from Hacker News

Bitfinex will no longer treat Tether as 1:1 conversion

by thoughtexplorer on 11/27/18, 8:57 PM with 49 comments

• by deweller on 11/27/18, 10:06 PM

  Tether just opened up a platform for withdrawing fiat USD directly from them:

  https://tether.to/tether-reopens-account-verification-and-di...

  > This update allows the immediate withdrawal of Tether to fiat (1:1), with the ability to acquire coming soon.

  So Tether still backs the USDT 1:1 by fiat while Bitfinex just becomes another trading market. Other exchanges already have USDT markets that change in value.

  This event is not the "de-tethering of Tether." It is returning the responsibility of backing USDT to Tether.

• by patio11 on 11/27/18, 9:18 PM

  A link direct to the announcement for the curious: https://www.bitfinex.com/posts/319

• by ForHackernews on 11/27/18, 9:20 PM

  It's not like Bitfinex has ever allowed anyone to cash out their USDT for USD (despite claims to the contrary) so maybe this is just them coming clean about that fact?

  They've also removed (false) claims about being audited from their FAQs section[0]

  [0] https://tether.to/faqs/ vs https://web.archive.org/web/20180628141947/https://tether.to...

• by raverbashing on 11/27/18, 9:27 PM

  Oh so all of those who had kept money as usdt will have their money devalued. Nice

  Remember, the longer you stay the more money you can lose

  This will be fun to watch

• by rememberlenny on 11/27/18, 9:40 PM

  Can someone explain why this is important?

• by arisAlexis on 11/28/18, 6:36 AM

  This is a well known Twitter account with no other purpose that tweeting 3times per dat for 2 years stuff about Tether which proved reserves last week again. I would be cautious about alterior motives. Those accusing or manipulation can be the manipulators in disguise.

• by jcfrei on 11/27/18, 11:59 PM

  So, is the Bitfinex BTC/USD market now a USD or USDT market? The price premium compared to other exchanges indicates it's a BTC/USDT market yet it's called BTC/USD. Has anyone sold BTC on bitfinex? Do you get USDT or USD?

• by carrja99 on 11/27/18, 11:04 PM

  Honest question... did tether ever allow people to create accounts? As far as I can tell he only way to buy tether has been via exchanges... even at this time last year their "create a new account" form was disabled.

• by alistproducer2 on 11/28/18, 12:45 AM

  I find it curious that there isn't any analysis suspecting the BTC crash to the breaking of the USDT peg. It started a couple weeks ago and now USDT is routinely trading at a discount relative to $1.

  There were a ton of articles in 2017 speculating that the bubble was being directly inflated by USDT printing and when the peg broke BTC would crash[0]. Now that those things have happened - silence.

  [0]: http://fortune.com/2017/12/05/bitcoin-btc-price-usd-tether-l...

• by gwbas1c on 11/27/18, 9:31 PM

  So basically, any slight deviation from 1:1 is similar to a transaction fee?