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Comment by aent | Hacker News Reader

Tether fake dollar printer has been going crazy the last few days, they printed a billion and a half in just 3 days. And no surprise there's an exact correlation between crypto prices and the amounts they print

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If this is true (which I think it is), then aren't all these institutional investors going to get crushed when it crashes? And won't it circle even faster downward if they try to sell their positions once it starts doing so?

How are they even buying all this Bitcoin? Are they unwittingly assisting in the Tether prints?

From what I can tell, Tether's recent printing volume is consistent with that of its FINCEN regulated equivalent USDC ($4B marketcap).

If money came out of thin air from tether's side there should be a big discrepancy between the daily increase in marketcap

The entire Tether market cap is 22 Bn$, It's very unlikly that Theher alone is able to double the Bitcoin price in just a couple of weeks (current market cap 744 Bn$)

Market cap is irrelevant when we don't know the trading volume, if I created a million random coins and sold one of them for a thousand, I'd have a billion dollar market cap coin, despite only having a thousand dollars of real money involved.

And we definitely don't know the real numbers, reported tether trading volumes are total nonce, they wash traded them to the point that they report higher volumes than all the world stock/bond markets combined.

Do they even claim to hold an equivalent in cash still?

Nope.

It's "backed by other assets", not backed 1:1 but "is always valued by Tether at 1 USD" and "Tether makes no representations or warranties about whether Tether Tokens that may be traded on the Site may be traded on the Site at any point in the future, if at all." all on their website.

See The Tether Press and Bitcoin's Speculative Mania [1]

TL;DR - Prepare to get filthy rich! In USDT terms.

[1] http://www.tr0lly.com/bitcoin/the-tether-press-and-bitcoins-...

Why does Tether always come up in HN crypto threads? I'm surprised it's still around after it was revealed they're running a fractional reserve. When I worked in the industry Tether was a joke and there were many alternatives that are backed 1:1.

Because they keep printing more and more unbacked money to the point that they are the 3d largest crypto currency right now and almost all crypto trading happens in tether, not actual dollars, so it's unclear how much actual money there is in that market and how much of it is fake dollars.

It's basically the bitcoin for crypto.. and its constant actual monetary difference with usd is the biggest cause of the crypto market cap inflation.

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