Bitcoin has crazy volatility compared to gold and even USD. Sure, you can use it for speculation, but no one in their right mind uses Bitcoin as a store of value.
People just hope that someone else will use it as a sure if value, so that the price rises and they get rich off it. Ie, speculation.
The thing is, TCP/IP is necessary to deliver the website. From a user's point of view, a huge majority of the websites have no reason to set a cookie. Anything where I don't login, just read some news, read some blog entries, inform myself about some products, or similar doesn't actually need cookies.
It's just that in recent years the operators of the website have decided they'd like to track and/or analyze their users (best case), or even send that data of to some 3rd party ad network. So I appreciate the heads-up. (Not that it matters, I delete the cookies anyway when I leave the site.)
Right, but what this means is a business often can't support itself via a mix of subscription and ads - if you offer both for the same content the value of your adds will likely crash, so it's mostly equivalent to just being subscription based
Even worse, they tried to get an audit, but it ended up with them and their auditor ending the process without producing an audit. Apparently they weren't too happy the auditor wanted to actually take a close look:
“We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved. Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success.”
- Tether spokesperson
The fact that people still support tether after getting fired by their auditor and then releasing the statement you quoted astounds me.
It is the most clear cut indicator that there is some super sketchy shit going on ever.
People seem to be willing to believe whatever they want despise clear signs they are wrong. Especially when there is the possibility of getting lambo-rich with Bitcoin....
>It is the most clear cut indicator that there is some super sketchy shit going on ever.
Yes, there is something that they're hiding, but there is no evidence that this has anything to do with their 1:1 USD reserve being a bogus. It's far more likely they are encountering regulation problems given the regulation uncertainty surrounding crypto.
>People seem to be willing to believe whatever they want despise clear signs they are wrong.
Or perhaps I'm not willing to commit to conspiracy theories based on baseless speculations.
So wait, am I reading this right? They want to say that their holdings are audited, but want an auditing process that stops at "yes, this bank account as a $X balance" and doesn't include anything about who actually owns the account or what its liabilities are?
In fairness, I can kind of understand the bind: it seems that use-case of tethers depends on not being a legally enforceable claim to dollars, specifically so they can't legally be regulated as such (which would trigger reporting requirements, accreditation as a money transmitter, etc). But that's a double-edged sword: it also means that no (ethical) auditor will sign off on a statement saying they legally own the assets they claim to have.
For example... let’s say Bitfinex really does have $2.4B (or whatever) in the bank. But they have borrowed $2.3B using the cash as collateral. This is the sort of shenanigans that come out during an audit.
The problem isn't the warnings. The problem is that every damn website where you read a single article thinks it's somehow ok to set a cookie (and track you).
The problem is both. We can't pretend that failed solutions with good intentions are not problems. It is not worth adding more problems on the stack because the guess-and-check solution whims fail. Solutions can be measured and worked towards, not guessed at where they do such large changes that their failure is also large.
People just hope that someone else will use it as a sure if value, so that the price rises and they get rich off it. Ie, speculation.