Unless a significant portion of the tether are converted to real dollars it wouldn't prove much. I'm sure bitfinex/tether are not completely broke and can afford to pay a few million of dollars easily. The only way we'll know for sure if they have the money is if somebody manages to get hold of their real financial info or if there's a bank run and they end up having to redeem a significant portion of the USDT they've emitted.

As far as I understand the current conditions for retrieving the real dollars from tether/bitfinex are dissuasive enough that most people won't bother doing that, so they just need to have enough liquidity to pay the small portion that will.

Can you?

Any actual, verified customer of Tether here willing to provide a demo?

I love how much you're defending and willing to go to bat for something you haven't tested yourself nor seen any real world examples of. Why?!

I'm not going to bat for them. I'm explaining the way i've reasoned about the situation. If you disagree with my reasoning, feel free to explain why. Here's the chain:

1. Bitfinex claims to offer wires to Taiwanese accounts.

2. Bitfinex does redeem Tether 1:1 for USD (nominally, within your Bitfinex account).

3. Bitfinex claims to wire that redeemed USD to any Taiwanese account without delay or haircut.

Now, given that, the price of Tether out to trade at 1:1 with USD. Which, for the most part, it does. If there were lots of Taiwanese customers unable to realize those wires, i'd expect we would hear some complaining from them. But we don't. Therefore it is my presumption that those wires are proceeding uninhibited.

If you have an alternative explanation of the facts, i'm happy to listen to it.

You are going to bat for them, in the fact that this comment is the first where you've made any note of "claims", and "expects".

All your other posts on this thread have made these as statements of fact. "Bitfinex offers wires", "Go ahead and open an account right now", etc.

So, you don't have an alternative explanation of the facts then?

Fair enough.

I'm buying this reasoning as evidence towards the hypothesis that they indeed redeem some amounts of USD.

All the other things I've read so far suggests this will turn into a game of musical chairs - some amount of people who make the wire orders first will get redeemed, and the rest will be out of luck.

Even IF ( a big IF) your explanation is true, it is of little help to most of people holding USDT.

So in the best case scenario to redeem USDT for USD:

  1. You have to have a Taiwanese bank account.
  2. You have to gain verified status at Bitfinex's discretion.
  3. You have to have a balance over 50k USDT.

Bitfinex/Tether backers know that it is near impossible to trigger a serious run on their USD balances with such rules.

Thus it logically follows, they have very little incentive to actually keep 2.3B in USD EVEN if they received 2.3B in USD.

I can buy the explanation that originally Tether planned to have 1:1 USD for each USDT.

However the massive regular printing of Tether really strains the 1:1 claim.

Actually I've yet to find anyone who has successfully done it. I suspect that they pretend to do it but don't actually do it in practice.

And you know that, in reality, it's not guaranteed, right?

Yes. But that is likely a way of trying to skirt money laundering laws by saying technically it's not equivalent to USD. The fact of the matter is that they do redeem it 1:1, and have this whole time.

I cannot believe that, especially with that line in their TOS. Saying, "They're only saying that to skirt the law!" doesn't make things any better.

Well, it may not make things better from a moral perspective, but it does make things better from a value-of-tether perspective.

No, it very much doesn’t. If they’re willing to skirt laws for that, what makes you think they won’t skirt you?

You seem to be binarizing a non-binary thing. If they are financially insolvent that is objectively worse than if they have routed around some banking laws. The probability of repayment on one is much greater than the other.