66% of all Tether (USDT) have been printed in the last 6 months

It's strange how perfectly rational people who know Occam's razor and Popper's falsifiability principle, and can explain with great eloquence why correlation is not causation, are unable to apply the same logical reasoning to cryptoassets.

No, it doesn’t. Occam’s razor literally says if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

Tether has admitted to being fractionally backed. They are unaudited and the directors are ghosts.

Who the hell would deposit with that type of an organization? Most people would rather just transact in fiat and for those who must have stable coins, every other stablecoin is an order of magnitude safer.

Getting BTC into Coinbase is far easier than getting hundreds of millions of USD out.

Kind of, see the monthly attestations at https://www.paxos.com/attestations/ . It's significantly better than USDT, but IMHO not fully at a level where you can say "properly audited" without any caveats.

Atleast until the inevatible hack

The consensus is that all/most trading there is wash trading to give the illusion of volume. But like all bank runs, they don’t occur until enough people actually ask for their money.

Until that point, people seem happy to consider USDT equivalent to USD (and that may never change)

That assumption is the key issue: Binance doesn’t have USD banking, there is no way for them to accept USD for which to buy USDT.

Exchanges use Tether because they don’t have banking and can’t accept USD. So the USD has to find its way to Tether by some other mechanism. They claim it’s institutions, which is absurd. No institutional investor would ever give billions to an unaudited offshore entity when they can send fiat directly to legit exchanges. Michael Saylor himself says no institutions are using Tether.

So where do the Tethers come from? Maybe it’s not a fraud. But the answer should be very simple, and yet they cannot explain it.

Same can be said for gold.

Are most users even capable of melting it into tools when there's nobody that wants to trade for it?

I think bitcoin can be a technological marvel that has utility to humanity, even if it's being pumped artificially and its value falls back to (or below) what it was before it was pumped.

I think you underestimate just how mighty 'fragile' sentiment can be.

It is even worse than gold: it has negative value due to the insane energy consumption.

Newton lost a lot of money in the south sea bubble. Just because they are smarter it does not make them more rational.

I've been cashing out of my crypto weekly. Started in January, going to continue until i'm dry.

I can't predict when this garbage explodes, but i'll at least have the majority of the money out or all of it. If i'm wrong, i'm wrong, but all of this is fishy as fuck.

Defi loans, using your crypto as collateral to buy more crypto, tether printing off the charts. Most people don't care though, they see number go up and ignore the noise.

> Agreed. Surprised there are so many Bitcoin lovers on HN and in the startup scene, which is supposed to consist of smarter-than-average people. Bitcoin is basically shitty gold, because unlike gold, it has no intrinsic value and can go to zero, it's all based on fragile sentiment.

Being "smart" often doesn't translate into making good decisions or having good judgment. Sometimes intelligence only amounts to better capabilities at rationalizing whatever harebrained thing you already wanted to do, instead of giving up on it.

I think Bitcoin hits a bunch of special-interest buttons in some people that make it very difficult to put aside, for instance: truly innovative technology, startup thinking/wanting to be in on the "ground floor" of a big success, sci-fi made real, libertarianism, etc.

Delayed again? Do you have a link?

Tether/Bitfinex submitted something like 2.5 million documents. Reviewing them and taking a public position takes more than a few days.

>did you google the article that says how they submitted papers to NY attorney that they are fully backed?

Nope, haven't.

If so, I'd expect this to have hit most of the media channels dedicated to crypto (some of which I am sub'd to).

Not a peep.

Link?

Yes their white paper explains this quite plainly: an entity sends them fiat and they issue an equivalent number of Tether.

What you’re suggesting is very different. And your unwillingness to explain something that is so simple speaks volumes.

I’ve done my research. You’ve made a few unsubstantiated claims and then refuse to substantiate them.

M2 includes "I owe yous" by banks. But USDTs are only the "I owe yous" by the emitter. So a better comparison might be the federal reserve balance sheet:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

43% of these "original emitter" dollars have been printed in 2020.

Counter-point: the US government added $2.2T more dollars, yet they are almost as good at buying commodities and other goods and services today as they were a year ago. Furthermore, the market expectation of their goodness, as determined by Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, is quite strong. That seems like almost the opposite of dollar holders rushing for the exits!

I'm having trouble following your logic for [2]. Prices are decided on the margin whereas M1 is a metric of total assets, which is a cumulative measure. As a thought exercise: if I owned the entirety of $DJI, and you bought $2.2T of $DJI from me, M1 would be unchanged (your money is now held in deposit at my bank account), and the market cap of $DJI would be determined entirely by our transaction price. By what mechanism do you relate the two?