's worth exactly one dollar. Which they have in an account. That's the point. The price of the other cryptocurrency will come down, and the value of USDT compared to that cryptocurrency will indeed rise, as it should when people want to sell to a market where there's more demand on dollars than the asset.

> They are not "magicking" Dollars, they are magicking a commodity (USDT) pegged to Dollar.

But it's supposed to be pegged to the dollar by a real dollar backing. In the scenario you're describing, it's a floating asset not backed by anything, with a value maintained purely by supply manipulation, and being issued to prop up an asset price. The opposite of what it's supposed to be.

> However to say that it "doesn't make sense" when they print more Tether during market crashes is false.

It still doesn't. I mean, it makes sense from a "lets conjure up some money to prop up the price of BTC" angle, sure, but that's not the same as it making sense for something that's backed by cash on a 1:1 basis. Tether should only be issued when people give dollars to the tether foundation. That's the claim on their front page, and the basis of their peg.

I thought that what people call a "currency peg" is normally the same as what you are calling "maintained purely by supply manipulation". So I suspect you may be using words in a nonstandard way.

Not here, not the way tether is set up. Its claim is that its peg is concrete and reliable in the way a floating peg is not, because every tether is backed by a real dollar in a bank account, and in theory is redeemable.

Take a look at their homepage.

I'm saying that I have the impression that some countries have a currency that is pegged to the dollar, and they maintain dollar reserves, but not one for one. And people do not say that is "floating", but that it is not floating. So it becomes misleading if you start defining a peg as requiring one for one reserves and being "floating" otherwise. There's no downside to using terminology that is clear to other people, unless you are trying to be deceptive.

I'm not making these claims you seem to think I am.

I am 100%, absolutely, positively not saying 1:1 backing is required for a currency peg.

I am saying that in the case of tether, that is the explicit claim they are making about their cryptocurrency. They are claiming that each and every one is backed by a dollar in their account. This is their value proposition, this is what you are buying when you buy tether. An open, audited, 1:1 backed US dollar token * .

Please go and read their homepage if you have some sort of issue with this, it's right there at https://tether.to/

The idea is very much that you can park money in tether and it's not vulnerable to a run on the currency and it cannot drop below a dollar, because each one has a corresponding dollar in an account.

(* unfortunately they are not very open and have never been audited)

I don't understand why you are getting downvoted, because this is indeed what Tether claims. From their homepage

"100% Backed

Every tether is always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves. So 1 USD₮ is always equivalent to 1 USD."

Whether Tether's claim is actually true is at best unclear, of course.

There's zero proof they have anything in there account.

Well indeed! But that's how it's supposed to work.

Completely fraudulent?

Nobody outside of tether really knows until there's some sort of audit.

But the secrecy, false claims of regular auditing etc. don't look good from here.

Bitfinex hired Friedman LLP to audit them.

Friedman only gave a report explicitly specifying "THIS IS NOT AN AUDIT" because Bitfinex wouldn't provide the documents and access beyond simple statements.

Friedman LLP recently removed all mention of ever having been involved with Bitfinex from their webpage.

Previously visible here:

http://archive.li/xbhxI

http://www.friedmanllp.com/insights/auditor-engagement

The Bloomberg article states that Friedman was issued a subpoena from the CFTC, at the same time Bitfinex was subpoenaed.

  Friedman LLP, a New York-based auditing firm, was also 
  subpoenaed by the CFTC after Tether hired it last year to 
  assess claims that Tether held enough U.S. dollars, 
  according to a person familiar with the matter.

Yes of course demand increases for UDST on downturns which increases the market value of USDT and that's fine.

In fact printing tether to ensure it's market value is $1 is a fine solution. Except for the fact that the bank accounts that BACK the tether with USD are now in deficit compared ot the UDST supply. So while the crypto market value of USDT is $1 it's no longer backed 1-1.

So now, if they're legit, tether must figure out a way to get the missing dollars back into the bank account. The most efficient way to do this is to find an outside investor and trade him all the newly printed USDT for USD. In practice this would be rather difficult to do consistently in sliding markets, difficult enough that the correlation would be low as I pointed out.

You could also exchange USDT for various COINS then sell the coins for USD which then go into those reserve bank accounts. If you have a willing exchange partner with lots of cash and a need for bitcoins then this could work pretty well. Considering Bitfnex is run by the same dudes as tether, if they are legit then this is probably what they are doing. But all that's just IF they are legit and there's plenty of things wrong with USDT outside of whether it's backed 1-1 with USD.

TLDR: Trading volume and market value of USDT does not relieve tether of actually having USD on hand for each Tether that exists.

By your logic if that were the case, Tether would need to be destroyed everytime the crypto-markets rise...

Plus, Tether's offical website and documentation state that's not how Tether is intended, they claim it is always 1:1 backed by a real USD reserve in a bank account (which they tell people they will audit, but the auditor backed out after giving a statement that said Bitfinex would not provide the proper documentation and access, later erasing any mention of having been associated with Bitfinex.)

No, they don't need to print more tether to protect the price. The price of tether is locked to $1.

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