correct. phil potter is director at both bitfinex and tether. tethers get deposited straight to bitfinex upon creation as far as i understand it.

source: https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/82024464

yes that's true. You can even see the tether printer and the sends of tether on the omni network. The omni network is a layer on top of bitcoin and is totally transparent

Can you show us where we can find these transactions?

Here: https://omniexplorer.info/lookupadd.aspx?address=3MbYQMMmSkC...

this handy twitter bot sends a message every time new tethers are issued -- https://twitter.com/tetherprinter

very plausible vector for contagion! do u remember what thread that was your are referencing?

I can't recall the hn thread (there have been tons of crypto currency threads recently), but the comment was referencing this reddit discussion where a bitfinex representative made the same conjecture:

https://archive.fo/R6sku

> Isn't it more plausible that this is not someone writing a check for tethers (money coming in from outside the crypto ecosystem) but more likely it is coming from converting other cryptos into USDT?...

@roybaldi

Correlation not being causation, i could b wrong, but you signed up 50 mins ago just to post about the awesomeness of this app, with nothing critical to say at all? Not very HN of you!! My model has you at a 90% chance of being a shill, like I said I could b wrong tho

Very cool thanks for sharing!

Interesting this isn't gaining more interest.

Also interesting how you could extend this with serverless architecture to be unkillable and massively scalable

Sure thing! Serverless architecture is an interesting thought.

I didn't include this in my write up but I figured out a few tricks for generating as many Twitter accounts as you want (their current safeguards against this are not very strong).

I think adding some components that auto generated accounts in addition to something like lambda would make this theoretically limitless in the number of accounts it could run.

I'll leave it for those who have interest in working that out.

How is this different than say, bills of exchange (at least an 800 year old instrument) which are essentially over the counter iou's

Bills of exchange created tons of credit booms and busts throughout history. How does your system control leverage and make sure nothing "blows up"?

This also seems like it misses the fact that iou's become money. For example, rather than call in a loan / iou, if the iou is to someone credit worthy, then traders just trade the iou back and forth

This works a treat until some calls in a loan and there's no cash to back it up. So again controlling systemic leverage is essential.

The desire to control / smooth boom bust cycles is what ultimately opened the door for the rise of powerful central banks to be the ultimate backstop. And even without a central bank, powerful entities arose naturally in the US for example jp Morgan single handedly backstopped the credit crisis of 1907. Money and power tend to concentrate in a few hands even without central banks

I agree that pure credit networks left with no supervision have been quite bad historically, but it also appear in our new online world as one of the less cumbersome way to move value at scale. What changed since then I think is the amount of information we have on each actor of the credit network which may lead to other outcomes at scale. Also sub part of the network may be quite safe, as an example the subnet that allows BTC wallet users to pay on Stripe merchants with one hop through gdax or any other exchange.

> sub part of the network may be quite safe

true, seems like the more something in finance resembles a utility (like a pure conduit or short term store of cash / tokens) the safer it seems to be. altho i guess even those types of agents can get infected if enuf shennanigans are going on around them (e.g. money market's breaking the buck in 2008-2009)

> BTC wallet users to pay on Stripe merchants with one hop through gdax or any other exchange

thats pretty cool. so thats how stripe's btc processing works? dump the btc for usd (for example) at market via some exchange routing algo? then forward the fiat so the merch never has to handle any cryptocurrency?

I want more information and/or examples of bills of exchange having created booms and busts.

I think the major boom/bust problem arises actually from the existence and power of central banks and its affiliated commercial banks. I don't think that credit generated by people is capable of creating these cycles alone, because there are so many checks against it.

> I don't think that credit generated by people is capable of creating these cycles alone

For the best history of bills i would read charles kindlebergers mania's panics and crashes for a thorough rundown on every sort of credit boom and bust for the last couple hundred years.

Specifically, pages 56-63 4th edition, deal with bills and their close cousin's call money

In that section there's something on the order of 10 crises mentioned. Def worth a read if you're interested in this sort of stuff (gaining a long term perspective of money).

Hopefully fair use excerpt:

"Drawing on bills of exchange is evidently infectious. Described by Adam Smith as normal business practice, it can easily become overdone"

These were particularly abused in the london crisis of 1866 (where there was a central bank) and the aforementioned 1907 crisis (where there wasn't a central bank).

Again quoting kindleberger "the spectacular failure of the DeNeufvilles in 1763 which produced a panic in hamburg, berlin... was the result of the unraveling of a particularly impressive chain of discounts [bills]. If one house fails, the chain collapses and may bring down good names."

also, i would check out hyman minksy for a completely endogenous model of boom and bust speculation.

I think your concerns are all taken in account in the formulation of this tool.