Hacker News Reader

Comment by ufo | Hacker News Reader

One problem with the market price for tethers is that it is actually very hard to sell them for USD. For example, Bitfinex does not allow USD withdrawals, only Bitcoin withdrawals.

View on HN

>it is actually very hard to sell [tether] for USD

Kraken offers a USDTUSD pair. How is that hard at all? https://blog.kraken.com/post/206/kraken-announces-support-fo...

Very little trading volume, and I'm not sure how easy it is to withdraw USD from them either. There's generally a lot more volume and market depth available for trading Tether to Bitcoin and that to USD. Also, for some curious reason, during most of the time the Bitcoin price was going through the roof that Bitcoin was actually worth more USD than it was USDT - the effective exchange rate via this route valued Tether at a small but very noticable premium to its face value.

>For example, Bitfinex does not allow USD withdrawals

Not true, bitfinex reenabled usd withdrawals in November.

not too hard. kraken and bittrex both do USD/USDT pairs (which, at 1.0 is a good metric of USDT health)

True for Kraken (although their USD withdrawal policies are very restrictive, so not a huge improvement over getting your money from Bitfinex).

Bittrex has a public pair between Tether and "True USD" [1], but their fiat USD market is not yet available to the public, and I don't know where we can find pricing data for the non-public market.

[1] https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=USDT-TUSD

> although their USD withdrawal policies are very restrictive

What is "very restrictive"? Cap on max amount for a given period?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com