Using this recent market bull run to leave. Leaving the fiat on GDAX. Got some buy orders in for lower.

Bitfinex wallet was running low, so they have just moved in USDT 200m from their backup wallet.

Let the market crutch continue!

BlottoOtter:

There's not much reward for putting effort into critical posts on this subreddit any more. It's never been great, but something changed in the last month or two to where it's overwhelmed with pro-Tether votes and sentiment. I'm not even sure it's entirely shills to blame, I think it could just as easily be a new wave of cryptocurrency zealots that don't distinguish between criticisms of Tether and criticisms of cryptocurrencies in general.

targetpro:

I once questioned this at length. Not any longer.

The paid shill phenomena is happening all over Reddit, particularly when there's a sub that gains/loses from corporate meddling. And especially, when a company has gone as far as to hire a PR firm. Every PR firm worth its weight is aware of the impact that supposedly "independent/grass-roots" social media sites like Reddit/Twitter/etc. bring to the table. They all exploit these platforms as best they can. It's proven more cost effective than conventional advertising, press releases, you name it.

In the case of iFinex (Tether, BitFinex), they hired 5WPR out of NYC. One of the most egregious, sleazy and misleading firms in the business. In regard to these new platforms:

A young friend of mine is a Chinese national completing her accounting degree here in the US. She keeps prolific ties with friends and co-workers back home. Her English is good, and due to that and her abundance of connections back home, she is constantly getting these shill job offers.

She told me that back home there are many businesses set up for every kind of social media or customer review site, including Reddit, Yelp and others. And she showed me one that was looking for writers to write positive reviews for Amazon products. Another one claimed, "Join the Twitter Technology". It was all about pumping certain Twitter threads. She told me she could get work (at home) from any of these grey-market businesses in a day. The pay isn't great, but if she were back home in Beijing, she could make a very good living at it.

There was a story this morning on NPR or BBC (can't recall which—satellite radio) about a firm in Saudi Arabia doing this same kind of shilling on Twitter. They charge $200 to get your hashtag to within the top six stories within your designated geographic area.

Ever since 5WPR was contracted in Nov/Dec of last year, this sub has gone to shit. At first it was hilarious, because the shills here were clearly not native English speakers. After I gave them A LOT of shit, things have changed. Most seem to be good English speakers now. My guess is that we have 2-3 part-time shills around here currently operating on around 40 different user accounts.

Ok Slight exaggeration, but people need to relax. Decided to see what the hysteria was about. I have a financial background:

1. anybody that has been through the ups and downs of crypto knows that Tether has handled some massive situations heroically and its normal that the peg budged a little during some of those times. Sometimes 1.01 sometimes .98. It happened before. Many times already. Nothing new here.

2. Bitfinex $1,134,419,856 24hr volume fees on transfers and trades + interest on margin= $2,000,000/day at least!

3. massive bitcoin purchases? = massive profits i believe. They were buying when everybody was selling. I think they made a total killing here. Like hundreds of millions or even billions.

4. Tether has huge volume #3 after ethereum! justifying its market cap and price. In fact the price of tether were it not tethered to the dollar would probably be something like $4 at these supply levels. It is greatly undervalued.

5. The tether business model actually does NOT need to be backed by anything!! Now that they have enough USDT coins they will be able to control the price of USDT without having to buy bitcoin by buying and selling USDT.

6. Also, just to compare, people do not realize that neither Chase bank nor any other bank has the capital to backup their deposits. Just a fraction of the capital I don't remember maybe its like 15%. If you did what people are doing to Tether to chase and the US gov didn't step in to save them, even Chase bank would go down. Its like screaming fire in a movie theater. Stop it.

7. Consider, if you had a legit business that was bringing in massive profits every day like Bitfinex/tether would you do something really really stupid to mess that up? Most intelligent people would not. I am not worried.

8. Another clue is that Bitfinex should probably do an ICO and use their coin like binance, but they have not. This would generate millions, obviously, on top of the hoard of cash they already have. They obviously do not need the money.

9. I think they are probably right that the US gov doesn't like tether and is giving them a hard time so I can believe the shielding of their business information is reasonable and they have tried to get the info out their by having well known members of the crypto community check their balances -see news.https://news.bitcoin.com/vouching-bitfinex-and-tethers-bank-accounts-hold-nearly-3-billion-usd/

Anyone that knows anything about financial markets knows that confidence is really important and the wild speculation without doing your homework is very irresponsible and destructive putting everyone at risk. I have done this analysis in literally a few minutes of my time. Granted I have a financial education and trading background, but really any average person should be able to quickly see that Tether isnt going anywhere. Please pass this on so that the scaredy cats can calm down. Dont be lazy people-- do your homework! Tether/Bitfinex is clearly an amazing business of historic proportions, now if a bunch of pananoid people and other detractors end up bringing them down externally that is not my fault, thats just people being stupid/jealous etc, but internally you do not need to be an auditor to see that it all makes sense as I have just done. Keep in mind that this is the first time in history that the little guys have made it big while Wall st and the 1% watched from the outside looking in. They want nothing more than panic to set in so they can get low prices and I have noticed this with the reporting.

Somebody do a youtube cat video meme with the tether haters freaking out please... I know a cat that jumps in the air when somebody crinkles a plastic bag...

Under normal circumstances, yes the audit thing would be troubling, but these are very much not normal circumstances and there are powerful people that want to see crypto go down. Some people don't seem to be taking seriously the evidence I presented. They have the world's largest exchange their balance sheet gets larger by millions every single day. The way I calculated it they probably already made enough money on their own to back up the tether and frankly I use the tether all the time for trading and I do not care if I can withdraw actual US dollars. I only care that they maintain the price at $1. With the massive profits I belive they have the ability to do that. In other words if every single person sold USDT for ethereum they now have the ability to maintain the price at $1 even in the most extreme situation. This is unprecedented. Even the worlds largest bank cant do that.

Some peoples logic seems to be well it happened to bitconnect therefore it will happen to tether. Did bitconnect have the world's largest exchange backing them /this level of profit? Forget that they make ridiculous amounts of money legitimately for a second and grow stronger everyday. The USDT they "print" is worth I believe around $4 based on demand due it's preeminence importance on exchanges as a trading vehicle and safety zone during downturns. It's sort of like the crypto world's reserve currency along with bitcoin and Ether. That is worth a lot. So I believe they can still legitimately print up to another 6 billion USDT for now based on what the value of USDT is if they wanted to! There are many possibilities with all this. They could get loans for example. Remember unlike other cryptos USDT doesn't go up when millions pour into it so you don't see what it is really worth.

I think people don't understand that they do not need to buy back at this point because they haven't even reached the optimal level of USDT given the demand!

Wow can't believe people are comparing the ponzi bitconnect to tether the crypto world's standard on the largest exchanges backed by the legit profits of the world's largest exchange . Talk about unfair comparison. I think that is a shady comparison. Wall St. shills are out there for sure! Hope they are not you guys....

I've yet to see proof of anyone doing so.

Tether printing moves the market appreciably; 48.8% of BTC’s price rise in the period studied occurred in the two-hour periods following the arrival of 91 different Tether grants to the Bitfinex wallet.

Has anyone been able to crosscheck this data from The Tether Report?

I took this sentence to mean that of BTC's 1400% rise from ~ $1,000 on 3/29/2017 to ~ $15,0000 on 1/4/2018, 48.8% of it can be accounted for in those two-hour periods after the release/transfer of Tether grants. I.e. Tether grants were responsible for about 700% of the 1400% rise.

But my data in excel is showing a total or absolute gain (sum of all the individual gains) of 48.4% during those two-hour periods. Compounded over each of the time periods, this ends up as an 84.3% gain. I.e. if we had isolated just those two-hour time periods following the release of new tethers, bitcoin would have gone from ~ $1000 to $1843.

Either way, it is substantial when you factor in the psychological effect on a market constantly seeing this support for BTC's price any time it was falling. But I'd like to clarify what the data is actually finding.

hey hey heeeyy wasa wasa wasa wasaaaaa

p.s. just kiddin

There are writers and readers here who believe that the controversy about Tether/Bitfinex is unjustified, or/and Tether/Bitfinex is legit.

Please state your arguments and support your hypothesis.

The votes show that this side (ie Tether is legit) is quite active. Listing your arguments would contribute constructively to the public debate. Just voting shows little or it shows that you want to hide posts and be seen by less users.

https://vimeo.com/142444429

There is no evidence of an audit that I have seen. The only post I have been able to find is some post that states somebody saw 2 bank accounts.. hardly any proof. Am I missing something??!!! What evidence does anyone have??

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/#markets

Tether has a daily volume of 2 billion, but Bitfinex isn't listed among them? Did they bribe coinmarketcap or something? Is there anyway to see it somehow? Or have I missed something?

I ended up getting help with what I was looking for which was a link to a post that was made into the cryptocurrency Reddit page that gave a bunch of background information and highlighted some concerns about USDT

After doing more research, it made sense to me why the person who provided me this link had a bunch of downvotes.

This tether Reddit page is being manipulated and censored. It’s such an eerie feeling that I actually was swayed by this voting fraud stuff at first. Its almost like a mind control, creepy.

Anyway, goodbye Reddit and goodbye crooked crypto. It’s been, well, weird

For me, looking at r/Tether has taken the small snippets of time I'd otherwise use to check my NEO or chat in the nuls telegram page. Despite my frequent confessions, I'm not a shill.

Maybe this is the case with other generally anti-Tether posters too, I don't know. It would explain the rise in anti-Tetherness without resorting to mystery bogeymen financing anti-stable-coin bigotry.

Or, I am a shill being paid by MakerDAO. Who knows right?

P.S. Tether is legit shady af though.

So, thats the point. Banksters shorting your bitcoin to death (1-3k USD eventually). Ofcourse USDT is a great fraud, but now it is enemy of my enemy, so get over it. If Tether will fail crypto is doomed, not because USDT is big fraud, but because nobody will be able to fight against banksters. U r welcome.

Assumption 1. Tether is dodgy. The why's can be found in countless posts.

Assumption 2. Sooner or later and in one way or another it will be no more. Again why can find the why's in other posts.

I am noticing that the most fanatical disputants of Tether, the ones that are connecting it with doomsday scenarios, are getting pretty desperate. I do not mean here.. I mean on Twitter where the influence game is played. Poloniex and Kraken was a hard blow for them. Both USDT trading and both good. Binance, another big player in USDT, has moved HQ to the most heavily regulated country. They left Shanghai and they are based in Tokyo.

The printer is of. We are at 2.2bn. And I would be surprised if it is turned back on.

Market cap is approx at 470bn.

Bitfinex is not 2nd in volumes anymore... it is 6th.

Tether is dodgy. But maybe, the dangers because of it are overestimated. Maybe there are more subtle ways in which the market is manipulated on a daily basis in non regulated exchanges, with or without Tethers. Maybe not all 2.2bn are unbacked. And maybe the BTC price pump theory which suits a doomsday scenario is speculative nonsense. And finally, maybe, not all exchanges trading Tether are going to fail when Tether collapses.