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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Tether has been printing record amounts again. And is also under legal scrutiny as various cases advance against them and other players.

Looking like a last-ditch attempt to fleece the unwary from here.

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I see Tether and USDC market cap has been increasing considerably last weeks while DAI has not. Do you think this is because Tether/USDC are more easily to be printed (aka not backed by real USD) compared to DAI that is decentralized?

- Tether: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

- USD Coin: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/usd-coin/

- DAI: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/multi-collateral-dai/

How is it that Tether, with all its reports of unviability, seems to manage to go on?

It seems like if they were the fraud people frequently report, the would have bust long ago.

How long were people talking about Madoff before his firm finally went bust?

(I actually don't know, if anyone has insight, I would appreciate it.)

Markopolos complained about Madoff for around nine years and other people may have seen the signs earlier. There is a great deal of ruin in Tether.

Yup, and when Madoff eventually blew up the SEC instituted the whistleblower program in which they pay up to a fraction of recovered funds, to kind of make up for the fact they slept on this problem for soooo damn long.

Maybe they are backed by 3 letter agencies wanting to monitor crypto activity?

That’s a widely speculative conspiracy. Do you have any evidence?

are you asking that if I am snowden or assange and have managed to uncover the work of 3 letter organisations. No, just like people speculate about why Tether is still alive. I speculate that they might have cut a deal with the various 3 letter agencies to provide data on USD -> USDT flows which will help deanonymize huge branches of the transaction graph. In that way 3 letter agencies can keep an eye on the flows. In return all cases against them will be held up and will not move fast.

In the case of secretive 3 letter organisations you can only observe their actions by second-order effects. In this case the lack of significant prosecution against Tether.

The fact the article doesn’t cover this at all except for a passing mention of USDT as “pegged” (talk about legitimizing!) is really all you need to know about the fluffiness of this article. We are at cotton candy levels of writing here.

Tether supply is more than reasonable if you compare it to USDC and take into account that USDT is more widely used in exchanges than USDC.

USDT going bust was a nice story. Many of the big exchanges now support USDC, and so people could easily switch if they thought Tether was not solid.

How do you see the amount of tether printed vs actual amount of tether bought?

Well in theory those numbers are equal, any discrepancy would be fraudulent.

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