jerguismi

To become a bank you need an account at the central bank. Getting a banking license is difficult. And even after you get it, central bank can freeze your assets any time.

It's crazy that they messed this up, Tether is basically a money printing machine, all they had to do was be solvent.

Tether is a fundamentally a risk free money making concept

To me it sounds like you don't really understand the risks of tethers business. It is light-years away from being risk free, because you are on the mercy of the banks where you store the fiat. The banks can freeze your money any time, as they now did (AFAIK).

If you are operating a business with unclear regulation at this level, you can't really rely on banks like normal businesses can. The banks will cause problems with pretty high probability.

Full-blown government collapse is quite far-fetched scenario. Infrastructure in venezuela still works at some level, however poorly. Bitcoin works in places pretty well where goverment is crappy but still not that crappy, that you have electricity, internet, etc.

They are selling gold to afford these necessities.

They are probably using anything that there is available as a currency replacement. I would bet that mostly physical USD, but also gold, bitcoin, cigarettes etc. I don't think gold is the main replacement when national currency starts hyperinflating, just a tool among others.

Well lots of bonds tend to have negative returns nowadays...

Well, if you follow that logic your whole life, you will have lots of bitcoins when you die. Happy life I guess?

The point of money, currency or any financial asset is to produce value to your life. If you think bitcoin will develop in value, it makes sense to spend less-valuable assets before those bitcoins, but at some point you probably want to use your bitcoins as well for living. Money should be a tool to enable nice life, you shouldn't live for money.

Quite often this kind of instruments might be "tradable debt instruments" which can't be converted to actual bitcoins, but can be traded back and forth on the platform to traditional currencies. The issuing company maintains the peg to the bitcoin market value, probably using futures or similar instruments.

Of course they might also enable bitcoin withdrawals/deposits but I somewhat doubt it. There are similar offerings on other traditional platforms and usually they work this way.

Well, banks can give out loans too eagerly to wrong people meaning that the resell value of the loan can be much less than the value of the loan. In fact nowadays it is not that rare for bonds to have negative returns.

Banks can fuck up and go bust. It doesn't happen often but it happens.

Usually by insolvency is meant that the bank doesn't have enough liquid, hard assets to cover up the withdrawals from the bank. Bank can have varying assets such as bonds that it has lent out, but if the bank has lent out a lot of money to some people who can't pay the loans or other banks are unwilling to buy, it can be insolvent even if on paper it has "assets".

Central banks can print money, banks can't. Banks can only do fractional reserve. Sometimes banks go bust, sometimes central bank might save them.

Sure some of these assets are not liquid.

Most of the banks assets are not liquid, such as the loans they have lent out. Banks quite often have problems that they give credit out too easily, which leads to the situation where their assets aren't worth much. They often also give loans to the stakeholders of the bank which makes it a bit sketchy.

More like fractional reserve banking.

On the other hand people have been saying the same about tether for many years, and it still has kept the peg at pretty good levels. And it is still the most liquid and biggest "stablecoin". Many seem to need this kind of thing so they keep using it even when there are risks involved.

Yeah they are loans, like apartment loans. The loan might be for something like 20 years and might default.

In my opinion having assets like house loans is pretty far away from being "backed". If enough customers want their money out, bank can go bust. If they have lent the money to wrong people, they also can go bust. Banks go bust now and then.

Small amounts are somewhat easy to exchange, if you want to exchange millions it gets much, much more difficult since you have to explain the source of funds to the exchanges and banks involved. If you have hacked them they will use blockchain analysis etc.

To expand on it further, even if you are lucky to have joined a unicorn, you still didn't get a good deal in comparison to virtually everyone else involved in the company. The founders are likely billionaires and you made off with a low 7 figure outcome while taking on only marginally less risk. That's not a good deal by any reasonable definition.

I wouldn't see the risk of being an employee and founder as similar. Typically often founders are for time periods without salary etc. Early employee should just consider it as a job with more risk of the company going down under (that risk also exists in more established company). You can request more salary for the job or some additional perks (such as options).

I think for the employee the risks of joining to startup are quite easy to manage compared to a founder.

There seems to be some kind of understanding that start-up means aways working overtime etc. AFAIK that is not often the case, but people can work quite normally in early-stage companies as well. And mostly it is the founders who are working hard and employees are not required to work the same way.

Wow, genious idea.

I have used Bitcoin to buy various things and used it as a savings instrument, I see that it has solved problems for me. Of course I could use other tools for that, but if you think Linux is superior that doesn't invalidate someones experience who is using Windows.

Generally there seems to be lots of people who don't use cryptocurrencies and think that they don't solve any problems - OK whatever, don't use them, but there are loads of people using cryptocurrencies for whatever and your opinions are not objective measure on their value.

It's very simplistic to say that (low, predictable) inflation hurts individuals.

Hurting might be the wrong term. Analogy would be something like having some bonus card which gives you 2% off for every purchase. Some people obsess about having that kind of card, but most people wouldn't care, because it is only 2%. Obviously the 2% difference isn't "hurting" most people, more like very small tax.

Btw there are cashback credit cards which give back something like 0,5% to 1%, I wonder how popular those are...

One speculator enters the market = one more buyer and seller. If you go to a stock exchange, you see the bids and asks. The more there is those, the better the liquidity. Each speculator adds either bids or asks or demand for them.

What is driving the value of a bitcoin?

No one knows, maybe some have same theory of value and that's why there is speculation? I see nothing special in bitcoin, it is just one of the numerous things that the market tries to value. If the market is only speculation the value should go to zero in the long term. If there is some value in addition to speculation, the value should be non-zero - and it is left to the markets to decide, what the actual value is.

Why not have inflation at 10% to have even better "nudge" for people to work?

You are essentially communicating the same thing that the crypto nerds are saying, just from a different angle. The individual pays the 2% "nudge", and crypto people don't prefer paying that, and that's why they use crypto. Whether it is good for society or not is irrelevant in the individuals context.

Hoping that it will mis-count your wealth in your favor is speculation, which is a bad, dangerous role for currency.

Speculation is rampant also with traditional currencies - I remember seeing reports where 80-90% of trades in traditional forex markets were classified as speculative.

I personally think there is a lot benefits from speculators. Speculators create pricing signals, help price things more effectively and create better liquidity. All market participants benefit from better pricing and liquidity. The more we have speculators on the market, the better priced things we have on the market and that in the long term means stability and predictability.

There are actually lot of cryptocurrencies with issuance for eternity: dogecoin, grin comes to mind at least. The inflation parameters are the easiest to change, if for Bitcoin those are a problem, some other cryptocurrency with better parameters can take over. The market will decide, as no one forces anyone to use specific cryptocurrency, there is pretty much free competition.

They most definitely aren't dirty, but also there is nothing dirty in wanting money. Practically everyone needs money to survive, and if you want to have more money than just survive I don't think there is nothing wrong with that, if you acquire that money ethically.

But in real life many people show their basic disinterest in money simply by choosing to do things and pursue activities that have no financial incentive. So in fact most people are above money.

Usually the preference of staying in the comfort zone comes first, and preference for money later. People will grab money if it comes with low effort and risk. However I wouldn't say that there is generally "disinterest in money", just disinterest in money in the sense that other factors are overvalued above it.

It is quite a complex topic. For example there are credit card processing companies for cryptocurrency related companies, but they have very stricter customer onboarding processes and also higher fees. For many banks who target mainstream customers it is just easier to block all customers who deal with cryptocurrencies than to create specialized producst/risk management/compliance processes for them.

How so cryptocurrencies haven't solved anything? If someone has done a transaction with cryptocurrencies that brings value to him, isn't that solving something? Your claim is just very probably totally untrue - I think Bitcoin etc have been very useful for some small group of people for quite a long time already. However the adoption just isn't that big. Somehow people seem to think that cryptocurrencies have to replace the existing financial system to be useful. Meanwhile they can be just be used by 100 people worldwide and still be useful.

Yeah so you need only to be super genious to design the system properly and then it won't break.

Somehow I like being stupid and use technologies that allow me being stupid and still work good enough.