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Well, Bitfinex uses Deltec as their bank. A bank that claimed at the start of this year that they were "55 years old and whose customers were predominantly asset managers and high net worth individuals", until they did a website redesign (more on that below) and overnight were "70 years old".

A bank that had a 33 year old "Deputy CEO" who gave interviews from his gaming rig.

Who claimed to have graduated from HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Masters in Science when he was 15...

and then immediately get a job as Professor of Finance at a Lebanese university...

while dividing his time between running funds in Switzerland and oh ... Jacksonville Florida (actually, that last part is the most believable), where he worked for himself, managing a fund that he couldn't even spell correctly on his own LinkedIn profile (Independance[sic] Weath[sic] Management).

Of course, the last interview he gave, the bank removed him from their website within hours once the ridicule started piling on. When people started questioning that, they very quickly re-added him. And then removed the site entirely. And put up a WordPress template website with completely non functional links and buttons a few days later.

I keep waiting for Yakety Sax to start playing, but to the true believers, it never does, and apparently all us nay-sayers are just neanderthal and don't see "the vision".

Sounds like a dumpster fire.

The 55 years old/70 year old thing could have some legitimacy, kinda. Banks like to be seen as being very old, implying stability. There is a popular regional bank where I live that was established in the 1970s. But this bank says that it is more than 150 years old. Why? It turns out that it bought out a bank that was founded around 1860. Since that bank is now part of them, they reason, they have a history that goes back that far. Sketchy if you ask me, but apparently legal. (?) If Deltec bought an older bank, then maybe they are using the same justification.

> I keep waiting for Yakety Sax to start playing, but to the true believers, it never does, and apparently all us nay-sayers are just neanderthal and don't see "the vision".

It reminds me of the initial dot-com bubble, where anybody who asked questions was also painted as not getting it. Ditto the mortgage bubble, come to think of it.

Then when the inevitable crash comes, nobody apologizes. It's either "who could have known" or just moving on to the next grift and never saying another word.

Not that nobody apologizes, more often than not those early warning voices are singled out. Because obviously, having seen it coming, they could have done something to avoid the crash. So of course they are to blame.

I’ve seen this happen in companies with stupid projects. Same thing happened with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Anyone who dares ask questions is ignored, sidelined, or fired.

Seems to be a general pattern when there is an economic or policy “bubble” and big players in an organization or sector are holding the bag.

Everyone who holds cryptocurrency is holding Tether’s bag of poo. No they are not even the majority of money in cryptocurrency, but they are enough to prop up the price a lot given that it’s a fairly thin market. They are also structured so as to make it very easy to use their funny money to manipulate cryptocurrency price.

Their joker CEO sounds like a cutout and fall guy.

> Everyone who holds cryptocurrency is holding Tether’s bag of poo.

Or they recognize you can't time the market, and see upside despite a nearly-inevitable tether crash? If investors had been waiting for tether to crash they would have missed the run from $1k - $30+k, and I don't think you can claim with a straight face that was all tether manipulation. Again, can't time the market.

What you describe is timing the market though? Specifically, getting in on a run with confidence you can get out before the crash.

No definitely not assuming you can get out before the crash. I'm talking about longer term investors who see the Tether crash as temporary, not a permanent end to crypto.

Everybody holding a bag of poo believes there's upside. That's why they're holding it. I will grant that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is incredibly good at not just finding but creating greater fools. [1] But the fool supply is finite, and more than 10 years on cryptocurrencies still aren't good for much practical. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28781968

If you’re criticism is based on payments you have not been paying attention to the space for the last 5 years.

Anyway, it’s easy to make a circular argument of “people buy it because they are fools, and they are fools because they buy it.” You’ll be right whether it goes up or down so there’s not much of a debate to be had..

Well I'm glad we agree that Bitcoin has failed in its original purpose. Perhaps you can set straight all the people who argue otherwise? Because there sure are a lot of them.

The trouble is, it doesn't actually have another one, not a practical one.

Payments is..part of the original purpose. And I think for everyday transactions Bitcoin has failed, so far. Lightning is a step in the right direction though, but it's not there in terms of UX. And volatility is obviously an issue.

If you are actually unaware, and not just arguing in bad faith, most development right now is happening on Ethereum and DeFi apps running on Ethereum. You can get collateralized loans, there are decentralized prediction markets, stuff like that.

Payment was the entirety of the original purpose. As the original paper says, "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash". The first sentence of the introduction starts with "Commerce on the Internet" and ends with "process electronic payments". It has failed both on "peer-to-peer" and "electronic cash". It makes no material difference to internet commerce. It has signally failed in its original purpose.

And yes, more development is always happening. Success is always in the future. Never mind that M-Pesa and Venmo and Android and Tesla all started around the same time. Uber and Lyft and Twitch and TikTok all launched years later. They all have actual success. None of them are hammers blundering around in search of a nail. None of them have to keep blowing smoke about the incredible future ahead.

But in the same way that Bitcoin is making no difference today in the real-world payment markets, none of that development is making a difference today in their equivalent markets. Colateralized loans, if they work, are 0% of the total colateralized loan market. Prediction markets have existed for more than 20 years. Adding "decentralized" doesn't make them better. Most of that "innovation" is in the category of dancing bears: the impressive part is not that the bear dances well, just that it's a bear doing the dancing.

But since you can't name a purpose, I'll just tell you: The actual current purpose of the whole circus is to enable assorted grifts. When Bitcoin got popular, that's what drove it: people seeking unearned wealth, and the people preying on the suckers with money to lose. That has kept snowballing, grift upon grift and with massive effort to create more suckers to keep the grifts going just a little longer.

Are there reasonable people caught up in this? Sure. As Madoff showed, many of the people involve on both sides of a Ponzi scheme are perfectly sincere believers. But neither their belief nor their sincerity changes the underlying truth: there is no value being created. Nobody can admit that, of course, so they just claim that the value creation is just down the road if only you hodl and believe hard enough.

> Prediction markets have existed for more than 20 years. Adding "decentralized" doesn't make them better.

Prediction markets have probably existed for thousands of years, but this is where we disagree. Decentralization is a fundamental improvement to a betting market, because there is no longer a counterparty who is incentivized to cheat you when you win, or incentivized to take on so much risk that they cannot pay you back if they lose.

> Colateralized loans, if they work, are 0% of the total colateralized loan market.

You sure about that? There's nearly $100B locked in DeFi, although admittedly that's more than just collateralized loans.

You can disagree with that but the snarkyness of "you can't name a purpose" isn't necessary, I've named multiple. It's easy to find cases where a company took much longer to become successful that Uber and Lyft and ended up doing much better than both. I don't find that argument very compelling do you?

I think folks on either extreme of "cryptocurrency is going to eat the world" and "cryptocurrency is literally a trillion dollar scam" should really try to second guess themselves a bit. I think emotions get in the way a bit.

> Everyone who holds cryptocurrency is holding Tether’s bag of poo

Everyone who holds Tether is holding Tether’s bag. If you don’t own tether, this doesn’t directly affect you. Most of the people I know don’t own (and have never owned) Tether.

How many people who didn’t invest directly in CDOs or subprime mortgages were affected by the Great Recession in 2008?

Tether (or a substitute stablecoin) is currently a requirement for lots of the Wall Street investment in cryptocurrencies. If it turns to poo, lots of that Wall Street investment does too and it creates huge liquidity/ volume issues.

"Then, this year, Tether Holdings started putting out a huge amount of digital coins. There are now 69 billion Tethers in circulation, 48 billion of them issued this year. That means the company supposedly holds a corresponding $69 billion in real money to back the coins—an amount that would make it one of the 50 largest banks in the U.S., if it were a U.S. bank and not an unregulated offshore company."

A Tether crash would take down a lot of stuff.

I don't think that's fair, these concerns have been around for probably five years plus and get a lot of media attention. As someone invested in this area it does get a bit old and counter productive being scared of the various boogie mens while missing all the enormous upside so far.

After all, tether is 3% of total market cap, I think it's fair to say the effect if they disappeared tomorrow would be a bit bigger than that in an emotional market, might see a 40% dip or so but after that greed would make a recovery pretty fast and then grind to all time highs like allways. my five cents.

edit: As the Dothraki slaves would say it, tether has pretty scummy people behind it, it is known. but that's ok.

Quoting tether's total market cap is a bit disingenuous. What % of daily trade volume is tether?

Market cap is a meaningless metric to use here. How many actual dollars are invested into cryptos? When it is revealed that 1 USDT != 1 USD there will be a rush to the exits and you will be begging and praying for only a 40% drawdown.

The most serious argument is that the “enormous upside” is being driven by Tether fraud. Take some money off the table…

Tether counts for 80% of the trading volume though, which is the important figure instead of the nonsensical "market cap" value so beloved of crypto fans.

"Market cap" is not a real thing here, because it implies that there is an asset to value. Cryptocurrencies are synthetic commodities with no use value.

Your basic theory here is that bubbles always keep going up, even if sometimes they go down. But that's not how bubbles work. Tulip bulbs did not "grind to all time highs like allways". Neither did Beanie Babies. They both fell back to something approximating their use value. But what's the use value of some numbers on another person's computer? Approximately zero.

The only part I agree with is the market cap part but my post already accounted for that and for good measure inflated the effect from 3% to 40%. Replace tulips in your sentence with money supply or assets and you'll get a different picture. You seem to have an unshakable opinion without having read the first thing about the subject, suggesting anything by Andreas Antonopoulos. edit: maybe something like "history of money", your "bubble" has been going since before writing.

Wow ... I'm realizing what a completely unremarkable education and career I have. I've been a CTO twice but perhaps this shows what it would take to be a deputy CEO.

Well, I'll have you know I graduated summa cum laude from Lemönade Ständ Universität, which is a very prestigious institution in Luxemburg, when I was 6.

Whoa ... I can tell it's prestigious because it has three accented letters in its name!

I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces.

I once single-handedly beat an entire US armed force at an arm-wrestling tournament.

Anybody "fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software" almost certainly ran a whitebox computer shop, and was successful enough to get noticed and charged in a period where almost everybody's home computers ran pirated Windows and you could buy it on any street corner. In Italy to boot.

Bold! Bold pushback! To use a Fawlty Towers Basil line: "Sooo .... that's all sorted out" knowing full-well it isn't. Don't know Fawlty Towers? Let's go the Monthy Python direction:

JC: "It's not much of a bank."

MP: "Well, it's very clean, sir"

JC: "It's certainly uncontaminated by crypto-backed dollars."

Now I enjoy American TV too but I can't think of an All-in-the-Family, Nightcourt, or Scubbs scene here. But if you know the "aaaaannnnnnnd it's gone" ... line well you can riff from there.

I was thinking more of the tethered https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/us-the-tethered-explained/

Yeah, it was common, but that doesn’t exactly help his case to regulate a currency taken as an equivalent of the US Dollar

I think his experience fits nicely the job of running "counterfeit US Dollar"

Not arguing that, just saying he probably did run a successful electronics business for some time.

Tether most likely holding CHINESE paper. The kind that probably lost a lot of value in the past weeks.

Follow BennettTomlin on Twitter, he has been researching tether for years.

Or it could be like so many cryptocurrency adjacent businesses a straight up scam/Ponzi scheme.

I assumed their "$30B of commercial paper" was just the owners' other company.

Why are they downvoting you? The article mentions that they do claim to own a lot of Chinese paper

Not just that. The reporter saw their statement listing ownership.

They value their paper “at redemption value” which is a loophole so big they don’t need to lie. They can hold $10 billion worth of paper and value it at $30 billion.

M Impression was that Tether is holding BitFinex papers. I am not sure though where I read this

Is that crazy that people but this …