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Comment by ban5wall | Hacker News Reader

Surprisingly, yes. That is fairly normal in financial institutions. It seems nonsensical at a first glance, but:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/analyst/090501.asp

What you are pointing to is expressly pointing out that 1) it is illegal, 2) it is illegal for a very good reason, 3) if anyone finds out the illegal things going on, it will likely result in catastrophic (or at least very, very expensive) consequences.

The pretending part that Tether and Bitfinex were doing was fundamentally different than the walling happening within financial institutions, where it has to be disjoint staff, disjoint control/leadership, and if someone sneaks through compliance and shares data (wink wink) it is highly likely someone will get fired if compliance finds out.

In the Tether/Bitfinex issue, they shared board members and ownership despite claiming they didn't in public, and were misrepresenting themselves in a very material way as independent.

If you were just adding some information, apologies. If you were advocating that clear evidence someone is brazenly committing a crime is not a justifiable and strong reason to distrust them, or even that it is inappropriate to hypothesize how they could be getting rich while continue to do similar things - then yikes?

If you were saying Situation Normal, All Fucked Up - then extra yikes?

Goldman Sachs (or some random VC firm) say might have some subtle versions of this going on, but if they were doing what Tether is and has been doing right now, they wouldn't be a solvent entity for very long. That Tether is hiding from jurisdictions (for now) in a way that Goldman can't doesn't inspire confidence in their trustworthiness or stability going forward, as they're clearly on the radar now and blood is in the water. Along with a lot of money and some high profile political promotions, potentially.

Goldman absolutely does play games like this on the market making side, but the difference is that the chairmanships of Goldman and the Federal Reserve tend to be a revolving door. They’re a special kind of royalty.

USDT, USDC and DAI each have their own set of counterparty risks. USDT is regulated somewhere sunny, USDC somewhere that could be hostile if given enough power, and DAI is backed by digital assets such as custodied Ethereum. The sooner there are more solid options in more jurisdictions, and more certainty around USD stablecoin regulation, the better. I will be very glad to see Tethers go away.

I can’t find where Tether is ACTUALLY regulated, but I can find a lot of misinformation about where it is regulated and how, even in their own legal pages. For instance, they claim they are regulated by FinCEN. However, they appear to only be registered with FinCEN for the purpose of reporting crimes and the like (money laundering), which does not (quite explicitly) give them the right to claim FinCEN in any way is regulated or overseeing them in the traditional sense.

If someone runs across Tether (somehow?) explicitly committing money laundering in a jurisdiction that FinCEN controls, yeah they could go after them - but since they don’t have an address near as I can tell, that’s not easy to do, and all they say on the matter is they are ‘incorporated in Hong Kong’ [https://tether.to/contact-us/]

Also, their ‘proof of funds’ is kinda ridiculous from any sort of auditing or compliance perspective and crazy out of date [https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/FSS1JUN18-Accou...]

If you have any more accurate information, please post!

Given the amount of money we’re taking about, the number of investors affected and the extent of the fraud around these entities, I’m surprised we have not yet seen a securities class action suit raised against them... I suppose it’s all good while the ROI goes up. After the seemingly inevitable crash, I suspect a SCA would be on the cards

I think there are 4+ active class action lawsuits, or were before they were combined - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.coindesk.com/plaintiffs-com...

Your linked article keeps calling "The Chinese Wall" an "offensive and racist term." I don't understand that. I always assumed that the term refered to the Great Wall of China, i.e. a large, famous and fortified wall designed to keep groups on opposite sides separated, hence its metaphorical use in business. Is there some other connotation with regards to that term that I'm unaware of?

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