>The argument some people have is that tether is printing fake money to prop up crypto market.
I don't think that's actually supported by evidence. AFAIK there are concerns about tether's solvency (because one of their bank accounts got frozen), but evidence of money printing is lacking.
> many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked
I’m sorry, but it’s worse than that. Whenever I’ve said “Tether is a scam waiting to blow up, and the evidence is obvious”, none of my smart peers had anything to say, either.
The BTC price is hells high by this fake USD money printer.
> It's clear that the HN crowd does not like Bitcoin. So why keep reiterating similar arguments all over?
When we take a closer look at crypto it appears to be as corrupt or even more as the institutions it was trying to replace. Tether, of course, is the poster child of crypto corruption.
> It has to be stressed that in the midst of the market mania in which we find ourselves, the cult-like fervour behind cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin has become untethered.
Wow, imagine choosing that last word unwittingly...
>This kind of argumentation makes cryptocurrency proponents so insufferable. There’s no evidence Tether is backed, but somehow we can just assume in a parenthesis that they probably are, and then go on a tangential rant about banks or fiat or digital gold or something.
Ah yes, because all cryptocurrency proponents are pro-tether.
>I will wait for more clarity before jumping back in.
Probably wise given how correlated ETH and BTC prices are.
>It is kinda sad that in this technology there are so many frauds like that.
It is, but it is also unavoidable.
As the author correctly points at towards the end, many of the properties of cryptos (high liquidity, non-reversible, pseudo-anonymous), while very useful to legitimate users, are a wet dream for crooks.
As a matter of fact, Bitcoin has been used to scam people for its entire existence, e.g.[1][2], sometimes even in new and innovative ways.
There is one aspect of Bitcoin that many people entirely overlook, especially newcomers: [3]
Tether is one of the most maddening scams out there.
Who really believes that Tether had a cool billion dollars conveniently transferred into their banks so they could mint a huge chunk of synthetic dollars to inject into the cryptocurrency world? That's a suspiciously round number for such a large transaction.
Yet people who are heavily invested in crypto will find any excuse to ignore the absurdity of this whole operation, mostly because admitting the Tether problem would be admitting that the value of cryptocurrency everywhere is artificially inflated.
> It seems all anyone cares about with crypto is how much richer they get in dollar terms when cryptos go up.
As I reckon it, people haven't, on net, been getting richer from crypto since around March of 2021. That isn't the all time high of Bitcoin but so far it has set the high water mark. People in it for easy money have probably been flushed out of the market by now, the high-hype gains are long gone.
> It amazes me how many people are blissfully unaware of the rampant tether fraud and the effect it could have on the whole ecosystem.
Which people? These aren't people on HN. I haven't seen anyone here who is unaware of what is going on.
> Why does tether seem to bring out the tinfoil theories from people that have absolutely 0 background in finance or crypto market structure or econ in general.
Hilarious. People with backgrounds in finance are for the most part the group of people that have made an issue about this, myself included.
But more curiously, I'm not even sure what you're attempting to to convey with this comment? Do you think that a background in finance, or econ, is necessary to understand the incredibly simple business that Tether operates, and the even simpler reasons of why it is likely problematic (if not an outright fraud)?
> I thought Ethereum was a pre-mine scam at first (kinda still do)
This hits home. I really refused to acknowledge Ethereum for a long time, because I thought smart contracts and their need for oracles were stupid. Shifting around trust, instead of eliminating it. Security by obscurity, but for trust, is how I thought of it.
I agree with and share the sentiment of the rest you're saying also. Bitcoin and PoW generally are no longer interesting or useful to me, but I also feel sometimes like I haven't really warmed up to the rest of the sector yet.
I only mined with my desktop GPU. While I considered it, I never took the plunge and scaled up - instead I just bought more Bitcoin and sat on them for a little while, before I transitioned to other coins and tokens completely.
It’s really not. I’m so tired of people being surprised by articles like this. Scams like this and ransomware would simply not exist without cryptocurrency, and that’s enough for me to eschew their use entirely.
There is literally no legitimate excuse for cryptocurrency, and I don’t think there ever was.
> there's community and energy in the space that I haven't seen online since the early days of the world wide web.
Just like communities pumping AMC and other meme stocks. People get hyped easily when they can get something out of it. Why is that a criterion for anything?
> bet on it disappearing overnight or over long cold crypto winter.
Did you actually look into this? Because it's way riskier than you make it sound. In particular, I don't think it's financially sound to make this kind of bet as long as Tether exists with so little transparency.
> I assure you you will reconsider your stance if you look close enough, and it'll position you in a much better way for what's to come compared to continuing to ignore it.
After reading all your comments here, I still don't know what I should look at, beyond the "community and energy". The tech might be advanced and hard to grasp, but that's actually the part I do understand. What I'm still not seeing is the business case. Take any of the blockchain projects you seem to be fond of: what would happen if you just removed the blockchain? Would it really be worse off?
>>>> I think that cryptocurrency was a well-intentioned experiment trying to solve real problems...
I'm not so optimistic. I've seen too many technological experiments unleashed on humanity, such as Facebook, to where I am much more skeptical about the original intentions of their inventors.
With tether still being a thing I have a /really/ hard time believing that.
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