blocksceptic

Even if it makes sense today, if the approach became commonplace, it would become a lot less effective, as it would require a commensurate and sustained increase of the value of the relevant cryptocurrency for the $0.02/hour that is currently generated by one user to not drop to $0.0002/hour once 100x as many users are participating.

This barely makes sense today, where are your hard numbers showing how this will work if we try to fund journalism by throwing a coinhive script onto nytimes.com?

Tech people love these sorts of things, because it allows us to pretend we've solved a tough social problem (how do we pay for journalism) with a neat cryptographic hashing algorithm, when in reality we've just invented a horribly inefficient way to add hidden micro-transactions to our end user's power bills.

Oh I agree, but I was pointing out that this doesn't even make sense economically - let alone environmentally.

This idea is fundamentally flawed because mining is ultimately a zero-sum game. If this approach became commonplace as the author suggests, it would greatly increase the number of publishers squabbling over much smaller pieces of the pie.

In any case, you're effectively paying for the mining on your power bill. So nevermind that this approach disadvantages users who pay higher rates for electricity or have older, less-power-efficient computers.

Where is the audit? Where is the balance sheet? At which banks are those funds held?

Even IF those tethers are 1:1 backed today, they won't be once uncle sam figures it out.

in my opinion, the un-tethering will almost certainly come when the market stops valuing 1 USDT at 1 USD.

No amount of crypto handwaving can create fiat balances at actual financial institutions, so this will likely happen when new money coming into the space dries up to the point where it's no longer enough to cover the costs that have to flow out, e.g. from people cashing out and miner's electricity bills.

This guy has an interesting theory about how this may have come about: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/7sr33e/i_have_a_t...

Even if tethers are backed 1:1, the level of secrecy about the details means it's hard to believe there isn't something illegal going on around them.

By holding tethers, best case scenario, you're exposed to a significant risk that the underlying USD is eventually seized.

Many have speculated that a good portion of the volume on bitfinex is wash trading by insiders, who are presumably not paying the same trading fees as everyone else.