> if you look at recent (~1.5 years) sudden spikes in BTC price, they correspond almost always to a new supply of USDT being released by Tether.
is what you would expect to see even if Tether was 100% legit. As you say, most BTC liquidity is in USDT, so people buying Bitcoin would first buy (mint) USDT from Tether, and then use that to buy BTC.
That's what I thought about MtGox. How wrong I was.
It's mind boggling how long this has gone on, really. I've been following the crypto scam for like 10 years now and it just keeps going.
It doesn't take cleverness, just complexity.
Bitcoin is a failed open source project turned Ponzi. I can’t wait for tether to take it to the absolute bottom and end the current epoch of crypto-as-speculation. Crypto will have its uses as a decentralised application platform.
just curious because I haven't seen a practical use for the EVM, it just seems like the slowest, most expensive VM ever conceived.
At scale we’ve been building completely decentralized applications for a decade and a half. They’re just internal to some organization not public. Taking this and placing the database in the users hands is an interesting way to go but not exactly an order of magnitude more complex at that point.
But this doesn’t require some dumbass blockchain currency and ethereum is super forced.
That's because technological decentralization is much easier with political centralization.
But technological and political decentralization together is incredibly difficult.
In my experience, federated systems are more practical than decentralized systems and provide 98% of the benefits.
I agree that cryptocurrency is not necessary (or ideal) for either.
Spoilers: - saying "but there is fraud" is not an argument agaisnt NFTs, because actually an automated solution for NFT fraud is conceivable. And the fact that there is fraud does not take away from the thousands of artists using it legitimately. Plus, authenticating you are buying from a real artist in the NFT space is actually not that hard.
Saying something wrong many times doesn't make it right.
They are signed URLs that you can trade around on an exchange. This solves no problem that anyone making art has ever had.
Yeah NFTs did exactly this and they’re doing a decent job. If you’re a digital artist it was really really hard to get people to buy your art without a gatekeeper/art gallery certifying it. Now it’s easy. So yes they work for specifically that purpose.
If you think coffee shops are a substitute for digital art to be sold in a permissionless global open market I don’t know what to tell you.
Will they, when ETH collapses to being worth less than 10 bucks because you can't exchange it for funny drug money and it's only usable as funny slow distributed computer coins ? When users can't speculate on it, when stakers lose money on running a node because they're getting 5 bucks worth of rewards every other month ?
Thankfully for the Ethereum Foundation, they conveniently prevented people from taking out their stake then did the merge, so that now that someone is in Ethereum, they cannot back out of it. Some might say it was something that only a malicious actor would do, but then again, the crypto community has never really been that bright when it comes to detecting scams.
Spoilers: - saying "but there is fraud" is not an argument against NFTs, because actually an automated solution for NFT fraud is conceivable. And the fact that there is fraud does not take away from the thousands of artists using it legitimately. Plus, authenticating you are buying from a real artist in the NFT space is actually not that hard.
I actually think there is a huge potential to decentralized applications, but this is essentially faith for now so I won't add much more to the discussion.
My feeling is that the odds of anything useful coming out of this are small. After insane money and over a decade, nothing useful has resulted. Perhaps conditions will be right in another decade for something useful to emerge, but at this point it's all scams imo
So when people want to buy BTC they often do exchange from USDT.
The question then becomes whether the fiat going in matches the new Tether being issued, and that can't be answered without a proper audit.
Lol, you think these transactions done with crypto? Don't be silly.
Silk Road … facilitating annual sales estimated at almost $15 million.
https://reason.com/2013/04/09/bitcoin-vs-big-government/
Researchers estimate that from 2006 to 2016, the total amount of money spent by Americans on these four drugs fluctuated between $120 billion and $145 billion each year.
A chance? It's an absolute certainty.
Not only most exchanges have only a USDT:BTC pair and not a USD:BTC pair, but if you look at recent (~1.5 years) sudden spikes in BTC price, they correspond almost always to a new supply of USDT being released by Tether.
The only upward momentum Bitcoin has had since the last ATH has been due to Tether printing money, so it's safe to say that not only it's pumping it, but it's probably contributing 80%+ of its value.
If Tether dies, it's the end of cryptocurrency, period.