the closest there has ever been is a letter from a law firm that was related to the owners and which clearly stated that it was not an audit.
They also parted ways with that firm because they were unwilling to provide what the auditor requested. They've never completed an audit, despite their website claiming "subject to frequent professional audits".
Yeah. "Our auditor wanted to actually conduct an audit to say we had been audited."
Tether tried to give them an instantaneous bank account balance of an account with no history, and say "Yes, on day x, there's this much in the account".
Whereas, of course, there should have been nine digit deposits (sometimes multiple times a week, lol) showing on this account.
Not so much.
Tether was basically a workaround for the severe problems that cryptocurrency exchanges seem to have paying out real money. "Withdrawal limits", "pauses", "verification", and just not paying withdrawals are continuing problems. Kraken: [1] Coinbase: [2] (Over 1000 Better Business Bureau complaints!) But getting money out of Tether is hard, too.
[1] https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/financial-se... [2] https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/financial-se...
Not be able to secure an auditor to do this suggests somebody was too cheap. It's important to spread the loot around, for example instead of paying for an audit and expecting them to lie, try paying for the same audit AND buying ten times as much "specialist professional services" from the audit company. Don't ask exactly why these services are so expensive, and in particular don't expect to see all the people you're supposedly paying for busily working on anything. Just hand over the cash and voila, your audit is spotless. What a wonderful business.
Stabilisation mechanism
unlike Maker's DAI for instance
The Maker DAI relies on users trading Etherium for another token DAI.
It’s essentially a mortgage backed security derivative, except instead of houses it’s a speculative database token swap.
Certainly not safe.
Why would this report be believable?
If the USDT to USD ratio fluctuates so much, what is the point of 'parking' your money in USDT?
But if they are in fact backed 1:1 with USDs, then it raises the question: if the tether peg is slipping below $1, why doesn't Tether or one of these alleged "verified customers" buy them up at a discount, redeem and destroy them for USD, and bank the difference?
The answer to this question is left as an exercise for the reader.
[2] https://wallet.tether.to/app/#!/signup
[3] https://omniexplorer.info/tx/bd9520b9aea701e9606ad8a8f4d6852...
Here's 30 million being destroyed earlier this year:
https://omniexplorer.info/tx/24db40680654b8b505fda3e96be722c...
The moon also had to be in full eclipse while in Mercury retrograde.
[1] https://cryptocoincharts.info/pair/usdt/usd/kraken/today
Redemption implies a non-market transaction to turn in an asset for a guaranteed face value. For example, you redeem bonds (and bond coupons) for the face amount with the original issuer, once the bond or coupon has matured
I mentioned DAI today in comment and essentially got banned for doing it.
In comment I provided link to interview with Olaf on blog.ycombinator.com where MakerDAO was mentioned.
So I got banned as spammer in HN for providing link to blog on YC.
It tells a lot about the level of average HN reader.
"Marked you as a spammer" and "promote fraud" is your interpretation, and I believe it's wrong. A single person called your comment "link spam", that's it. And nobody even mentioned fraud.
You seem to think fraud could be the only reason for a flagged-off comment. It's the rarest reason. I cannot remember a single clearly fraudulous comment here.
And I'm sure the people who flagged my submissions and comments from time to time didn't think they were fraudulous, either. They thought they were obnoxious. Or combative. Or mean-spirited. Lots of reasons why someone might flag something.
For what it's worth, I don't think you're trying to defraud anyone. Still, I believe that this cryptocurrency you mentioned is probably fraudulous, as are all of them. :-)
Yes, you linked to ycombinator. Among other links. Nobody ever said anything about that particular link. Again, it's your imagination.
Thanks for full-quoting your comment, but that wouldn't have been necessary. I have already read it. Before flagging it.
I don't care much about you taking your words back, and your pathetic attempt at blackmail doesn't change that.
Finally, yes, HN has changed a lot. In my opinion for the better, but you're in good company, many readers lament that change. Personally I don't particularly respect (or disrespect) Paul Graham, and I'm glad this isn't a Paul Graham fan site.
Maybe it really isn't for you. Do you really want to put more energy in this fight?
https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=16197475
I think HN went pretty much to the left, if not far-left. HN readers are pretty much on the side of Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty's world view.
I'm on the side Milton Friedman, Paul Graham's world view.
The left consider what I believe as total shit and at the same time call me intolerant. And this irritates me a lot. There is no way of being in peace with left without being submissive or self-censoring. And I don't want to be either.
> I believe that this cryptocurrency you mentioned is probably fraudulous
So do you believe YCombinator promotes fraud? Because cryptocurrency I mentioned was on blog.ycombinator.com.
Your other comments on this topic, though, have been off-topic and tedious. Please just don't post like that, no matter how frustrated you are. If you think a post is being treated unfairly, you can email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
(On another note, I'd be careful about assuming that pg's worldview is the same as Milton Friedman's. That doesn't sound right to me.)
USDT is a pegged-currency. It's often described as a stablecoin but that's not correct because it doesn't have an inbuilt stabilisation mechanism unlike Maker's DAI for instance.
The way it works is purely based on well known legal mechanisms that have no cryptoeconomic properties on its own. The issuer holds a USD balance at a bank, then commissions a receipt that proves their balance and issues an equal number of USDT. 1 USD = 1 USDT at issuance time and the trustworthiness of both the issuer, the auditor and banks involved.
The token itself is used to facilitate trading and many investors 'park' their gains in USDT while waiting for the market to reach a certain point or just in between trades, but that means that the token's FX value is set by the open market itself so if there are more buy orders than available USDT the price goes up and if there are more sell orders than demand the price goes down. Where this gets interesting is that some exchanges list assets based on the USDT fx and not USD which opens some arbitrage opportunities like we are seeing today.
For more info:
https://github.com/jpantunes/awesome-cryptoeconomics#stablec...
https://stablecoinindex.com/