Bitfinex’ed Twitter suspension, and Bitfinex and Tether updates

“I feel like ‘after the media has all tuned into their message’ is the wrong time to use bots to suspend someone’s account, but hey, I’m not in the PR business” (MrAptronym)

“Bitfinex’ed”‘s Twitter got suspended for a while on Wednesday — apparently due to mass reporting of old tweets claiming they contained private information. (“Bitfinex’ed” maintains that everything he tweets is public information.)

It turns out this was a newsworthy event and was promptly covered in Bloomberg and Mashable — “Why release an audit of your so-called stablecoin when you can just shut down your loudest critic’s Twitter account?” The account was unsuspended a short time later. Apparently the suspension was a “mistake.”

Note that @bitfinexed has a lot of spambot followers, and mass-blocks them — because you can be suspended for having too many fake followers. If you want to follow @bitfinexed, let him know you’re not a bot — put #bitfinexed in your description, add, wait 30 minutes, then you can remove it.

“Bitfinex’ed”‘s Medium is alive and well — most popular Medium blogger in Bitcoin! — with new posts confirming his Reddit identity, cataloguing recordings of public statements by Bitfinex principals and “Bitfinex and Tether is unauditable: Why they will never do a real audit” — even if they do have a dollar per Tether in a bank account.

 

 

One of the big problems with Tether is that, even if every Tether is backed by a dollar, its function is to evade regulatory controls — even if every Tether purchase has proper KYC/AML, tethers that are sold on do not. This is why exchanges that can’t get proper banking use it, e.g. Cobinhood. Nicholas Weaver at Lawfare points out that Tether needs urgent regulatory review for this reason.

 

https://twitter.com/ncweaver/status/961661994943234048

 

In the meantime, the Tether printer has cranked up again! On the graph below, you can see where 80m EURT (Euro-demoninated tethers) were poured into the market — just after the major pump started. Okisammy writes up how a Tether release pumps the crypto market.

 

 

If you wondered how Tether works — it’s a token running in OmniLayer, on top of the Bitcoin blockchain. Very like an ERC-20 token — and new Tether issuance seems to be as an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain.

Amy Castor has also written up a useful timeline of Bitfinex and Tether for Bitcoin Magazine.



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