Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

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all the other assets that can absorb billions of dollars in liquidity are throughly manipulated

Bitcoin is thoroughly manipulated. Tether is minting a billion dollars a day now, with zero oversight and close ties to the major exchanges. Exchanges themselves have been found front running customers, running wash trades on their own coins etc etc. Fraud is rampant in this space and there is zero oversight from the normal regulatory bodies.

A trillion dollars goes into bitcoin, the price just goes up and there's no dilution.

But there is significant manipulation and absolutely no clarity about whether a trillion dollars has in fact gone into cryptocurrencies or whether things like the trillions of dollars that tether has minted affect the price more than real money flowing in. The numbers you can quote from exchanges are unaudited and highly suspect. At least those other assets have some sort of auditing in place to prevent fraud and market manipulation (which still happens, but would of course be rampant and largely hidden without regulation).

Also, Bitcoin is open source. So you can download the Bitcoin code and fork it and call it THE SUPER NEW IMPROVED BITCOIN

Ah, so the supply of this new money is in fact unlimited, since you can add new coins at any time. The supply of bitcoin may be limited (for now, by fiat), but the supply of cryptocurrencies and now nfts is constantly growing, there is no scarcity, and any we have is invented.

If you think Bitcoin is a symbol of resistance you're a mark making the likes of the Winklevoss twins and JL Van der Velde even richer. Get out now if you can.

> trillions of dollars that tether has minted

Tether has "only" minted $78 billion, not trillions

Sorry, tens of billions of dollars, not trillions, my mistake. They are currently adding 1 billion a day at times, where does that money come from?

Does anyone really believe 78,423,306,967 USD are currently invested in Tether?

I don't know anything about anything, but I see Wikipedia says Tether is 65% "backed by commercial paper". Which as far as I can tell basically means IOUs, but IOUs that are considered somewhat legit. It definitely seems questionable, but I'm not really sure how to assess how bad it is or isn't.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency)

Edit: I see elsewhere somebody saying "nobody in the commercial paper markets have heard of them"

Banks don't have to back the dollar by anything anymore.

With Tether - it's best to follow "fraud until proven otherwise" principle

That "commercial paper" could very well be IOUs from themselves to themselves

Their commercial paper would make them one of the largest players in the global market if their numbers were true, but nobody knows what they have invested in, they say it is in crypto as well (eek!), they've been found guilty of fraud multiple times, including faking assets by using temporary bank transfers, and the amounts we're talking about make it very hard to believe they could function at that scale without making lots of noise in the global commercial paper market.

So basically, like most other things they say, it's simply not credible.

https://www.ft.com/content/342966af-98dc-4b48-b997-38c008042...

USDC? and BUSD have been growing faster and are US regulated.

Everything can be manipulated, but bitcoin compared to any other asset we know, is the only thing that cant be changed. You can create a new bitcoin but you cant create the same bitcoin and thats makes all the difference in the world.

1. The rules can (and have) been changed by whoever has commit permissions on the repo, they are not immutable.

2. The rules can also be changed with a simple fork if enough users are persuaded to move (Bitcoin Cash) - and somehow the price of both is preserved (how? why? who benefits?).

3. The price is provided by unaudited exchanges and can be manipulated by manipulating linked assets and collusion with exchanges, as Tether has shown.

This is a house of cards waiting to collapse.

1) The rules about the 21Million which is the only thing that matters here can't be changed.

2) Again there is a reason why Bitcoin Cash is a fraction of BTCs value it's not the same.

3) Everything can be manipulated. You go and see how Soros did that in the 90es. But again that's not the measurement here. It can't be changed.

It's been a house waiting to collapse for 12 years now. Maybe you should ask yourself what it would take for you to admit to yourself that you were wrong. How long does this have to be a thing?

The rules about the 21Million which is the only thing that matters here can't be changed.

What would stop it being changed?

It's been a house waiting to collapse for 12 years now.

Tether has only been trading since 2015 and only prominent the last few years. Other cryptocurrencies have seen multiple bubbles and collapses. The thing that would convince me personally is that all the get-rich-quick marks and scammers leave the space and people start using it for actually useful things like payments.

Unfortunately distributed consensus with a global public ledger is particularly badly suited to payments or a currency, though it seems well structured for a ponzi scheme.

Why don't you tell me first what would make it possible since you seem to be privy to information no one else is. How are you going to change that?

It could be changed in bitcoin core, as previous changes to rules have been. It would require agreement from market participants.

Changes to some rules, not the fundamentals like the 21M though which is what is important.

I'm not clear on why you think this is 'impossible'. It's clearly possible to change the rules of a system defined by software, it just requires a majority of those maintaining the chain to go along with it.

The most bizarre economic occurrence of the last decade is Bitcoin forking and the copy and the original both maintaining value.

The crypto exchanges can sell more bitcoin than they have. Nobody is auditing them, and unless they collapse then there is not going to be an audit of what they hold. And with bitcoin being so impractical, there are is always going to be vast amounts of centralisation.

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