… and once again Tether’s market cap falls by a couple hundred k, and the Bitcoin price rallies.
JoshL
3791
Yeah, but there is about $17 billion less Tether than there was two months ago (about 20% of all the Tether), and in that time bitcoin has gone down over $11k, or about 36%. So if someone is attempting to sell tether to boost bitcoin prices, it isn’t really working out for them.
DraiAC
3792
Correct, but it is very strange the sponsor bank is allowing Voyager to withhold withdrawals of funds sitting in bank account for customer funds. More concerning is that bank has a real time, or at worst, daily, reconciliation of customer funds that should be in the omnibus account. So if Voyager was dipping into that account the bank should know almost immediately and, one would think, take action to stop it.
Correct: under this hypothesis, it’s all about “when will Tether run out of dollars in its failing attempts to prop up Bitcoin?”
(Which is not to say I’m right and this is definitely what’s happening: I confess my understanding of crypto in general and Tether in particular is pretty rudimentary. Someone more savvy than I may have other explanations of why/how Tether’s market cap has been falling in such discrete chunks over the last few months than Tether trying to prop up Bitcoin’s price.)
It could be someone else that owns Tether trying to prop up bitcoin’s price.
JoshL
3797
Yeah, the whole “we have NINE validators! (uh, and we own and run all of them)” thing is gonna be an issue for a lot of these things, I suspect.
Tether did another of its $200k market cap dips earlier today, bringing its market cap below $66 billion for the first time since August of last year.
Isn’t it better overall if crypto self-destructs sooner rather than later, when it would have been more deeply entwined with the actual economy?
That’s certainly my thought.
Dejin
3801
As someone who reads PDFs, this part of the article disturbed me:
Would most anti-virus/anti-malware software catch this sort of thing? Does this indicate the engineer had really poor security practices, or does this indicate that PDFs are very vulnerable for exploition?
Same here. I thought that after a rocky start all the security flaws in PDFs had been ironed out & they were a safe file type. Apparently not though.
Voyager going down for the third time.
Thrag
3805
Voyager? A whale couldn’t save them?
Depends on the specific exploit, I suspect.
The rule of thumb is never to download anything that you don’t know the provenance of. Which is easier said than done, of course (in this case the engineer of course had reason to think the doc was legit).
Dejin
3808
I open lots of stuff students send to me. They theoretically have legitimate reasons to send them to me, but I suspect some of them have some pretty poor security. Plus, if someone really wanted to spear phish me, there are various duties that involve students I don’t know sending me items for approval that I need to open — I’m probably not important enough to get spear phished, but still …
I generally try opening them on my iPad instead of my PC on the theory that it’s harder to hack an iOS device, since Apple has things more locked down. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but it seems to make logical sense.
This is very much true, especially for iOS in particular. It’s not a panacea, of course, but iOS has a much tighter security model in general than desktop devices, including macOS.
