OT: Ray, how's your Bitcoin investment going?

[rice rocket]

Originally Posted by prototoast

How much is the price rising because of increased demand for use in transactions by people in Russia and Ukraine, and how much is the price rising because speculators are anticipating increased demand for use in transactions by people in Russia and Ukraine?

It was a pump and dump, you should all expect this by now.

[verticaldoug]

One day its the currency of the future, then when they worry about getting a crack down- it's too small for Russia and traceable... Seems like a bull**** scam to me....

The founder of Binance, the cryptocurrency trading platform, has dismissed fears that virtual money could be used by the Kremlin to evade sanctions as he claimed that “crypto is too small for Russia”.

Changpeng Zhao said cryptocurrencies also defeated attempts to work around sanctions by being too traceable, adding that more focus should be placed on banks. In a statement Zhao said the media and politicians should be focusing on conventional lenders and the oil and gas market.

[rice rocket]

Bump

[skitlets]

Seems bitcoin has garnered enough widespread adoption in the finance world to correlate with the regular ole market.

[rice rocket]

I thought this was amusing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2IKID4PhE4


Their response was to mint more coins?

[verticaldoug]

I don't think there is secret sauce when it comes to owning treasuries. You own them or you don't.

It' a bit like the Bernie Madoff secret sauce.

as per the FT

Crypto industry shaken as Tether’s dollar peg snaps
Token’s tech chief declines to provide details on Treasury holdings on fear of revealing ‘secret sauce’



The $1.3tn cryptocurrency industry was on Thursday hit by one of its toughest challenges when stablecoin Tether — a critical cog in the market — failed to maintain its link with the US dollar.

Tether tumbled as low as 95.11 cents in European trading, far below the $1 peg that it seeks to maintain as it faced an intense bout of selling pressure. Its price later recovered, but the rare slip-up, days after the failure of smaller rival TerraUSD, sent bitcoin — the world’s biggest digital asset — sinking to its lowest level since late 2020.

Ratings group Fitch said the troubles at Tether and TerraUSD “highlight the fragile nature of private stablecoins, and will accelerate calls for regulation”.

In congressional testimony on Thursday, Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, said the collapse of TerraUSD showed the dangers of stablecoins, which the Biden administration and US regulators have grown increasingly concerned about.

“I wouldn’t characterise it at this scale as a real threat to financial stability, but they’re growing very rapidly and they present the same kind of risks that we have known for centuries in connection with bank runs,” Yellen told lawmakers.


Stablecoins, which are supposed to track real-world currencies, play a central role in the stability of the broader crypto market by providing traders with a safe place to park their cash between making bets on volatile digital coins.

Tether, the biggest operator in this $180bn stablecoin space, plays a crucial role in facilitating trading across the crypto market and also provides a link with the mainstream financial system.

Tether aims to maintain a peg to the dollar by keeping up a store of reserves of traditional assets. There are 80bn Tether tokens in circulation, meaning it should hold $80bn in assets — a sum that compares with the biggest hedge funds in the world. But details around how those reserves are managed are scant, and not subject to audits under internationally recognised accounting standards.

Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s chief technology officer, on Thursday vowed to defend the token’s dollar peg and said the company had bought “a ton” of US government debt, which it is willing to offload in that effort. But in an interview with the Financial Times, he declined to give details about its $40bn hoard of US government bonds because he did not “want to give our secret sauce”.

“Our counterparties are not public. We are not a public company,” he said. “So we keep that information [to] ourselves, but we are working with many big institutions in the traditional financial space.”*


Last year, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tether $41mn, claiming the company made “untrue or misleading” statements about its reserves.

Ardoino also said the stablecoin issuer is working on obtaining an audit, but said the big accounting firms “are quite scared for reputational risk in touching crypto at this moment”. Tether has had $2bn in redemption requests in the past day, an unusually high number, Ardoino added.

He said the group had recently been shifting away from holdings of commercial paper, a type of short-term corporate debt typically sold by highly rated companies, to Treasury bills. Treasury bills now account for around half of the group’s $80bn in reserves, he added.


Chris Taylor, a partner at proprietary trading firm GSA, said he is “a little more concerned about [the Tether debacle’s effect on] the ecosystem in general, but for now it seems to be stabilising”. Maintaining the redemption process would be key to restoring confidence in the digital coin, he added.

Ardoino said it was consistently possible to redeem Tether for $1 in cash by requesting a wire transfer that would be processed by its banking partners in the Bahamas.

[azrider]

yikes........

.
.

[jkbrwn]

Keep on dropping

[redir]

Originally Posted by jkbrwn

Keep on dropping

Yup. Buy the fear and don't sell the panic.

What happened to BTC recently was the crash of the whole LUNA/UST fiasco. I'm very sorry for anyone who got in on that but suffice to say, and I know this is hindsight but still, a stable coin based on trust in a crypto currency is an insane idea.

I'll pat myself on the back still though because even in this time of crashing I'm still ahead on the CATS that I recommended earlier No where near as much mind you but still.

Everything will come back.

[jkbrwn]

Oh, lol. I mean drop to 0. And stay there, forever, where it belongs

[Tony T]

Big drop today (along with the rest of the market)
Down 16% to ~ $23,000

[reuben]

Originally Posted by Tony T

Big drop today (along with the rest of the market)
Down 16% to ~ $23,000

A quasi cryptobank, Celsius, froze the assets of its customers.

[echappist]

Originally Posted by reuben

A quasi cryptobank, Celsius, froze the assets of its customers.

Is that a kleptobank or a cryobank? Or is it a cry-o-bank?

I'm sure you fine folks can make better puns than what I came up with. Have at it

[verticaldoug]

Originally Posted by verticaldoug

Speculation is as old as the hills. I think crypto eco-system is already corrupted by stablecoins. Stablecoins make no sense, serve no purpose except to provide a potential avenue for shadow banking to inject fraud in to the system.

Tether looks like a simple con where 'corporates' issue commercial paper to Bitfinex, Bitfinex issues tether to the corporate and Bitfinex holds some unknown credit exposure hoping for repayment. No USD ever changes hands in more Tether issuance in my opinion. The 'corporate' can use the tether to speculate in crypto. In a rising market this works, you are just leveraging. In a falling market, it collapses. It acts a lot like Archegos borrowing money to buy more shares of a few companies by posting shares of the same companies. However, when shares starting falling, the lender (Bank) ask for more collateral, Archegos had none and everything imploded.

For Bifinex, when the commercial paper comes due and the borrower doesn't have sufficient funds to repay, what will bitfinex do? Just extend and pretend in roll over the paper? The whole crypto ecosystem probably has a lot more leverage built into the price than anyone realizes.

That's how I see this.

Honestly, I cannot tell if cryptocurrency 'use cases' are actually a currency use case, or suppose to function more like a APP use case which you pay money to use.

May 2021, it just takes a long time for fraud to work out.

[Ozz]

Originally Posted by reuben

A quasi cryptobank, Celsius, froze the assets of its customers.

It probably didn't help that Russian FM threatened to nuke Poland......