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Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by dfdaffg423rag on Monday May 16, 2022 @01:13PM (#31400460)
I don't think anyone's going around using shares of Citibank stock as currency, are they? Because that's one of the many criteria that need to be true for that comparison to make any sense.

Blows my mind because stablecoins could be so easy-- hold some cash and hold some US treasuries. Pocket the interest. Become rich.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by mountainofdeath on Monday May 16, 2022 @02:40PM (#31401614)
Money Market funds already do this and the collapse of money market funds is usually a harbinger of worse things to come. Money market funds are non-FDIC insured places to park short term cash, typically backed by some combination of AAA commercial paper, municipal bonds and various vintages of T-Bills. Some also are exclusively holding California and New York City bonds and are are totally tax free. Money market funds can do things like suspending redemption in case of a panic to let things settle.

The idea behind USDC is to collateralize it 1:1 like a money market fund provided the underlying bonds hold. Tether is doing fractional reserve banking but has no central bank to act as a lender of last resort. Even then, banks pay into the FDIC which retains reserves itself like any other insurance.

Tether works as long as the money flowing in >= money flowing out.

A severe run on Tether would dry up liquidity very quickly.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by jpmattia on Monday May 16, 2022 @01:17PM (#31400507)
> hold some cash and hold some US treasuries. Pocket the interest. Become rich.

Not getting what you're saying here: Only banks should have that privilege?

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by JumpCrisscross on Monday May 16, 2022 @01:38PM (#31400830)
> Only banks should have that privilege?

Yes, in exchange for the privilege of money creation you need tight regulations and public disclosures.

Banking left unregulated turns into this mess time and time again. You'd think people would be more disciplined about betting private money creators. But they aren't. They never are. Particularly not when their neighbor is showing orders of magnitudes of paper gains. This was true in antiquity. It was true in our era of free banking. It's proven true, again, in crypto.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by jpmattia on Monday May 16, 2022 @01:51PM (#31401017)
> Banking left unregulated turns into this mess time and time again.

And yet, regulated banking also turns into a mess time and time again.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by threeseed on Monday May 16, 2022 @05:21PM (#31403264)
Depends on your country. In Australia, our banks are among the most regulated and survived through the GFC with barely a scratch.

Regulation is proven to work in the financial system. You just need to make sure you have enough of it which often the US hasn't. But in recent years that has been fixed up.

Also it's a false comparison. There is one Tether and tens of thousands of banks.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by vkou on Monday May 16, 2022 @07:18PM (#31404191)
Into a mess for who? Depositors?

Could you summarize how much money depositors across the entire United States lost to bank busts over the past, say 40 years?

And how does it stand up, compared to the crypto-of-the-month scams, losses, and exchange busts?

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by jpmattia on Monday May 16, 2022 @08:16PM (#31404573)
> Could you summarize how much money depositors across the entire United States lost to bank busts over the past, say 40 years?

Nominal or actual? Just the Federal Savings and Loan crisis + the TARP bailouts were billions from the dilution of dollars.

And that's just the US.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by vkou on Monday May 16, 2022 @10:08PM (#31405301)
The FSL crisis was caused by wild-west deregulation, accounting practices which have since been banned, and resulted in a thousand convictions.

The crypto space is repeating all the same bullet points, except with more outright fraud, with less accounting, and without any convictions.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by jpmattia on Monday May 16, 2022 @10:22PM (#31405394)
> The FSL crisis was caused by wild-west deregulation, accounting practices which have since been banned, and resulted in a thousand convictions.

I'm guessing you did not live through it: Like 2008, there were many causes. See eg the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis#Causes

But you also missed the heart of the matter: Money that was lost in the US, despite it having a regulated banking system.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by JumpCrisscross on Monday May 16, 2022 @11:06PM (#31405631)
> was lost in the US, despite it having a regulated banking system

This is a straw man. Nobody claimed nobody in a regulated system ever loses money.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by jpmattia on Tuesday May 17, 2022 @08:54AM (#31409807)
> Nobody claimed nobody in a regulated system ever loses money.

Only if you read the above questions literally and miss his meaning:

> Into a mess for who? Depositors?

> Could you summarize how much money depositors across the entire United States lost to bank busts over the past, say 40 years?

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday May 17, 2022 @09:17AM (#31410096)
The S&L crisis was a “crisis” because non-bank S&Ls lost money in a way depositors haven’t. You have still not pointed to a single American depositor losing money since 1982, though I’d extend that to the post-War era.
Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by dfdaffg423rag on Monday May 16, 2022 @01:35PM (#31400776)
I'm saying, if you're making a US dollar backed stablecoin, you could do it with minimal risk and still profit handsomely by just holding US treasuries.

Instead, we have stablecoins backed by all sorts of things like commercial paper in cryptocurrency exchanges.

Re:$3B in Bitcoin was sold in a last-ditch attempt to save U... by namdnay on Monday May 16, 2022 @03:20PM (#31402082)
Who is going to put their money in a stable coin paying 0.2% interest when the guy next door is offering 20%? Answer:anyone sane, but they wouldn’t be there in the first place