The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M

Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by jatsign on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @07:36AM (#15796631)

There is no bank account, just the smart contract. It holds the Ether, OMG, or whatever other cryptocurrency you send to it when you buy Unum. There's a function on the contract to return the total reserve in USD, or you can check the actual values of the variables being used. Anything on a smart contract is public.

You're right that relatively few people have the technical skills to query a smart contract, but that relative few is still a LOT of people who can verify the reserves independently. Versus the almost 0 people who can audit Tether.

If you're interested in interacting with the smart contract (or any smart contract), you may want to install Mist. It's non-trivial to get started, I admit, and the tooling around smart contract is incredibly immature, but..man it's cool ;)

https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases

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Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by empath75 on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @07:45AM (#15796699)

It seems to me that your currency loses its peg the minute that the cryptocurrency price collapses.

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Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by 55555 on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @08:06AM (#15796847)

The parent comment (empath75) sounds correct to me. If people deposit a bunch of cryptos, but cryptos are highly correlated in downward movement, and the general crypto market suffers, then this new crypto is no longer pegged to USD.

EDIT: looks like this is covered under "Reserve Deficit Sell Penalty". I don't really understand this part but regardless this won't be pegged to the dollar.

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Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by Mouse47 on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @07:56AM (#15796772)

Stupid question - how do you peg your currency to the dollar if you're holding ETH, etc?

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Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by jatsign on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @08:04AM (#15796824)

When you buy Unum, the smart contract looks up the price of ETH and gives you a dollar equivalent of Unum. So if you send in $400 worth of ETH, you get 400 Unum.

Then, a month from now, if you want to sell Unum and get ETH, maybe the price of ETH is $500. So you send in your 400 Unum, and get .8 ETH.

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Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by Mouse47 on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @08:36AM (#15797062)

So isn't it possible that Unum becomes insolvent? Forgive me if there's an easy place to read up on this :)

In other words, you send in $400 of ETH for 400 Unum, and if the price of ETH goes down to $300 and they try to cash out all 400 Unum...?

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Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by jstanley on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @08:37AM (#15797075)

Yes it is possible. That doesn't make it meritless.

You might equally say "isn't it possible that Tether could just print Tethers out of thin air"? And the answer would be "yes", but people still find utility in it.

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Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by Mouse47 on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @08:40AM (#15797107)

I wasn't saying it was meritless, I'm just a big finance noob.

So basically Unum is trading "risk of value going down/up" for "risk of smart contract bank run"?

EDIT: Also, I'm really interested since this is the first smart contract use case that I've managed to understand. Which is good since I'm all-in on ETH :)

EDIT 2, for anyone reading this thread: here's the announcement thread, answers all the questions I had here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2473877.0

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Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by jstanley on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @08:43AM (#15797146)

Compared to holding ETH, yes, that's the tradeoff.

Compared to holding USDT, the tradeoff is that Tether can't print themselves free USDT's, but you have a risk of a smart contract bank run.

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Re:The Supply of Tethers at 27 November 2017 is $675M by edf13 on Tuesday November 28, 2017 @10:38AM (#15798153)

But isn't this just a fractional reserves in this case?

How will you have the reserves to pay out everyone who wishes to cash out all of their Unum 1 month later if the price of ETH as dropped by 50%? Where will you have the funds to do so?

Edit: I see from your website you have a penalty in place for when your reserves drop below Unums in circulation - clever play! (https://unum.one/#!/learn#reserve-deficit-sell-penalty)

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