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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> isn't it slightly premature to file a lawsuit over losses

People bought, and Tether sold, USDT on assurances of being 100% backed by U.S. dollars. Tether is now admitting that not only is it not 100% backed, it isn't even entirely backed by U.S. dollars [1]. That's enough to allege fraud.

> The latest price charts still have tether at $1~=1USDT

Tether is under criminal investigation by the United States and New York State for, among other things, market manipulation. Taking Bitfinex's word that one's USDT has suffered no losses, all while they delay and unreasonably condition withdrawals [2], is like trusting Adam Neumann's on WeWork being worth $47bn.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-30/tether-sa...

[2] https://tether.to/announcement/

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Sure, it might be criminal fraud, but a lawsuit like this is civil. And in a civil lawsuit, you generally have to show actual damages. People that lost on the Bitcoin bubble burst caused in part by tether may have a stronger case though.

> People that lost on the Bitcoin bubble burst caused in part by tether may have a stronger case though

The complaint [1] seeks to certify precisely this class.

"Plaintiffs and members of the Class have suffered actual damages and injury in fact due to artificial prices to which they would not have been subject but for the unlawful conduct of the Defendants as alleged herein" (¶ 260). This is par for the course when it comes to "part-fraud, part-pump-and-dump, and part-money laundering" (¶ 2) schemes.

Note that the defendants are various, from Tether to its affiliates, including Bitfinex.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.524076...

OK, so, I don't have a strong position on this -- I'm purely asking a question. No need to go all ham with hyperbolic similes.

Also, am I taking Bitfinex's word when I look at the exchange-derived price of Tether? I'm not sure. I would have thought that I was trusting the price discovery mechanism in general. If I'm trusting Bitfinex on this at all, it's only to the extent that Bitfinex would be backstopping the price of Tether on all other exchanges. Right? I mean, they can lie about how much a Tether is worth, but they can't lie about how much it's trading for on exchanges they don't own.

The problem is: the Tether-USD pairing, which is the one that is supposed to always be at 1:1, is really exotic on exchanges. The only major one coming to my mind is Kraken, and even there the volume on the pair is anemic compared to the Tether market cap.

Or at least it was this way last time I was really active in cryptos, which I‘m not really at the moment. But a quick scan of Coinmarketcap didn’t really indicate that this has changed.

Thank you for providing this additional context. If the pairing is exotic and doesn't have much liquidity, can you still compute the expected value of tether by doing Tether->BTC->USD? Maybe not, because maybe BTC->USD is inefficient or illiquid itself?

You can compute the market price, either by taking the USD/USDT pairing on Kraken directly or by taking the ratio of BTC/USDT on Bitfinex against BTC/USD on Coinbase. They usually give the same answer modulo exchange fees (i.e. within about half a percent or so). When there was a run on Tether in May and it dropped to about $0.93, there was roughly a 7% price premium (several hundred dollars) on Tether-based exchanges like Binance and Bitfinex.

The confusion is because in theory, the market price should be tracking Tether reserves. Bitfinex admitted in a court filing that only 73% of outstanding Tether was backed by dollars. In an efficient market, that should imply that the price of Tether would fall to $0.73. Instead, it went back up to about $1. The implication is that traders either figured Tether would somehow be able to make up the shortfall, or that it just didn't matter.

Interestingly, people who shorted Tether expecting the market to be efficient got rekt, and the people who were actually correct (so far, at least) were the ones who were irrational. I wonder what this says about rationality and efficient markets today.

> I wonder what this says about rationality and efficient markets today.

Nothing new. Markets are more heavily dominated by those with more resources. If these players decide to act irrationally, then you'll go bankrupt faster than they will.

This is why you don't short industries, you only short companies. Industry will eat you alive. There are also strategy and tactics. Musk can fend off the short siege even though they might collectively have more resources than he does. If you want to beat someone in the market, your better bet is to enter it yourself than to try to bet they're going to fail.

Trying to use a short maneuver to expose market irrationality is not for the faint of heart. It never was. Shorts were only ever really useful to try to profit off of stupidity, not irrationality.

> I wonder what this says about rationality and efficient markets today

There isn't an efficient market around Tether.

The exchanges that trade it are predominantly controlled by its backer. Fraud investigations in play make a short's gains at risk for clawback. (Or at the very least, creating a legal headache for their owner.)

There is no assurance that the end game isn't a crash in value, but no value, which makes closing out a short position difficult or even impossible.

I have traded securities my entire career. It's been pretty obvious, from the start, that Tether is a scam. I wouldn't short it.

Disclaimer: This is not securities advice. Don't buy or sell securities or currencies based on Internet comments.

The Tether:USD rate is not the only factor you must consider, particularly because of how thinly traded it is.

The more important metric is comparing what it costs to buy BTC on Coinbase with cold hard USD, and what it costs to buy and then transfer out BTC with Tether anywhere else.

If you can buy large quantities of BTC with your Tether at close to the USD:BTC rate, then you can exit your Tether holdings at or close to the effective peg.

That's sea shells being traded against rocks. For Tether not to be sea sells ( or rocks ) this trade needs to have a very low difference between X and Y:

Start send X from a bank account USD to trading spot. Do USD->Tether->BTC

Immediately follow up with:

Take BTC received and do BTC->Tether->USD (Y) => fire to the bank account

Tether promised a guaranteed 1:1 exchange rate with USD. That guarantee no longer exists, even though the rate is still ~1:1 Tether has no way to enforce that. If it's value tanks there is nothing they can do.

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