Depends what you mean by “holding” USD. Is it under your mattress? Or in a bank? Is it a bank in Venezuela or Lebanon?
Holding USDT is kind of holding USD. You just have Tether in the middle.
Main utility (value?) of stablecoins is to “bridge” USD fiat into crypto though.
Interestingly, crypto.com (exchange) keeps a “USD” balance for its customers, which is separate from its USDT balance. You can deposit/withdraw to/from your “USD” balance via fiat (bank transfer) or a basket of stablecoins like USDC, BUSD etc. Binance does this as well, and FTX before. They all kept USDT separate though. Worth considering why this is the case.
> They all kept USDT separate though. Worth considering why this is the case.
Because they’re not dollars, it’s a token that is supposed to be pegged to a dollar. It’s not a dollar until you redeem it for an actual dollar. In that respect it’s the same as USDC.
Not really, if they fail because of bank run reasons, it might be better for them to liquidate the assets slowly first, to stave off the run. Ymmv, check the accounting.
There is no possibility of a "bank run" if tether is actually 1:1 backed with USD. But it's almost certainly not, and that's why it's effectively fraudulent
They could be backed in USD denominated illiquid assets that may take time to unwound (it's kinda dumb from a treasury management POV if you keep everything in cash).
They can use overnight instruments, and its still pretty much impossible for there to be a bank run.
But it begs the question, is Tether meant to be a viable stablecoin, or is it a fractional reserve piggy bank for the Tether owners to earn interest from?
Clearly they're running it like the latter. Why would the crypto industry consolidate on something scammy like that?
That's a good point. If it's a pure stablecoin, would it be sustainable? It doesn't make sense to run a stablecoin as a charity/loss leader as there is a very real cost to treasury management and depreciation unless Bitfinex is trying to commoditize their complement.
Plenty of money market funds run with 0.1% fees. SGOV for one. These things aren't expensive to manage, it's pretty much on autopilot.
Ideally a stablecoin would be non-profit and run strictly for quality purposes with audits etc. Why would you ever need more than one? The desire to skim some off the top is far too pervasive in crypto
Exactly everything is insolvent. If tomorrow people were like hey everyone USD is going to fail you’d get the Great Depression unless the fed printed money. And there isn’t nearly enough paper money for it.
That's wildly and obviously untrue. Let's look at the definition of insolvency[1] "when an individual or company can no longer meet their financial obligations to lenders as debts become due."
Take a trivial example - a person with no debts. You have to concede such people do exist in the world.
They are by definition not insolvent, and cannot be. Even if the currency completely collapsed and USD had zero value this would not make them insolvent because they have o debt and therefore no financial obligations.
So here’s where there might be some confusion, Binance consolidates a pool of different stable coins into 1 “BUSD” balance for its users[0]. Depositing any of these stablecoins into Binance will add to your BUSD balance, and you can withdraw from it as any stablecoin of your choice. What CZ is saying is that they ran out of USDC but have plenty of the other stablecoins instead. It sounds like they need to redeem the other stablecoins to fiat USD and send it to Circle to mint USDC with it, hence the talk about the bank.
So, they need to find gullible 3rd parties that accept to give them hard cash (USD) in exchange for their in house created clown money (BUSD), and then use this hard cash to go to the market and buy USDC. How is this different from FTX padding their balance sheet with billions of their own made up clown money? Crypto is ponzies all the way down.
BUSD is not clown money or created by Binance. It is the most highly regulated financial instrument in crypto, issued by Paxos New York, tightly regulated by NYDFS, backed 1:1 and regularly audited.
Only BUSD on Ethereum (ERC-20) is issued by Paxos. The BUSD on the BNB Chain (BEP-20) is not affiliated with Paxos and not regulated by NYDFS. Quoting Paxos:
"BUSD is issued by Paxos on the Ethereum blockchain and regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services. Separately, Binance wraps BUSD and issues separate tokens (known as Binance-Peg BUSD) on several blockchains, including BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, and Avalanche. These tokens are unaffiliated with Paxos and not regulated by the NYDFS."
Yes, but I believe that this "wrapping" should be visible on chain. In the sense that there should be a 1:1 mapping between "real" BUSD locked on Ethereum and the number of pegged BUSD on other chains, and that the accounting can be verified in real time. But I haven't verified.
I visited Binance's main page on BUSD [1] and it suggests you go look at their proof-of-reserves page [2], which lists the exact number of each token on Ethereum (5,334,500,000), BNB (5,315,999,056), Avalanche (11,500,000) and Polygon (6,000,000), each with links to block explorers. Note that if everything adds up, this total leaves 1,000,944 tokens on Ethereum, but at least that's positive.
Edit: I spent some time thinking the Ethereum number was the total number of BUSD, but apparently it is Binance's holdings which can be found in a wallet nicknamed "Binance: Binance-Peg Tokens" on Etherscan [3]. Since this number is greater than the total number of pegged tokens, I guess everything adds up. (Of course, since the "cross-chain peg" here is implemented in a centralized way by Binance, it could de-peg at any point they want it to.)
Yes, on a centralized entity you're required to trust ("we're totally backed by cash and bonds, for realsies"), as opposed to owning and holding your crypto outright.
From their web page:
> Transparent
> A top auditing firm will attest to the matching supply of BUSD tokens and underlying U.S. dollars on a monthly basis.
Note the future tense, as in, "sometime indefinitely away in the future".
Their attestations (as opposed to audits) just say that at a certain instant in time they had the required amount in a bank account. That means Paxos could have borrowed it for a short while. Quote [1]: "Any activity prior to or after the Report Dates and Times at 5:00 pm ET was not considered when testing the assertions described above."
This is the same trick pointed out by Coffeezilla about a year ago, about Tether. [2]
Binance is regulated where exactly? Can you please point me to the jurisdiction where it's offices are located, so I can instruct my lawyers to send them some papers? Just asking in case something happens in the future.
BUSD is not a Binance product, it is a Paxos product [0] regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Binance merely pays to have their name on it.
[1] Here is the specific NYDFS guidance on Paxos' issuance of stablecoins. [2] And here is a link to their NYDFS appointed third-party auditory accounting firm.
Complaints against Paxos can be filed with the New York State Department of Financial Services at:
So in an eventual future where BINANCE stops allowing people to withdraw their BUSD, I can go to Paxos door and complain about it? Will my clown USD be returned to me?
This was my initial idea but unfortunately there can be name conflicts, if two files or folders have the same name, this idea does not work anymore. Also, I wanted to be able to keep the initial path to restore the element directly where it was deleted.
When a person delete an item, I get all the information that are interesting for me (https://github.com/AmineZouitine/rmt.rs/blob/main/src/trash_...), and then I move it in a .trash folder in which I rename it with a hash (the hash is made with several parameters to avoid any collision), I then store the information in a database sqlite :)
In the article, a Wizz Air rep explained it’s meant to charge bots and other automations for booking, but is catching users who use ad blockers as a false positive.
Ad blockers blocks ads, it does not block bot detection scripts. Even if ad blockers did block bot detection, all the bot operator have to do is… not run any ad blockers on their puppets?
I think it might make sense assuming that the ticket to "increase price for automation bots" ticket was taken by someone who did not think through the implications, and maybe there wasn't an adequate sprint planning (or maybe place is sort of old fashioned no actual sprint planning) and so nobody else discussed potential downsides.
So instead of getting a bot detection script they rolled their own solution.
Why am I giving them the benefit of a doubt here, because it doesn't really make sense for an airline to want to punish ad blockers.
> Ad blockers blocks ads, it does not block bot detection scripts
While not wrong explicitly, I think that most ad blockers I’ve used are very generous in what they block, incl trackers and other monitoring scripts. In this case, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the statement is true, that blocking or otherwise interfering is messing up bot detection. That said, they could be intentionally misleading in that they are trying to bill ad blockers not bots but don’t want to say it for PR. Especially considering others have said they run a captcha already.
The Supreme Court asked them to block the delivery of content inside of Brazil, for brazilians in Brazil's territory.
It doesnt matter where the original account is stored.
Those accounts are part of a large network of fake news spreading, with a lot of cash apparently originating from the country government itself..
The individuals themselves keep all the free speech rights.. they can go to newspapers, social media or speak on the streets. The only thing that is blocked its the accounts that are bounded to this fake news network process being judged by the supreme court.
Free speech cant be used as an excuse to constantly commit abuses and crimes that menace to demolish democratic institutions.
Democracy must have means to protect itself from malicious actors that are massively lying in a industrial scale fomented by big money from populists that dreams becoming dictators.
If part of this money is public, this is even worse.
We should have learned at least one or two about how the proto-fascists used every immoral and even illegal trick in the book to turn a democratic society into a fascist nightmare.
> The Supreme Court asked them to block the delivery of content inside of Brazil, for brazilians in Brazil's territory.
If you read the article it’s saying the court is asking Facebook to block delivery of certain content globally, not only within Brazil. And they are threatening a local Facebook employee with criminal liability, which is the reason Facebook says it has complied with the order while appealing it.
The individuals in question, after being blocked on portuguese language, just changed their profiles as they were in english. It was just a matter of people that follow them changing their preferences making the court order ineffective. (Again their content were being delivered to Brazilian followers)
Than the court sent another order to block the content for Brazil of those specific profiles, in a way the content were not delivered to brazilian citizens.
This is exactly what the court order is saying..
Now if Facebook or Twitter cant act on geolocation, its a technical problem, that they need to solve, as its just a matter of blocking based on geolocation of the people who are seeing that content, the target, and not just the source.
I've read the court order, and it does not cover people from other nationalities, as if we follow whats being said on the court order, they are not the target.
Now if Facebook cant deliver this, they are just asking to loose the battle giving its pretty easy to destroy the narrative.
BTW, Brazil are more akin to Europe's convention to free speech, as to remediate things like "hate speech" learning from the past with the way fascist regimes spread out over Europe.
I dont know why Facebook feels entitled somehow to think the US way of seeing and working with free speech should be forced on others sovereign nations.
No, they have fined Facebook for not complying with this decision for the past two months and are increasing the fines if Facebook keeps refusing to comply.
Holding USDT is kind of holding USD. You just have Tether in the middle.
Main utility (value?) of stablecoins is to “bridge” USD fiat into crypto though.
Interestingly, crypto.com (exchange) keeps a “USD” balance for its customers, which is separate from its USDT balance. You can deposit/withdraw to/from your “USD” balance via fiat (bank transfer) or a basket of stablecoins like USDC, BUSD etc. Binance does this as well, and FTX before. They all kept USDT separate though. Worth considering why this is the case.