Tether, everybody's favorite gang of variously assorted scumbags and their networked criminal associations, appears to be marching on in advancing and revolutionizing this space, lol. I won't go again in all the juicy details regarding Tether and the can of worms that it is cos that gets tiresome at some point (but it is really juicy, involving some really colorfully unsavory characters, Ukrainian oligarchs, money laundering operations and general corruption and plenty of experience in perpetrating financial crimes and fraud and God knows what else... and which I've actually covered previously in another post), but for one, we all know/remember how it turned out that they're not quite really backed by reserves of US dollars corresponding to the Tethers in circulation and how eventually they conceded to backed ~70% by money and assets? Well, funnily, now also claim backed also, among assets, by Bitcoin, which is funny given the central role they seem to have played in orchestrating and triggering the very bubble which formed the current market price of BTC as measured in US dollars. Cool!
But wait, there's more! Latest addition to their awesome financial products - Tether gold:
Tether Gold (XAU₮) is the only product among the competition that offers zero custody fees and has direct control over the physical gold storage, safely held in a Switzerland vault, adopting best in class security and anti-threat measures. Today, Tether Gold (XAU₮) is the best way to hold Gold.
XAU₮ is supported by around the clock customer support. We invite any exchange interested in supporting XAU₮ to contact us at [email protected].
Contract address: https://etherscan.io/token/0x4922a015c4407f87432b179bb209e125432e4a2a
* XAU₮ is issued by TG Commodities Limited.
It really is astonishing how these guys keep on not only getting off the hook, but continuing to do what they do and find ways to do it. Although, when you zoom out and compare things and realize the extent of fraudulence, corruption, organized crime, etc., etc. on a global scale and as permeating everything everywhere, it becomes rather just more or less the same shit as so much else that's been going on since forever (like, HSBC banking on and laundering drug money since its inception in Hong Kong way back during the opium wars for the purpose of banking opium money...) Either way, it all boils down to one of two things: either the Keynesian beauty contest effect of just how much/many will bite the bait for any such thing to have an effect on the market (so, traders basically betting on the direction of collective human stupidity and psychological factors of the lower order and compulsively emotional kind), or preferring to focus on the confidence factor which is what drives things long-term. Clearly, there's no way anyone can have any confidence in Tether (if I am not mistaken, registered on the British Virgin Islands too, or was it the Caymans) whatsoever. Clearly, they're also a threat to the system in their pulling in a potential systemic risk, plus fact that bank reserves as such already introduce centralization, etc.
Nonetheless, far as commodities/precious metals pegged stablecoins, the only legitimate and trustworthy such project I have personally come across is Digix's DAO which operates as a consortium DAO in bringing tokenized gold on to the Ethereum ecosystem in a way that provisions jurisdictional and counter-party risk guarantees, being Singapore-based and working with such similar service providers that specialize in securing assets against the often times arbitrary laws of state governments, especially every time when shit hits the fan and they enter a state of emergency/exception.
I wonder though, how are things like Tether to be approached and dealt with in this space? I mean, it has to be self-regulatory in some ways if not ideally altogether so. What permissionless mechanisms could we have in place to dis-incentivize bad actors from instrumentalizing the technology as means for evading laws and regulations to their criminal self-serving ends? Or anyway prevent them from developing into actually serious risks and going on spiraling out of control? The only one I can think of is wider education and knowledge, training to think, spot, verify things before jumping in on something on the advice of somebody and so on along these lines of reasoning (and where most media, Youtube "influencers" and the like are more often most of the time by and large doing the opposite of a good job at), but I don't think that'd be anywhere near enough even if translated into practice. We need some kind of immune system response mechanisms similar to how Holochain conceptualizes that in their framework of bio-inspired computing.
Well, end of rant, that's it.
Don't buy Tether's gold. Perhaps don't buy any gold at all, really. But I hear urban mining of gold from recycling electronics may be a pretty profitable endeavor.
