Neither of those statements is true. Bitcoin seized by US government is often sold off in auctions[1]. Tether seized by the government could also be redeemed for fiat eventually, following due process.
EDIT: I see now that you were actually comparing the case of USDT freeze against Bitcoin seizures. Nevertheless, Tether doesn't simply get to keep the USD value of the frozen tokens. US government would want to recover that.
Tokens are frozen "in-place" pending investigation. It differs from how it works with btc, because the government does not have control of the private keys that manage the addresses in question - so they go to Tether who controls the smart contract that manages the transactions of the tokens.
This, in practice, means that the US government controls the mentioned tokens for the moment. What happens with them depends entirely on the outcome of the investigation.
US govt could also create a govt wallet and force usdt to transfer the tokens there I imagine, if they want to proceed with seizure. They'd likely will need some legal framework for this but it's easily doable. Then us govt can auction it off as they like.
It's an interesting question: What does that mean?
Maybe it's better to look at cryptocurrencies as financial securities, shares in an asset controlled by a private company (as has been said many times before). Could General Electric 'disable' the shares of a shareholder? What would that mean? The shareholder can't sell their shares, I suppose, but GE's equity would remain the same (not counting any market movement that would be caused by the sale).
Imagine a monetary system where currency was profit to a private company. What will our once-proud industry think of next? Software to help landlords collude, take housing off the market, and jack up rents? Software that impersonates humans, as well as any form of truth? We are on a roll!
Companies absolutely can "disable" trading by certain shareholders. This is what an IPO lock-up is, where insiders cannot sell their shares until 6-12 months after the conclusion of the IPO. It's also what a trading blackout is, where employees cannot trade shares between the end of the quarter and release of earnings. These are very common - almost everyone who works for a public company has encountered them.
These cases are temporary, but I suspect there are also permanent trading bans that might be caused by legal action - if, for example, an employee is found guilty of a crime, or is under a wage garnishment order.
Also, crypto has long had the phenomena of coins that get "locked" and can never be touched or transferred again, simply through holders that have died or lost the private key. For example, the original "Satoshi coins" - the roughly 1M Bitcoin (~$45B at today's prices, enough to make their holder the 27th richest person in the world) mined by Satoshi before Bitcoin became mainstream - have never been spent, and it's likely that their owner is dead. They simply drop out of circulation, and the price of all other Bitcoin rises to compensate.
The difference with Tether is that its value is ostensibly pegged to the dollar, with each Tether being backed 1:1 with real dollar reserves. So its price doesn't float with supply & demand. Instead, for each Tether that is "locked", it's one less person who has a claim on Tether Ltd's bank reserves.
It's debatable whether Tethers are actually backed by dollars 1:1; people have long suspected that Tether Ltd mints them out of thin air based simply on promises (i.e. fraud). And occasionally the price has dropped below $1 as suspicions grow and folks try to exit Tether. So it's good for the company to have Tether holder accounts locked, as it means they have fewer liabilities and less chance of a bank run.
It's actually more equivalent to a stock reverse-split than locked up shares.
When coins are lost, they stop circulating; that amount - of active, unique coins - is the M1 value, or the amount of circulating currency. Just like if you burn a key, or mint or destroy a trillion dollar coin thats in the Reserve, or disable shares, the value is derived from the scarcity of the resource.
Technically the "uncirculated" money has value, but only as "capital", as it's generally a liquid asset or borrowed against collateral. Uncirculated currency and coins are generally just a very flat asset, just eroding by inflation.
Thats because people use the cash in Tether USDT there like their brokerage account: its accumulated from deposit and trading and rarely withdrawn to a bank account.
For example, if Charles Schwab created Schwab USD upon every fiat deposit, the growth and redemption distribution would be similar to Tether. People that can save and populate an investment account do that more than they ever actually withdraw to cause a redemption.
Notably, this is a coin used by a lot of cryptominers, many of whom are Chinese who fled the ban in China on crypto mining and also to export their wealth in a way they can't otherwise because China doesn't allow transfer of currency out of the country.
...so now gigawatts of electricity are being used here to generate more wealth for chinese billionaire playboys who are so stingy they can't even pay rural local electricians. Must be because of how expensive his tuition is...
Real estate is how China allows their citizens to move money out of country. If the money is at all legitimate, there is a vehicle.
I’ve been around the world, and I’ve been as much Chinese real estate as I’ve seen, makes me think there is very little legitimate money in crypto for this application.
You're not the only one to have seen the Chinese real estate, from the Alberta coast to Florida. If you want to move money, ofc you can[1]. There is commerce with China. If you want to avoid controls (including punitive ones), real estate is not a preferred choice. This "vehicle" took a huge hit around 2016ish[2], which is why Chinese transfers fell dramatically crashing a number of luxury markets (US locales) with it. This is still recent memory and taken into commensurate consideration.
The CIA doesn't need to release a PSA to let everyone know of their actions, they have infiltrated SWIFT, have you ever read a join letter between Visa and the FBI?
That Tether expands dollar hegemony is just the story Tether tells the US government to try to convince it not to shut Tether down completely and instead work with Tether to recover dollars backing Tethers in sanctioned wallets. If Tether were backed by another currency, the US government would have less leverage, but it would also be worth less to malicious actors.
That might explain why it has not crashed completely yet.
As a rule of thumb, never trust service providers that should, by all common sense, fail, but miraculously don't.
For me the test is: What unethical action would optimize profits for company X? And what is the control mechanism that prevents them from doing so? If the answer to question 2 is None, there's a good possibility the answer to 1 is already happening.
The thing is, a lot of people just assume they must simply be doing good business. The continued existence of the economically impossible entity is, to many, proof not only of its solvency, but also of it's quality as a financial partner.
Most people don't look any further than that. Obviously, a large number do look further than that, and many, many people would never take the bait. But don't underestimate the number of people, even well resourced people, who would fall for this sort of scheme.
These reports are not full audits, although Tether would certainly like us to think they are! If you click into one of the reports, the auditors list the steps they took, and they're focused almost entirely on verifying the existence of Tether's self-reported assets on the report date. They would not, for example, have uncovered an FTX-style "hidden, poorly internally labeled fiat@ account" by following these procedures.
You'll also note that they're following the "International Standard on Assurance Engagements 300 (Revised) ~ Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information", which heavily suggests that this is not an audit and they did not review historical financial information.
It's not an audit. Attestations mean they move a bunch of funds into the account, get the auditor to check that indeed that money was there at that point of time, then move it away again. Every legitimate auditor they've engaged has quit.
Also, the 'auditors' they are approaching are more and more into the 'not quite competent' end of the line if you look into them.
Tether is a well known scam. We have no idea that they have any backing for the amount of tokens they’ve issued and we have significant indications they don’t.
It may be insolvent, and that may mean "scam" to you, but those words are different.
Even if they claim full backing and don't, they have lied.
Whether that is substantially and materially a sole qualifier in determining them a fraud and scam, is for the legal system, not an assortment of most vocal persons, to decide.
You’re joking? Tether is a well known scam. We have no idea that they have any backing for the amount of tokens they’ve issued and we have significant indications they don’t.
Tether is an insanely profitable company, they would be able to fill any hole in a few years purely from profit. That is besides the point though.
There is no (literally 0) evidence that Tether is not solvent. Tether itself has been audited [0] and has hundreds of millions MORE reserves than USDT issued. Tether is the opposite of the fractional reserve banks in America. Tether is MORE solvent than major US banks (before federal bailouts.)
> "Tether is a well known scam."
Huh? Hundreds of thousands of real people use Tether to transact monthly. Seems pretty legit to me?
I will concede that Tether has made some strange choices by choosing a smaller Italian firm to conduct their audits, but this is very different than a "well known scam."
Can you explain this 'common sense'? I was under the impression that Tether was in the business of taking USD (with the promise of returning it) and earning interest on that USD without paying any interest on it. If that's true, it sounds like a dream business to me
That's what business they say they're in, but in reality they do things like (A) get nearly a billion dollars seized by the US for money laundering, (B) invest in risky Chinese corporate bonds, and (C) issue USDT loans backed by volatile crypto. They're usually solvent but they have been insolvent at various points in their history.
The common sense is that they would make a lot more money by doing fractional reserve (leaving them open to a bank run collapse) and there is nothing really to stop them from doing that.
As with most common sense, that’s completely wrong. Deceptively operating at a fractional reserve would eventually end with everyone involved losing everything and spending large portions of their remaining lives in prison.
Except we know of occasions they printed tether in return for collateral promises, rather than actually for cash. Not to mention filling a hole with Bitfinex stock when one of their processors got raided.
Now, it's just a question of degree: they're so profitable they can recover from being fractional rapidly. OTOH, why mess with a working formula?
Yes, the NY investigation was all about this: they patched up the loss and quietly changed their terms to being backed by cash or equivalents.
And they later detailed the $1bn Tether printed for Celcius in return for collateral (once Celcius collapsed and they claimed it was fully repaid).
Understand: for modern banks this kind of fractional behaviour is considered normal. It's only from the weird Bitcoin perspective that full reserve would be a requirement.
This is pretty hilarious coming from someone defending a company that refuses to produce a legitimate audit. (no, an "attestation" is not an audit)
If all they're doing is sitting on a giant big pile of cash and treasury bonds, it should be absolutely trivial to provide proof: here's where those assets are deposited.
If you can’t see the value in an attestation, you’re not familiar with the topic.
And I’m not “defending” anything other than the basic idea that when one has not proven something, one cannot claim it as true. Nobody has been able to prove Tether is a scam, so it isn’t.
You have to look at the system as a whole. They run Bitfinex, a centralized exchange. They can just change balances in a database, like FTX. There’s no need for fractional reserve.
Tether is simply shadow banking and brings liquidity into Bitfinex. It’s very simple:
1. Export finished goods from China for dollars.
2. Import inputs for step 1 from places like Turkey, Ukraine, and others and pay inflated invoices with dollars from step 1.
3. Receive Tether out-of-band for step 2.
4. Swap Tether for dollars on Bitfinex.
5. Buy property in Western countries in the names of your children who have US, Canadian, and UK passports.
Tether makes money from interest on the funds that they do actually have. Maximizing the amount of money that they hold would actually increase the amount of profit they make. They have no incentive (and a pretty strong disincentive) to be insolvent.
> I was under the impression that Tether was in the business of taking USD (with the promise of returning it) and earning interest on that USD...
To be fair there's a HN unicorn doing just that: Coinbase. They created a joint venture with Circle and are backing $25 billion USDC by US short term treasuries, minting a cool 1.25 billion yearly in interests.
And contrarily to tether, Coinbase does have the actual USDs / short term US treasuries backing the USDC emitted (big names banks have published the list and individual numbers of all the US treasuries they're holding for Coinbase and during the SVB fiasco Coinbase was shown to have 3.3 bn at SVB or something like that).
Anyone who's been paying attention knows that Tether is an opaque money-laundering scam, and it's only a matter of time before it totally unravels. The only reason Tether is making noises about cooperating with the US government is because they're being told in no uncertain terms that their continued near-term existence depends on it. Check back in a year.
Isn't that the case for every business operating in the US anyway? If they don't cooperate with OFAC, they will find themselves in deep doodoo very fast. Has nothing to do with being scam or not scam, it's the law and compliance is not optional.
The difference between Tether and a standard bank actually seems pretty small to me. Tether doesn't look like they have enough money to pay back people holding Tether tokens. Banks don't have enough money to pay back depositors. Both muddle along fine.
Theoretically the banks have lower risk due to regulatory actions. We've had enough financial crisises now that a reasonable person could discount that. Given the levels of debt and spring-loaded derivatives, any institution is at risk these days. We can imagine a history book entry saying "XYZ couldn't return their depositors money" for pretty any actor in these markets.
The banks get bailouts of course, but that tends to be action outside the official rules; so maybe Tether will get it to? The differences here are mostly about how long the game has been played, not what the game is. Tether doesn't seem to be less reputable than the banks. It outlasted Credit Suisse for example. I'm not calling anything, but maybe Tether is going to behave a lot like another bank.
Does that include the banking system? Because fractional reserve banking is definitely one of those systems that should never work in theory but miraculously works in practice.
Not actually true, while MakerDAO (DAI's issuer) cant microtarget and freeze, DAI itself still has alot of systematic risk, i.e. it has a large part of its backing assets in USDC, Circle could freeze this part of their balance sheet VERY easily. They also have "RWA" i.e. more traditional financial products in the mainstream financial system to generate a yield, it would be easy enough for the service providers to be ordered to freeze these assets (on the back of a money laundering or kyc type of case bought by regulators).
Are they sophisticated enough in public communication to try, in passing, to spread the gospel of cryptocurrency: the dollar's market power is 'hegemony'.
(I know the expression is already used, but not by the government and its partners, afaik, and not as an explicit goal.)
It's not exactly a secret. The US dollar's proliferation is an extremely good thing to happen in the world - our modern banking system is one of our greatest inventions.
For everyone. The answer would be the same if the yuan was the world's reserve currency. Having a single reserve currency is just good. Please don't conflate your distaste for a country's politics as somehow obviating the unbridled success of the global economy.
This isn't true - China as a world leader is worse than the US, because China has a worse government and does not believe in the same freedoms the US does. The US dollar being proliferated everywhere is good because it helps the US stay the world power with a lot of influence, which is much better for the world.
I don't think the answer is so clear. There is also the third option: neither are particularly good "world leaders", and however bad China would hypothetically be as one, the US' leadership has actually been terrible, with disastrous consequences for billions an unfortunate reality.
To those who think tether is a massive fraud: time to get caught up. The crypto dollar market is extremely large, the product market fit is extremely real and tether is king.
But remember, the crypto exchange market is also extremely large and profitable, and yet exchanges keep turning out to be massive frauds.
The number of people who promised to keep your money safe and had long term incentive to do so and yet failed miserably used to astonish me. Now I assume it's the norm.
Weird phrasing. It isn't clear that responding to OFAC listings makes one a "partner" of the FBI or Secret Service; to my knowledge, entities that do business in the US (or anywhere the US's financial limbs can reach) have to respond to OFAC listings.
I think it relates to this quote from the article:
"Tether is grateful for the opportunity to address the concerns raised by U.S. lawmakers, and we are committed to continuing Tether’s close work with law enforcement in the U.S. and globally. Tether seeks to be a world class partner to the U.S. as we continue to assist law enforcement and expand dollar hegemony globally."
obviously spin, but "partnership" doesn't bother me much. Partnership doesnt mean equal partners. Someone might have a business "partnership" with a warlord, that lets them live as long as you prive payments.
It still implies some sort of meeting of the minds. You wouldn't say you've entered a "partnership" with the IRS because you paid your taxes, nor a "partnership" with the police because they pulled you over and searched your car.
"I'm excited to work with the Philadelphia Police Department in our new partnership and am thankful they agreed to negotiate yet another meeting with the parole board after I helpfully divulge where I hid more of the remaining bodies."
Yes, they don't have any power. That doesn't prevent them from presenting it like they are eagerly collaborating. And why not? Nobody wants to piss off federal government or the Congress, it's better to show they love it.
Err.. except the environment they exist in - 'crypto' - tends to be full of anti-gov/3letteragency types, so you'd think this is a bad PR angle to take.
At a guess, I would say this is more flagging to their real customers that their funds aren't safu...
Don't confuse the reddit/twitter crowd with the businesses dealing with billions of dollars. The latter can not survive - or at least can not operate in any way that is connected to the US financial system or touching it in any form - if they don't play nice with regulators like OFAC. They could be all ancaps in the depths of their souls, but if they don't play nice, they'd end up in jail. It's not dependent in any way on their politics or the strength of their convictions - it's just how it is when you're dealing with the financial markets. You can be as anti-government as you want, but if you do what the regulators consider money laundering, either you stop it immediately when they tell you (or before), or you will get shut down. If they are not getting shut down, then they are likely cooperating, there's not much other options.
You missed my point. Just because it's in a statement that they made in no way means we need to interpret it as anything but a meaningless attempt to convey to the government they are more than cooperative.
Think about it... My fake example takes it to the extreme and portrays it as a serial killer sending a statement to the police department on how excited they are to help them find more of their victims' bodies. Obviously, it's not really a "partnership". Saying it's a partnership is just an attempt by the serial killer to reframe the situation in a way that implies civility and cooperative pursuit of mutual benefit. As if they are being employed by the police department. In reality, they are a serial killer withholding information in hopes of getting a chance at leniency. We are literally saying the same thing.
I mean, basically you're correct, but they are claiming that they don't have to be pulled kicking and screaming into compliance, but rather they are easy for law enforcement to work with.
In other words, please don't let the SEC find an excuse to go after us.
To me, it's oddly reminiscent of SBF testifying to Congress that they were the responsible ones who are in favor of regulation on crypto, in order to polish their image as a reputable financial institution. Doesn't mean they're going to end up like SBF (or CZ), but it does reveal similar motivations.
I dont think they will end up like cz, they are one of the biggest buyers of government bonds. The way skeptics in the space take it is that they offer an outlet for a cbdc thats compatible with the existing banking system.
The treasury market is so big I would be surprised if that is a consideration but I could be wrong. There is $25tn notional outstanding and a lot of players in the market have been complaining about lack of liquidity for a while now so if Tether was to completely evapourate, having on large passive investor out of the picture should (I would think) make it better for everyone else if they notice at all.
The liquidity issue is on the buyer side, there arent enough buyers of government bonds, which is why weve now had a couple rocky bond auctions. If there wasnt enough bonds to buy then interest rates would be in decline as banks outbid each other.
So... Half the appeal of crypto and Tether & co has been a separation from the current financial system and 'deep state,' yet here we are embracing both with hugs.
“Fascist governments encouraged the pursuit of private profit and offered many benefits to large businesses, but they demanded in return that all economic activity should serve the national interest.”
I think there were some early adopters with libertarian or just simple "stick it to the man" ideals that believed that, it was never the original position and those who wanted it to be that ended up up disillusioned.
Bitcoin was created with the notion of decentralized control in mind. It was all about having the option to go elsewhere. I'm not sure if the early developers stated a position on secrecy. I find it hard to reconcile the public ledger with any goal of avoiding scrutiny.
That was always a hopeful lie that anti-government types were telling themselves. If you use cryptocurrency while you're in a country, you are subject to that country's laws. The 'cryptoverse' is learning that math is not stronger than guns and prison bars.
It's just finally meeting reality. Reality is that you have to live in a world of jurisdictions. Somebody somewhere can always put you in jail or take your stuff. You know "I fought the law, and the law won."
Tether has a market cap of $91,767,545,339 on coingecko.com at the moment, I don't know how many of that holdings is in BTC, ETH or FIAT. But if these guys can create Tether out of thin air (If it's not fixed like BTC) and syphon it off to personal created wallets..
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