zilebune

I've only followed Archegos from afar, but I see your point. Basically it all boils down to people's trust in Tether, which if lost could cause a ripple effect and massive dump of USDT.

I think there are just too many unknowns to predict the market-wide impact, but Archegos is a good case study (in a way so is Ripple/XRP who went through a somewhat similar dump for different reasons a few weeks ago).

Perhaps a controversial view, but why does this matter?

I was having this debate with a friend a few weeks back.

Tether was the first crypto coin pegged to a fiat currency, but now there are so many more: USDC, BUSD, TrueUSD, DAI, GUSD...and that's just a fraction of the ones pegged to $USD.

The entire market's _daily volume_ is 5+ times the entire Tether cap. Plus you have Automated Market Makers (Uniswap & co.) where you can trade directly between crypto pairs and even Binance/Crypto.com debit cards which ensure a closed circulation loop for stablecoins within the exchanges.

If it turns out that Tether is printing USDT without backing anymore how would this impact the crypto market? I expect another USD stablecoin would just take its place and life would go on.

Crypto trading/hodling is just too irresistible at this point. The last _3 months_ saw $1Tn of new money poured into crypto from all sides.

I would be curious to know what does HN genuinely think about this USDT controversy, if possible without the shilling and emotion?

That's a good question and I've seen it partially answered on their Telegram group: Maiar offers the option to back up your private key to an off-chain location (eg. Google Drive), so if you do choose to back it up it can be used to regain control of the wallet.

However, the app is still in beta, with GA date on 31st Jan via both Google & Apple stores, so I don't know precisely if its linked to the IMEI or if it fingerprints the phone in other ways to allow recovery of said wallet & prevent SIM takeover attacks.

Looking fwd to the official docs/FAQ addressing this topic as well, which I expect the team will publish along with the app release soon...

You probably need some 'cooldown time' to take the emotion out of that selection process :)

I also take thousands of pics when travelling...well used to anyway before Covid. Then I store them all in some cold storage, like a backup HDD so they are handy, and look at them again after 1yr or so. By then the important memories of that trip are cemented and I can easily delete the irelevant ones. By then you will know which are important and which need to go in the bin.

To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes: If you owe the bank 1$ million, it owns you but if you owe the bank 1$ trillion, you own the bank.

My guess is all banks have invested heavily in crypto by now (either over or under the counter - by proxy) and their investments are slowly but surely becoming too large to fail. If you can't fignt them join them, right...

This is great, thanks for sharing. It makes me think that as engineers eager to fix problems or building stuff we sometimes go for the solution we are most used to from past experiences (eg. use a huge saw to cut through) instead of thinking of the simplest & most cost-effective (eg. use a chain instead).

Also using an alternative line an abrasive cable would not make sense either. If friction causes it to tear it would need complete replacing, which would be plenty $$$.

Instead, with a chain they just replace a couple of broken links and back on track. Which is apparently what they've done:

> Unfortunately, the chain actually broke during the cutting operation. “Approximately 25 hours into the cut, the cutting chain broke,” St. Simons Incident Response writes on its website. Luckily, there were no injuries and there was no damage to the equipment. The team simply fixed the chain’s broken link, inspected the other links for signs of fatigue, and continued on.

Any idea why they've set the Genesis start time at 23sec past 12PM?

Perhaps just my OCD, but why not kick it off at 12 sharp rather than wait for [$random_number == 23] seconds?