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.

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".

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) 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.

Here is the paper if anyone is interested: https://www.gogreenmango.com/whitepapers/Bitcoin-Volatility-...

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

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.

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?

> […] 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”?

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.

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.

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.

#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

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerIjELO7IY

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

But money is a strange thing. Almost everyone you speak to doesn't understand it. People think the money itself---the bank notes and numbers in an app---are "worth" something. The system itself does have value because it enables asynchronous trade, which seems to be a good thing. But when you tell people that the numbers in their bank account were just created from thin air by some bank who lent someone money at one time, their eyes glaze over.

When you look around it is obvious that there really are people who are "good with money", and people who are not. Who knows if the poor understanding is intrinsic or has been nurtured by the finance sector. But if we accept that money is a good thing and that some people are bad with it, then that does mean the finance sector has some value.

Bitcoin has long been about greed, unfortunately. In the beginning it seemed like a majority were in it because they saw the value of trustless electronic cash. A system much like gold but completely electronic and completely accurate. But it hasn't been about that for a while. Today you can't even move BTC around due to high transaction fees. I can't believe that the current market cap reprents the value in the current system.

So we need to understand why part of it sucks, why part of it is great, and develop better alternatives that are also great but suck less. For example, it is important to keep track of who owes what to whom, otherwise people can't trust each other to make promises on a large scale with strangers. It's less good that people can gain a lot of profit simply by manipulating numbers and moving financial instruments around. Part of this stems from all value judgements being collapsed down into a single number which of course can never be self-consistent [1], part of it stems from informational differences between actors and other real-world deviations away from what a "perfectly-liquid" market should look like. If financial activity was truly a "market optimisation" mechanism, we ought to be able to replace the entire thing with a neutral algorithm and get rid of bankers and personal profits here completely.

[1] you cannot totally-order a 2-vector (and in general a n-vector) so that the ordering obeys the neighbourhood principle

However, I think about it slightly differently -- crypto currencies (and their likes) are just an attempt to replace man-power with computer-power. We need someone to enforce the rules without human intervention, hence, freeing up more people to do stuff that doesn't involve managing the abstraction of money.

edit: When we imagine "mining" in this realm, it'd help to think in terms of mining abstract resources like cost for verification of a transaction, rather than tangible resources like coal.

Don't forget that decentralized currency is a rather new technology, and is constantly seeing progress being made on all fronts. You can even mine Grid coins doing SETI and Protein folding work!

Which is higher than it should be, but thankfully not 70%...

The above probably includes the accounting industry but not all employee accountants/cashiers embedded in all companies, but even if it did, it would move the needle only a bit (maybe 10% of employees?)

I think that's a wild overstatement, even if you're including every kind of management and public service job in the world.

There is a really critical distinction between truly trustless currencies like bitcoin and "managed" [centralized, trusted] assets like the ones Ethereum offers. Interesting that once you start to grant some amount of trust there are options that don't leverage proof-of-work at all, so the waste is not necessarily a concern.

Proof-of-work is "only" necessary if you want trustless coin w/egalitarian distribution. Some folks would argue that it's not necessary to be truly trustless (perhaps bootstrapping a new bitcoin node could suffer a DoS from a sybil false-chain attack, at which point you would trust someone authoritative's copy of the blockchain).

No matter how you slice it, you should be very, very suspicious of any new cryptocurrency and super extremely suspicious of any new "crypto-asset".