If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Money, the World Is in for a Shock | Hacker News Reader

If Russian Currency Reserves Aren’t Money, the World Is in for a Shock

wsj.com

14 pointspaulpauper8 comments

If you don't hold it in your hot little hand, you don't own it.

Banks are supposed to be a safe place to put your money. We've just seen that ALL BANKS are not safe at all. That means Wells Fargo, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, etc, etc, etc can keep your money at any time they feel like it. How do you feel about banks now?

That also means Coinbase, Binance, Bitfinex, Kraken (no relation!), FTX, and Huobi. Also keep in mind that although Bitfinex probably can't confiscate your Tether (as long as you're holding it in your own wallet on your own computer, or in Binance or something, not Bitfinex's own trading platform), they can inflate it, or they can collapse, which would probably cause Tether's value to collapse. Bitfinex has a history of very shady practices.

Also, Tether's value depends on the value of the dollar, which is likely to collapse if the US gets nuked or if the Federal Reserve decides to make money machine go brrr.

It's almost like civilization requires a level of trust that falls apart if you assume a threshold of greed beyond anything we've seen in most democratic systems

That would be unfortunate, because it would mean that the first war would end civilization. Fortunately, that didn't happen. It's certainly possible that current civilization is too fragile to survive the levels of distrust and greed that are inherent to warfare, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Tether is one of the crypto stable coins that have a blacklist feature that freezes the asset in a wallet to prevent transfer and this is dangerous. What would happen if Tether froze all the centralized exchange's hot and cold wallets? What would happen if they did this to liquidity pools?

I didn't realize that. So basically holding Tether, anywhere, entails the same risks as banking. Except that the guys running your bank are a bunch of grifters with no regulatory oversight. This is going to be a huge disaster.

You can even hold it in your hand, and if no one will take it from you, it’s worthless.

https://archive.is/io6Qg

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