This is good news for quality cryptocurrency organizations. Bitfinex has problems, so does Tether and it's good to see bad actors in the crypto world getting weeded out, called out and put down.
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In the long term, perhaps, but in the short term there's going to be MtGox-or-worse level carnage in the markets if Bitfinex/USDT is exposed as a scam and people start panic selling to cash out.
if they sell their usdt for btc, the btc price could actually rise. it just depends if they try to withdraw all together and the money leaves the crypto market
It would rise as priced in tether, with tether depreciating against the dollar. You will see larger spreads between tether exchanges and dollar exchanges, which already regularly grow into the hundreds.
If people were holding tether because they wanted to be flat with respect to the cryptocurrency market, they will likely sell their cryptocurrency on a dollar exchange, suppressing prices there.
btc would rise in terms of the real USD as well because the demand for it would increase.
I suppose it's possible, but holding all else equal? I don't immediately see why dollar demand would increase in the event of a tether collapse.
Dollar prices will adjust as BTC->Dollar and Dollar->BTC flows change. Dually the Tether prices. The only thing that keeps these prices in line is a Tether/Dollar arbitrage, but that arbitrage will slow and halt as people flee tether.
If anything, I would guess that a sudden increase in selling pressure from people doing Tether->Crypto->Dollar risks pushing people into a Crypto->Dollar fear feedback loop.
You're assuming the severity of this news would not cause Tether to devalue while BTC holders exit into real USD or fiat instead of Tether.
I keep reading about these magical places. Say that I have a 1000 BTC. What is the exchange that would allow me to sell 500 BTC and wire money to my account in:
a) Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City ( USD )
b) National Westminster Bank in London ( GBP )
c) HSBC ( Paris ), account in Euros.
The wire must show up live in 72 business hours and post to the account within 72 * 2 hours.
For my small ventures ( <1000 euro) I've used bitonic.nl.
A dutch site using the standard dutch banking system iDeal.
First time I bought it took a day for a test transaction of 0.01 to confirm my holding the account.
When I recently sold (back to that same account) I received the money by 13:00 of the next business day.
Not sure how this works for non dutch citizens. Presumably a dutch bank-account suffices. They don't seem to be an exchange though. Instead they are essentially market making, keeping their own supply. You don't have an account there. Instead, when selling they present you an address to send to, and when buying you give them the address to send to, Moving 500 BTC there in a single trade would probably exhaust their supply. At the moment they report 250BTC+, I've seen ~150BTC the last few times I checked.
Still, it seems to be an actual functional on/off ramp for BTC - EUR.
bitonic has a spread between buy/sell of about 200 EUR (on an average price of 8000 EUR). That seems a bit excessive.
GDAX but there will definitely be a KYC delay the first time you do it with phone calls and ID checks and questions about where you got the money.
Second time, though, no problem. Less than 72 hours.
Presumably GDAX...? I’m sure it wouldn’t be as smooth as pushing buttons and they would likely want something stating where you got the coins.
yeah they only let most people withdraw 10k a day. some guy owed millions on taxes but couldn’t withdraw it fast enough to pay..
You can request an increase to your limits. For a customer with a large, verified portfolio I’m sure Coinbase would work with you if you needed to move funds in large amounts.
It may not be overnight, and there may be additional fees, but it’s not going to take 100’s of days to move $1M unless you aren’t trying very hard.
Haha presumably if you’re wiring the money directly to the US Treasury they would make an exception!
C'mon, say the "This is good for Bitcoin!" thing.
which is odd because I thought the libertarian dystopia that bitcoin is pushing us towards abhors this kind of regulatory interference
those libertarians have been expecting this and have traded their tether-pumped btc for gold, land, etc.
it's the late to the game profit seekers who have bought in over the past few months who will get killed by this. even if the tether founders have made off with whatever cash deposits they had and there's nothing in the vault, cryptocurrencies will still have value and will rise again.
I thought this was all "working as intended."
Bitcoin is a dinosaur that will either need to adapt or die.
This is good for Bitcoin.
Yeah all news are good news for greedy Bitcoin hodlers !
> This is good news for quality cryptocurrency organizations.
Are there any? I’m being honest and not snarky here: I’ve yet to see a single company in the space that’s not at least somewhat shady.
I haven't looked at it in any detail, but my impression was that shapeshift was fairly, uh, on the up and up?
Iirc, the idea is you say you want x amount of cryptocurrency M sent to address A1, and you want to pay in cryptocurrency N, and it gives you an address B2 and a quantity y, and you send it, then they send it. With this set-up, I don't see much of a way for them to behave dishonestly that wouldn't be immediately discovered, as either you get the currency or you don't, and if they don't, then you can quickly tell.
(I mean, the exchange rate they give might not be the best available, but it is the consumer's choice whether or not to accept the exchange rate for the convenience.)
Also, it is possible that I am substantially mis-remembering how it works, as I've never used it (I don't in fact own any of any cryptocurrencies, and never have except for testnet ether)
Also, I don't know if shapeshift is still around or not.
Still around, still works that way.
I mine eth and/or zcash in small quantities. If I want to buy a small quantity of something else I use shapeshift. This way I hold no accounts anywhere.
'course I have no way to cash out, but then my holdings total less than 1 ETH so it's no big thing...
Check out Gemini exchange. 100% professional operation
Of course, not before the owners of Tether have already loaded up their Swiss vaults full of sweet sweet cash.