
Tether Critical Announcement - benpink
https://tether.to/tether-critical-announcement/
======
patio11
If you haven't been following along, here's why this matters:

Tethers is a sole-source cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar. Bitfinex
produces it, though they're cagey (some would say outright lying at times)
about the level of involvement.

The primary purpose of tethers is money laundering, even more so than
cryptocurrency generally. Bitfinex was cut off from the US financial system,
which makes it impossible for them to clear USD-denominated wires. Their
clients have ~$400M of USD on deposit with Bitfinex. Their solution: issue a
cryptocurrency which is claimed to be 100% backed by USD and say that it is
redeemable 1-to-1 for dollars... we just can't actually physically give you
the dollars.

Incredibly, this has worked so far. Bitfinex has issued approximately $600
million in tethers, all but $10 million or so in the last 6 months. They're
usable on a handful of exchanges, for the purpose of buying BTC and other
cryptocurrencies.

Tether claims that someone has stolen 5% or so of their $600 million tethers
-- the digital claims, not the underlying dollars sitting at their totally-
exists-we-promise bank account. They've made a technological change to the
Omni client to disallow transactions on the stolen tokens, but there is no
guarantee that they succeed in convincing all parties to use this.

The nightmare scenario for them is 1+ exchanges say "Well, actually, we rely
on your money actually being money to list it here, so pick: we delist you or
we don't, but we don't have any incentive to apply that patch." [0] The thief
immediately exfiltrates to Bitcoin, and suddenly 30 million hot tethers are
contaminating the money stream at the exchange, and they cannot be
conveniently disambiguated from clean tethers, because money is fungible.

Hilarity then ensues, for values of hilarity which probably mean "bank run" on
a bank which is structurally incapable of paying out most holders of money.

[0] Why does Bitfinex care whether their cryptocurrency is listed at other
exchanges? Because they need to launder money to support their exchange
business. Tethers are institutionalizing a sort of crypto-hawala (or crypto-
Liberty Reserve), allowing the physical transfer of real money to happen at
legal remoteness to the cryptocurrency exchange.

Bitfinex has an order book filled with something people want. A way to get
access to that orderbook is to say "Bitfinex, I want some tether, how do you
sell them to me if you can't accept a wire?" Bitfinex might say "Are you a
trustworthy US VC? Spiffy. Move $20 million from your left hand pocket to your
right hand pocket. The right hand pocket is now ours; here's $20 to $21
million in Tether, which are good for BTC at your favorite exchanges. At some
time in the future, a trustworthy US VC other than yourself is going to ask
you to buy some tether from them at par value. You will do that, and pay them
from your right pocket. If a regulator asks you about this transaction, you
bat your eyes and say 'Oh, sophisticated investors doing a cryptocurrency
transaction, nothing to see here.'"

Post-script: Is this good news for Bitcoin? Oh this is _great_ news for
Bitcoin. If you don't believe Bitfinex's $600 million in liabilities are worth
a copper shilling, the only option for getting your value out of Bitfinex is
to swap your liability for Bitcoin, which drives up the price of Bitcoin at
the margin.

This is exactly what happened in the final months of Mt. Gox.

~~~
darawk
...except that Tether long predates Bitfinex's wire issues. They're usable on
_many_ of the major exchanges (Bittrex, Poloniex, for example). Tether was
explicitly created for the purpose of equalizing prices across exchanges. It's
indeed possible that they're insolvent, but there is no real evidence of that,
just lots of people speculating incessantly without much justification.

Basically everything about the parent comment is factually incorrect. I'm not
sure why it's so upvoted. I guess people just like scandal in the
cryptocurrency world and would prefer to believe what comports with their
preconceptions.

~~~
3pt14159
I've been in Bitcoin for over 7 years. This type of back and forth is exactly
what happened to Mt Gox. And you know what? My friend got the fuck out of Mt
Gox before it burst.

When you have to choose between following a pre-bankrun rumour or following
unsubstantiated pushback, follow the rumour. It costs you maybe 5% to get out
vs 100% if you're wrong and banks / money holders compete on assuring people
that there is less risk with their solution so if Tether can't provide
assurance then that is their problem. Cut and run.

~~~
geofft
On a side note, the fact that bank runs are rational decisions and that no
FDIC-style agency exists to change the incentives seems bad for cryptocurrency
in general.

(Possible responses include both "the traditional financial system and fiat
currency is actually pretty good" and "someone should run a reliable FDIC
equivalent as a business for new exchanges and new coins".)

~~~
Ajedi32
Isn't a bank run only an issue if the bank is using a fractional reserve?
Cryptocurrency exchanges aren't banks; they're not supposed to keep a
fractional reserve. If everyone suddenly demands all their coins at once, the
exchange should have no trouble complying with that.

The only problem is that there's no way to know for sure whether an exchange
is running on a fractional reserve or not.

~~~
3pt14159
The issue is that they do run fractional reserves, even if they aren't
supposed to. Much like banks of the 1600s.

~~~
darawk
They claim that they don't. If they do, that is a serious problem. Some of the
exchanges have, but there is no evidence i'm aware of that points to any of
the current major exchanges running a fractional reserve.

~~~
3pt14159
The issue is that once there is evidence there is a bank run. Mt Gox wasn't
supposed to, but they did. And there are others out there that I hear rumours
about having 5 or 10% of their reserves stolen from hot wallets. Sure it's
fine if there is never a run, but it's worth pointing out that this is a real
threat vector.

~~~
darawk
Ya, no argument from me there. It's definitely a threat. I just don't think it
should be stated as fact that they do run fractional reserves without evidence
of that.

------
foxhop
The abstractions and tech which cryptocurrency works on is fragile in most of
the same ways as the layers that came before it (credit cards/banks/etc).

Try to look at all this holistically.

How many people and resources do we dedicate on this planet to keep track of
money, economy, mine the coins, cash the checks, swipe the cards, keep the
lines working?

All of these abstractions make trade faster and more liquid but honestly it
really feels like dimished returns in the grand scheme of things.

So many people make money by keeping track of money. So much resources. I
can't even fathom it.

Bankers, store clerks, amazon servers, politicians, Dunbar, Stock markets, its
crazy.

How much do we allocate to this cause, the cause of keeping track of "who owns
what"?

This is not rhetorical, If I had to guess, I would guess that 70% of our
resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense.

Just think we are mining coal out of the real ground just to mine these
"valuable" ones and zeros. What the actual fuck?

It all just seems like a waste.

Use my empty clock cycles to mine and keep track of everyone's virtual coins?

I was behind folding proteins and SETI, and all the other distributed
computing ideas. It felt meaningful, like I could help change the world and
help raise up the human condition...

Thanks to this post, I just learned what "Tethers" are, and I have to say, I'm
so fucking disappointed with this part of the industry.

One of the early promises of cryptocurrency was to "sick it to the man and
governments". Now its powered largely by greed and consuming our most
important resources in breakneck speeds.

I wish you all luck this this "investment", hopefully the planet will survive
this next abstraction of "money".

~~~
hvk
Without making a comment on the crypto/tether aspect, I just want to express
that it seems to me that the "cause of keeping track of 'who owns what'", as
you put it, is precisely the singular technological achievement which has
enabled the "human condition" to evolve to its current state. Money is
literally the decentralized, asynchronous, dynamic, and continuous computation
that has evolved to process the combinatorial coordination of
signals/information on resources between 7+ billion unfathomably complex and
independent agents. To me, the staggering thing wouldn't be that "70% of our
resources and jobs are dedicated to this nonsense", but rather that the
technology known as money is so incredibly efficient that it leaves 30%
surplus (in this example) for society to further grow.

~~~
Nursie
Really?

You really think that having only 30% of output go into actual, productive
endeavour would be a good thing?

It just screams of a completely broken system to me, and inefficiency.

I could understand if your attitude was that, well, it seems it had to be this
way, it's the best we can do. But to actually celebrate a ~2:1 ratio of fund-
shuffling busywork over production seems crazy.

Don't get me wrong, I work in the sector right now, I'm happy to get paid for
it, and I can see a use for what I'm doing (exposing data for use in new
services) but really not so much when it comes to using distributed
supercomputers and thousands of coders to try to predict tiny market
movements. And really not "burning energy as fast as possible to
(adversarially) compute transactions on a shared ledger".

~~~
jackstraw14
Just what exactly is your definition of an "actual, productive endeavour"?

Is it really that ridiculous that we dedicate a lot of resources to keeping
track of who owns what? We're a mostly capitalist society, right? In a system
where private ownership reigns supreme, you absolutely need to keep track of
who owns what or we'd have even greater wealth inequality than we have now.
Personally, I'd like to see some kind of anarcho-syndicalist structure but
let's be honest our greatx10 grandchildren will probably still be capitalists.

This article is a little over-the-top in some spots, but the main point is
correct. Cryptocurrency is an innovation in accounting:
[https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-
importan...](https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-important-
invention-in-the-last-500-years-c90b0151c169)

Cryptocurrencies are trying to make trustless transactions a reality so we
don't need a human workforce to keep it all _mostly_ accurate. Don't get too
disappointed yet, this stuff is just getting started.

~~~
Nursie
A "lot" of resources would be 1% IMHO.

If society is burning up not just a lot, but a majority of its effort in
servicing its model (resource tracking), it seems to me something has gone
very very wrong.

You need to keep track of who owns what. You don't need to make that such a
complicated thing that it takes vast portions of available human effort to
track, and sucks in vast portions of the fruits of said effort.

You don't have to be an anarchist to think that that's ridiculous.

We can do that with trust and the vast majority of people don't care.

~~~
jackstraw14
I don't disagree that it's a depressing waste of existence to spend one's life
keeping track of stuff. Especially if it's not even your stuff. But we've only
had the computing power to take a load off us humans for a decade or two. And
plus everyone needs a job (pointless or not) or the unemployment statistics
start to freak people out. It's sort of the hand we've been dealt, the whole
"let's work hard now for a better future we'll never see" thing.

I think the situation will improve dramatically when some of these crypto
projects begin to mature. From what I can tell, blockchains are the opposite
of lightweight, and personally I'm not holding my breath for one to become
useful for anything besides profit anytime soon. I think something like IOTA
is a better candidate to be useful (a fee-less directed acyclic graph, not a
blockchain). It's more like a new communications protocol that will allow
machines to conduct their own transactions with each other. The team's goal is
to make it useful first, and if it's profitable too well that's great. Maybe
I'm just not that creative anymore, but I can't see a production-quality
future for blockchains, and would agree that giant PNW datacenters doing
nothing but proof-of-work is a massive waste of resources.

That said, these are mostly just research projects hoping they have one of the
big ideas that will win.

------
Jd
Here's some more context:

Tether was originally setup as RealCoin. It originally had a clear bank
account relationship with a Taiwanese bank. It had about $30mm. Then the bank
cut them off.

Since then they've been floating without any announced banking relationship
and they also changed their terms of service. Over the same time period they
made a partnership with BitFinex and their supposed AUM has gone up over 10x.

No one really knows how much of that corresponds to actual USD or if anyone
can actually withdraw. A famous twitter account
([https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed](https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed)) points out
every day the ostensible discrepancies between the supposed AUM and public
amounts.

I'm generally a huge fan of the goal of Tether (a stable USD backed
cryptocurrency), but the proof is in the pudding (i.e the reserves) and your
access to it, and both of these are rather questionable.

Full disclosure: I know and am friends with some of the current Tether team
and was recruited for RealCoin in the early stages of the project. They are
working on a hard problem (asset-backed cryptocurrency on the way that gets
the most traction in the market at present, not necessarily the way that
inspires the most confidence.

~~~
ActsJuvenile
Tell your friends they should shutdown the company immediately to avoid prison
time. Using USD to back any token or digital asset 1:1 is a serious crime as
demonstrated by Liberty Reserve.

~~~
chx
What...? Liberty Reserve was a money laundering operation and had nothing to
do with 1:1 or whatever. If there's something in the US Criminal Code about
that, you need to cite it but I believe there isn't.

~~~
ryanlol
Tether does seem to suffer from exact same problems as LR though, no?

It’s structured in a manner that makes it trivial to establish third party
exchangers with no KYC processes. There is no KYC for individual Tether users,
who only need to generate a bitcoin address to get started.

Only time they do KYC is when you want to exchange via Tether website
directly, which is no different from what LR did IIRC.

------
dangero
I released a paper earlier this year talking about how we can reasonably lock
cryptocurrency to fiat, but unfortunately the space is still rather immature.
A single provider of USD tokens is extremely dangerous. Best case scenario
would be if there were many companies like Tether and you could spread your
token purchases between them automatically to minimize counterparty risk.
Stellar and Ripple are closest to solving this since they have fiat trading
pairs for each trusted exchange on their network. In the future that could
mean issuance from hundreds of banks.

Here is the paper if anyone is interested:
[https://www.gogreenmango.com/whitepapers/Bitcoin-
Volatility-...](https://www.gogreenmango.com/whitepapers/Bitcoin-Volatility-
Removal-via-Crypto-Token-Asset-Baskets.pdf)

~~~
ActsJuvenile
Ripple is a scam and Jed McCaleb has been dumping thousands of Ripples a day
since forever. You shouldn't encourage new users to buy Ripples.

~~~
krisives
Ripple is a scam it also predates Bitcoin entire thing was a sever to server
bank basically

------
ajcodez
Twitter account @Bitfinexed [1] has been calling out Tether and Bitfinex for
possible fraud for a while. Time for popcorn, see how this plays out.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed](https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed)

~~~
iamthirsty
A lot of good reads on the Medium [1] as well.

[1]: [https://medium.com/@bitfinexed](https://medium.com/@bitfinexed)

------
pbnjay
$30M here, $30M there... by all means, please keep proving to me how secure
and stable smart contracts are!

I'm indifferent on bitcoin, it's a cool idea but there seem to be a lot of
these "hammer everything" types that are doing it a disservice across the
board.

~~~
chrisco255
Tethers are not smart contracts. It's a separate crypto blockchain currency
from Bitcoin and it claims to have a near 1:1 ratio with the USD, hence the
name...it's "tethered" to the USD. This is not unlike some foreign currencies.

~~~
stale2002
Well, it is "supposedly" backed up by USD.

A whole bunch of people have been questioning whether they ACTUALLY have that
money, very recently, and surprise surprise, there just 'happens' to be a hack
that happens right now.

~~~
askmike
Not sure if "a whole bunch of people" equates more than 5 extremely vocal
people on twitter and reddit.

Tether published an audit a month ago.

~~~
panarky
It's time for a new kind of bank - a transparent bank.

Exchanges could publish a daily report of their bank account balances for each
currency along with a daily message signed by each cold-storage key.

And the transparent bank would publish a daily record of balances for each
account, which ties out to the bank's balance sheet.

We wouldn't need to rely on historical audits, because we could do our own
automated audit every day.

Transparent exchanges with transparent bank accounts would attract funds away
from secretive exchanges with secret bank accounts.

~~~
askmike
After the fall of mt. gox there was a huge push to get exchanges to do this.

My guess is that the costs of doing this (security is quite hard: anything
that can sign messages using cold storage keys can obviously also empty the
cold storage, since transactions are simply signed messages) does not outweigh
the demand for this. Most traders don't care (and subsequently get burned).

> And the transparent bank would publish a daily record of balances for each
> account

I think this is a terrible idea though. Even if done anonymous it gives way
too much information about a market and its participants. IMO just use a
merkle tree so everyone can check their own balance.

~~~
dlp211
There is no such thing as "too much information about a market".

~~~
askmike
Anyone with a lot of AUM looking to invest would beg to differ - or well, they
might use the information while trading on a different exchange.

Also draws a nice crosshair on your exchange, so that hackers can exactly
calculate cost/benefits as well as learn from your systems (how you divide
your cold storage over different addresses, how that changes over time, how
money from different dummy accounts effects cold storage in what way).

------
tfha
Isn't tether the one that screwed up? They are the ones who got stolen from,
why do other exchanges have to bend over backwards and issue updates?

If the attacker is moving fast enough, exchanges probably can't even respond
in time. That shouldn't mean that they lose money. If tether reserves the
right to delist coins at any time without much notice, why would you ever
consider that a safe asset to accept?

~~~
sanxiyn
Situation seems analogous to DAO hack. It was DAO who got stolen, Ethereum was
fine, no Ethereum software had to bend over backwards to follow hard fork.
Still, it seems post-ETH/ETC-fork ETH is doing fine, and sometimes even
considered a safe asset to accept.

~~~
ErikHuisman
Problem is the tether is allready spent. So the exchanges where the tether is
spent is paying it out their pockets, no?

------
unabridged
Tether is handling this completely wrong. They should not hard fork Omni and
force everyone to blacklist addresses. Instead, tell everyone to halt on-chain
trading, take a snapshot of the chain, then create a new tether token and send
them to everyone holding the old tethers (minus the thief). I think the
bitcoins Tether would have to pay in transfer fees would be a fitting
punishment for their poor security.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
You can't just keep hard forking even time something had happens. The problem
is inherit to digital assets: they can be hacked.

~~~
chrisco255
Banks can be robbed, museums can be swindled, even credit bureaus like Equifax
can get hacked. There's no such thing as hack-proof. That some cryptos will
hard fork and adjust shows that the system can heal itself and not be in a
permanent state of disrepair. That's not a bad thing at all.

~~~
kobeya
It’s a bad thing to the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine
audited ledger of account.

Why not just run it in your favorite RDBMS? That way we’d at least save a
bunch of CO2 emissions.

~~~
unabridged
>the idea of a trustless, irrevocable, fully machine audited ledger of account

This is just giving sentimentality an economic value. Forking should
constantly be considered, you should always be looking to maximize the value
of your stake.

Imagine two coins A & B with exactly the same distribution, except in coin A a
real jerk has 10% of the coins and you know his addresses. You also know
almost all of the holders also consider this guy a jerk who will not
contribute to positively to the value of the coin (at least not 110%). Its in
everyone's best interest to just erase this jerk from the ledger and choose B,
everyone ends up with 110% of their original stake.

~~~
icelancer
That's literally the tyranny of the majority. Who determines what the majority
is? 90% in your example, but what if 65% of people do the same and wipe 35%
out? That could easily be done by buying enough of the coins / merging with
enough of the users.

That scenario is completely ridiculous and unacceptable.

------
runeks
> Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether
> treasury wallet […]

> […] they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by Tether for USD.

How will this ever work in real life?

If I yesterday — right after the hack, but before the announcement — in good
faith received $1m in USDT, and paid in Bitcoin, who’s liable?

In effect, this policy just shifts the financial burden to innocent people,
who may have paid e.g. Bitcoin in exchange for “fake” USDT in good faith.

The issuer needs to take sole responsibility for this. Not because it’s the
right thing to do, but because the USDT is useless otherwise. How can it be
used for payments if the issuer can make a blog post saying “by the way, if
you received USDT from this guy then you have nothing”?

~~~
thethimble
Presumably the stolen coins have not been spent yet.

> The attacker is holding funds in the following address:
> 16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r.

------
GreaterFool
> As Tether is the issuer of the USDT managed asset, we will not redeem any of
> the stolen tokens

Rip Tether. I'd expect everyone to stop accepting Tether transactions
effective immediately. Tether just made their own security breach a collective
responsibility. Now you have two types of coins: the clean ones and tainted
ones that are useless.

~~~
krisives
What they mean I think is that they have hard-forked their underlying
blockchain technology (Omni in this case) and it has a Ethereum Classic style
check in it not allowing a specific TX/wallet

------
kytwb
Grab your popcorn, this is just the beginning.

------
nowarninglabel
I came across this last weekend, which you may find helpful reading for more
context on potential fraud with tether and Bitfinex:
[https://twitter.com/bitfinexed](https://twitter.com/bitfinexed)

------
dcw303
Looking at the attacker's address in Omni Explorer:
[https://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPt...](https://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r)

I'm finding this a little confusing as it looks like BTC blockchain addresses
can also be Tether addresses. Is this correct?

They are currently holding $30.9M USDT. If they transfer this to another USDT
address, I assume it would show up here, like the 3 inbound tx from
31okFF1rUu8jjPEVuajycTRBp82Nteo4Mv that makes up their balance.

But what if they want to cash out to BTC? If they bought on Bitfinex with
their USDT would another transaction appear? And could it then be tracked to
the BTC blockchain explorer?

It was claimed that the stolen USDT could be mixed into the main supply of
BTC, but I'm failing to understand how that would happen, as it seems
traceable from the public addresses.

~~~
sanxiyn
> I'm finding this a little confusing as it looks like BTC blockchain
> addresses can also be Tether addresses. Is this correct?

Yes. Tether is so-called Smart Property (with Property ID 31) stored using
Omni Layer. Omni Layer stores transactions on Bitcoin Blockchain. Transaction
data is encoded as output script, which uses OP_RETURN opcode and zero value.
OP_RETURN opcode allows 80 bytes of data. Omni Layer uses 4 bytes ("omni") of
80 as a prefix to coexist with other systems using OP_RETURN.

------
hw
I'm super pumped and bullish about crypto and the whole idea of a
decentralized world, but there's so much money involved right now (most of it
speculative money, and arguably lots of illegal money), that there needs to be
some real measures to ensure the security around it.

Crypto has made it easy for people to essentially start a bank, without
actually thinking too much about or knowing how to build a vault properly.

------
ktta
Here's the text since it seems to be overloaded (italics theirs):

#Tether Critical Announcement

Yesterday, we discovered that funds were improperly removed from the Tether
treasury wallet through malicious action by an external attacker. _Tether
integrators must take immediate action, as discussed below, to prevent further
ecosystem disruption._

$30,950,010 USDT was removed from the Tether Treasury wallet on November 19,
2017 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address. As Tether is the issuer of
the USDT managed asset, we will _not_ redeem any of the stolen tokens, and we
are in the process of attempting token recovery to prevent them from entering
the broader ecosystem. The attacker is holding funds in the following address:
16tg2RJuEPtZooy18Wxn2me2RhUdC94N7r. If you receive any USDT tokens from the
above address, or from any downstream address that receives these tokens, _do
not accept them, as they have been flagged and will not be redeemable by
Tether for USD._

The following steps have been taken to address this matter:

1\. The tether.to back-end wallet service has been temporarily suspended. A
thorough investigation on the cause of the attack is being undertaken to
prevent similar actions in the future.

2\. We are providing new builds of Omni Core to the community. (Omni Core is
the software used by Tether integrators to support Omni Layer transactions.)
These builds should prevent any movement of the stolen coins from the
attacker’s address. We strongly urge all Tether integrators to install this
software _immediately_ to prevent the coins from entering the ecosystem.
Again, any tokens from the attacker’s address _will not be redeemed_.
Accordingly, any and all exchanges, wallets, and other Tether integrators
should install this software immediately in order to prevent loss:

[https://github.com/tetherto/omnicore/releases/tag/0.2.99.s](https://github.com/tetherto/omnicore/releases/tag/0.2.99.s)

Note that this software will cause a consensus change to currently running
Omni Core clients, meaning that it is effectively a temporary hard fork to the
Omni Layer. Integrators running this build will not accept any token sends
from the attacker’s address, preventing the coins from moving further from the
attacker’s address.

3\. We are working with the Omni Foundation to investigate ways that will
allow Tether to reclaim stranded tokens and rectify the hard fork created by
the above software. Once this protocol enhancement is complete, the Omni
Foundation will provide updated binaries for all integrators to install. These
builds will supersede the binaries provided above by Tether.to. After the
protocol upgrades to the Omni Layer are in place, Tether will reclaim the
stolen tokens and return them to treasury.

Tether issuances have not been affected by this attack, and all Tether tokens
remain fully backed by assets in the Tether reserve. The only tokens that will
not be redeemed are the ones that were stolen from Tether treasury yesterday.
Those tokens will be returned to treasury once the Omni Layer protocol
enhancements are in place.

We will provide further updates as they come available, and we appreciate the
community’s patience, understanding, and support while we work to rectify the
situation in the best possible manner to everyone’s benefit.

The Tether Team

------
robjan
Cached version: [https://archive.fo/7XoKB](https://archive.fo/7XoKB)

------
pmorici
Haven't listened to this yet but audio interview with one of Bitfinex's and
Tether's main detractors...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerIjELO7IY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerIjELO7IY)

------
quickthrower2
The advantages of centralisation. You can fork ... without a fork!

------
Kiro
How are tethers created exactly? Are they not mined? If so, how can they be a
cryptocurrency?

------
matt_wulfeck
> _$30,950,010 USDT was removed from the Tether Treasury wallet on November
> 19, 2017 and sent to an unauthorized bitcoin address_

And will you get it back? By design, no. This is the unfortunate reality of
crypto currencies.

------
brentis
May be an issue, but $600m / $200b = tiny

------
Kazamai
If you have money on bitfinex, get it out now~

------
By-Jokese
The page is down, what a coincidence!

------
knieveltech
This week's installment of internet funbux drama.

------
brentis
It may be an issue. But $600m / $200b = tiny

------
SrslyJosh
#buttcoin

~~~
krisives
Use the chrome extension it automatically does it

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-to-
buttcoi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-to-
buttcoin/gebbpaadmjjlgjnnljckibmmgkmckdng?hl=en-US)

~~~
mavdi
Have all the fun :) While I steadily get rich. I hope they'll make an
extension for "fiat money to food on table" when this whole corrupt financial
systems comes crashing down (again).

------
ringaroundthetx
when you're anxiously waiting for tether to gox the whole market and their
critical announcement is ... not that bad

~~~
krisives
Basically clicked it expecting to read what you're describing. I'm not
"disappointed" but at the same time I feel the writing is on the wall. I still
expect to read something like a MtGox in the next few weeks/months.

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nikolay
Bitcoin is crooks' playground! Inside theft, hacks, and everything possible
happens as there are enough idiots who hodl and who keep buying at any price
in hopes to become millionaires overnight.

