> None of the things called “real world currencies” meet today this very simple set of criteria.
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I dont own crypto but Im able to see the hypocrisy in our current global financial system.
But where would be the money in that?
But that won't be enough money for these people, of course
>The wording on the Circle website changed from the previous "backed by US dollars" to "backed by fully reserved assets" by June 2021.
>USDC reserves are regularly attested (but not audited) by Grant Thornton, LLP
This is the same bullshit that Tether has repeatedly pulled.
An audit looks at the history of your overall financials, to ensure that you didn't just borrow that billion dollars two days ago for the sole purpose of passing the audit. Or that you didn't, like, cash a half-billion dollar check from yourself to yourself, and have the money immediately show up in the destination account, before it was debited from the source account.
I definitely feel like this is one of those situations where "if you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide" actually applies.
I couldn't get a mortgage without a thorough check that income was indeed real income, the idea that billions in assets could be "attested" and not actually audited is incredibly shady.
https://www.centre.io/hubfs/PDF/2022%20Circle%20Examination%...
1) There are 51.39 billion USDC in circulation.
2) On a particular day (the Report Date) Circle held an amount of USD-denominated assets at least equal to the number of USDC in circulation in a segregated account.
Note what is absent: No statement as to what these assets are. No statement as to where they came from and whether they were in the account the day before or the day after the Report Date.
In the crypto world, where you can borrow a few billion dollars for a few seconds cheaply, that doesn't mean much.
Attestation: "Person X has $50 million dollars in an account."
Audit: "Person X has $50 million dollars in an account, and we know how it got there, who has claims on it, and whether it's fairly likely to still exist tomorrow."
As a concrete example:
https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...
> On the morning of September 15, 2017, Tether opened an account at Noble Bank. Later that day, Bitfinex transferred $382,446,847.71 from Bitfinex’s account at Noble Bank into Tether’s account at Noble Bank. Friedman conducted its verification of Tether’s assets as of 8:00 p.m. EST.
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...
> On November 1, 2018, Tether publicized another self-proclaimed ‘verification’ of its cash reserve; this time at Deltec Bank & Trust Ltd. of the Bahamas. The announcement linked to a letter dated November 1, 2018, which stated that tethers were fully backed by cash, at one dollar for every one tether. However, the very next day, on November 2, 2018, Tether began to transfer funds out of its account, ultimately moving hundreds of millions of dollars from Tether’s bank accounts to Bitfinex’s accounts. And so, as of November 2, 2018 — one day after their latest ‘verification’ — tethers were again no longer backed one-to-one by U.S. dollars in a Tether bank account.
An audit would've flagged this. An attestation does not.
It's like a kid who answers "are you eating cookies before dinner" with "no" because they stopped when you asked the question and are not currently eating one.
Has anybody trusted the attestations, but verified (audited)?
I admit I'm biased, I've used USDC personally & professionally, and I know people involved with running USDC. They're not evil geniuses. And even if they were, you could make so, so much money by breaking it ala Soros & the Bank of England, that I think it would've happened by now.
I could say my pencil is worth $52 billion and therefore I have the assets to cover $52 billion USDC and that would be the same as their 'transparency' reports which don't itemize a single asset, just an 'attestation' that the amount is covered.