> If you are so confident, why not sit on a Tether short?
Because betting either way in a manipulated market is a sucker's game. Bitfinex has their finger on the scales. Why on earth would I bet in their casino?
Does anyone other than Bitfinex even allow you to short USDT? Remember those two are one and the same, and Bitfinex doesn't even have banking. What are they going to pay my USDT short in? USDT?
I'm certain that's the right decision for you. But for those who spend time understanding markets instead of mythologizing them (and assigning any unpredicted movement to a boogieman), there is absolutely alpha to be had, and the market is not so easy to manipulate as many (almost exclusively non-quants) believe.
It's popular to shit on cryptocurrencies these days, and they certainly have their shortcomings, but they are still fascinating systems and the markets are even more interesting. Instead of intellectual discussion, people seem to flood the comments with hate and jealousy, presumably because some people made more money than them due to presumed luck.
The popularity of shitting on cryptocurrencies is directly in proportion to the level of hype that never lived up to anything. They were supposed to revolutionize the world's economy. But so far they only have proven utility for speculation and light financial crime.
Is it possible that somebody will make money speculating on cryptocurrencies? Sure. Some people make money from MLM schemes too. But ultimately these are negative-sum activities: more money goes in than comes out. And a lot of the money going in is from suckers being taken for a ride. I think there's nothing wrong with people being negative about that.
Based on the tone of the parent, I think we can probably agree his interest is more about deriding those who are involved in cryptocurrencies (whether they won or lost in the market) than offering a warning to protect newcomers.
Like most, you have trivialized the use cases in places like Venezuela and Zimbabwe where the state backed financial system has failed. With the current state of technology, Bitcoin has no ability to replace the global payment network. Claiming that means it's a failure that hasn't lived up to anything is hyperbole. The system's very existence and self maintenance after over a decade is impressive enough to me. I also believe the financial utility of a new asset class with new properties is interesting and useful on its own, although I doubt the layman would agree.
Those are utterly irrelevant until you solve the initial distribution problem. Ready for it?
- Those people don't have money.
- The only way to purchase a meaningful quantity of BTC is through purchase on an exchange. After all, it's twice as hard to mine today as it was yesterday, and in Venezuela you'll just get your mining rig socialized (this has happened a few times).
- If you exchange within the country, then you're just moving the poops around. It's zero sum. Steve has a bunch of Bolivars. He exchanges with Alice for BTC. Now Alice has a bunch of Bolivars, and Steve has BTC. The net worth of the system was preserved perfectly. BTC did nothing for the union of Alice and Bob -- except they lost a ~$0.50 transaction fee, which is a few days wages.
- If you exchange outside the country, who on earth outside the country wants your Bolivars?! If you can exchange outside you may as well buy Gold or Dollars. Those haven't dropped 50% in the last 3 years. Even if you did buy BTC, it's still a zero net sum situation -- except they lost a ~$0.50 transaction fee, which is a few days wages.
Bitcoin is meaningless for third-world countries in aggregate until the initial distribution problem is solved.
The problem in Venezuela isn't a piss-poor currency, that's a symptom of a piss-poor government. No amount of magic beans will change that, until the people solve the problem.
> If you exchange outside the country, who on earth outside the country wants your Bolivars?!
Nobody. So you don't buy BTC with Bolivars, you sell art commissions or do some work on Mechanical Turk or grind for online game currency with a real market value, and arrange to receive payment in BTC. Then you buy stuff with BTC.
Meanwhile if there isn't that much BTC in the country, that doesn't matter -- currencies can have a different value in different places when arbitrage is restricted. So maybe BTC is worth more there. Or maybe arbitrage isn't really that restricted in practice and if it started to be more expensive there somebody would make a profit by supplying BTC in exchange for exporting boatloads of oil or coffee beans or whatever people in those countries produce.
That's covered under my point though, that if you can exchange internationally then why on earth would you bother with Bitcoin? You may as well just hold dollars or gold, you know, things that don't fluctuate 10% in a day and 50% in a couple of years. If you're already doing business abroad then forget Bitcoin.
It's because Bitcoin is digital. Neither your country's banks nor some other country's banks will give you an account denominated in dollars. You can only transact in dollars if it's physical cash. Then you can't use it to buy anything electronically.
You seem to have completely missed the point that there have been severe currency exchange controls in Venezuela for over a decade. These Venezuelans aren't trading Bolivars outside the country; they are exporting BTC mined with a mismanaged electrical grid to get food, toiletries, etc. imported into the country.
> that's a symptom of a piss-poor government. No amount of magic beans will change that,
Did it solve their government problem? No. But it resulted in a little more food in the country then there would otherwise be by allowing citizens to subvert their government's financial controls. BTC provides a base level quality of money, that basically acts as an insurance system against the worst governments. Does it have a huge use case in a country with a healthy and functional financial system? No. But if things go to shit in a country, people can still use Bitcoin and safely transfer value online instead of reverting to trading gold coins in person.
I know you want all things BTC to be bad. But try to keep it intellectual, not emotional. What about the technology -- do you think it's fascinating that a relatively simple and elegant protocol of incentives and cryptography can result in a self sustaining financial system still running a decade after its release?
Of course it can address the needs of a few by stealing power and avoid the government nationalizing a few rigs. That's utterly useless for the general population.
> But if things go to shit in a country, people can still use Bitcoin and safely transfer value online instead of reverting to trading gold coins in person.
For a small handful of people. That doesn't address the problem on a broad scale. The bar isn't "can Bitcoin address the needs of a small handful of people in Venezuela." Of course it can.
> What about the technology -- do you think it's fascinating that a relatively simple and elegant protocol of incentives and cryptography can result in a self sustaining financial system still running a decade after its release?
I think it's fascinating a single transaction expends 700kWh (enough to drive a Model S from SF to New York) and produces 87 grams of e-waste -- and yet somehow costs less than $0.50, which is due to the socialization of costs in the form of block rewards, aka inflation. Each BTC transaction actually costs about $70.
I think it's fascinating a system brought in to free us from the tyranny of a single entity's ability to freely print currency has had it's pricing entirely subsumed by an entity with the ability to freely print a currency who's symbol is just one character off.
Just because something's simple doesn't make it good.
> I think it's fascinating a single transaction expends 700kWh (enough to drive a Model S from SF to New York) and produces 87 grams of e-waste -- and yet somehow costs less than $0.50, which is due to the socialization of costs in the form of block rewards, aka inflation. Each BTC transaction actually costs about $70.
>If you exchange outside the country, who on earth outside the country wants your Bolivars?!
If they have use for them, why not? Also money are indeed a zero sum tool designed solely for moving poops around, shouldn't be a problem, and yes, BTC is money.
Tether itself is manipulated lol, even if I short it in Kraken I'm still playing Bitfinex's game. Once 30% of their reserves were seized they remained 1:1 -- there's no way to win whether I'm right or wrong.
There is a short play here: if there's ever a bank run on Tether, it'll crash to 0. The bet would be to hold onto this short and wait for this event to happen, but given how banks survive with fractional reserve banking, it's entirely possible that a bank run will never happen.
True, though I'd also have to have faith that the exchange remains solvent and that an upwards run in Tether (and it does run up ~10% from time to time) doesn't blow through my collateral -- on top of my other concerns. I think there's easier ways to make money, after all Madoff's scam took 40 years to unravel. I'm not willing to wait that long.
> Matuszewski told On the Brink's Nic Carter that the idea of tethers driving the price of bitcoin significantly higher is "not true whatsoever."
> "I say this as someone who created and redeemed billions of tether over the course of my life and specifically created it in 2017," he said.
> In short, Matuszewski affirmed that there were incentivizing events for the generation of Tethers. Bitfinex didn't print Tether out of nowhere either, since Matuszewski said he himself was one of the drivers.
> “I can tell you that billions of dollars were sent in to make it like that," he said. "I can 100%, without question, verifiably guarantee it happened. I did it, I was there...That money wasn't just being hypothecated. It wasn't just coming out of thin air, that was happening."
I worked for Circle, I worked with Dan, and I can guarantee you that Dan (former head of Circle Trade, the second largest crypto OTC desk) knows his stuff, and Tether is nowhere near as sketchy as your posts and conspiracies would have you believe.
> In short, Matuszewski affirmed that there were incentivizing events for the generation of Tethers. Bitfinex didn't print Tether out of nowhere either, since Matuszewski said he himself was one of the drivers.
Great! Then an audit should be right around the corner, yeah? Or did we forget when their last auditor quit [1].
> "I say this as someone who created and redeemed billions of tether over the course of my life and specifically created it in 2017," he said.
Tether's terms of service: "The right to have Tether Tokens redeemed or issued is a contractual right personal to you. Tether reserves the right to delay the redemption or withdrawal of Tether Tokens if such delay is necessitated by the illiquidity or unavailability or loss of any Reserves held by Tether to back the Tether Tokens, and Tether reserves the right to redeem Tether Tokens by in-kind redemptions of securities and other assets held in the Reserves." [2]
Translation: Redemptions not guaranteed.
> I worked for Circle, I worked with Dan, and I can guarantee you that Dan (former head of Circle Trade, the second largest crypto OTC desk) knows his stuff, and Tether is nowhere near as sketchy as your posts and conspiracies would have you believe.
I'm sure the NYAG disagrees. [3]
Likely in no small part because one large market participant doesn't validate a fraud. They would be hugely incentivized to provide Matuszewski service so that he could go on record and say exactly this kind of thing. I'm sure the same quotes could be attributed to big players in the Madoff case.
To be clear I believe USDC is backed 1:1, in no small part because they're audited by Grant Thornton. [1] If those folks can do it, remind me again why USDT can't? Somehow Circle was able to overcome the seemingly impossible burden of their auditors only writing reports in Mandarin lol.
Because betting either way in a manipulated market is a sucker's game. Bitfinex has their finger on the scales. Why on earth would I bet in their casino?
Does anyone other than Bitfinex even allow you to short USDT? Remember those two are one and the same, and Bitfinex doesn't even have banking. What are they going to pay my USDT short in? USDT?