Hard to see how this could be done on a protocol level. Anyone can fork, and how can you prevent people exposing their private keys to the new fork if they want to?

I will move my Monero to a new wallet just before the fork, and the original Monero to another new wallet just after. That should solve the problem for me. Of course, many won't bother to do this.

From the Tether Terms of Service (updated in January):

No Representations & Warranties by Tether: Tether makes no representations, warranties, or guarantees to you of any kind. The Site and the Services are offered strictly on an as-is, where-is basis and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, are offered without any representation as to merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose.

Interestingly, there are now million-dollar buy walls on Kraken at 0.986, 0.985, 0.975, 0.97, and 0.965. Normally the buy side on Kraken is very thin. A few days ago, to sell $250K on Kraken you would have had to sell the last one at $0.50. Kraken is the only exchange I know of where it is possible to exchange Tethers directly for USD. Someone is defending Tether.

$5 million isn't much compared to Tether's market cap but this might have something to do with why the Tether price is still levitating within a cent or so of par.

In a related development, 600,000,000 Tethers just came into existence within the last few hours, according to coinmarketcap.

https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship-auditor-dissolved/

Tether has apparently dissolved its relationship with Friedman LLC, the accounting firm that produced the not-really-an-audit on Tether back in September. Here is the statement from Tether:

"We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved.  Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success."

No precedent to guide the process? The money is there or it isn't. That's what auditors do.

Incidentally, according to coinmarketcap another 600,000,000 in Tethers just came into existence about four hours ago. Tethers are now listed at $0.99.

In September Friedman sort-of-confirmed that Tether had money in the bank to back the less than $500,000,000 in Tethers then in circulation. More than that just came into existence. There are now about 2.2 billion Tethers.

That depends on the war.

If the war threatens the integrity of the Internet then the value of cryptocurrencies will plummet. Think of North Korea threatening the US with an EMP device or the Russians cutting the undersea cables - they have been snooping around them with their submarines. In that case you'd be way better off with gold.

If the war just gets expensive and threatens the financial system then the value of cryptocurrencies should rise. You'd be ok with gold then too.

Actually, quite a lot is known about the capabilities of quantum computers. ECC, used by Bitcoin and most other cryptos, can be broken by Shor's algorithm in O((log N)2(log log N)(log log log N)) time. Grover's algorithm, which can be used to break the hash-based cryptography used by QRL, runs in O(sqrt(N)) which is much slower. So using hash-based cryptography you can regain your original level of security against a quantum attack by doubling the number of bits in your key but against ECC you need to increase the number of bits by a much larger proportion - to a point that may be impractical.

At the moment QRL is being held back by the fact that it's available only on Bittrex, which is not accepting new accounts, and on Liqui, which many seem skeptical about. And it's currently an ERC20 token not yet running on its own blockchain - but that is coming "soon". But it's a real project, with a competent development team. I expect it to do well once these constraints are removed.

Disclosure - I own some.

I have argued previously that crypto to crypto trades are taxable and now it is law. However I think that this means that the IRS will probably not challenge like kind transactions for tax years prior to 2018. So now I plan to claim like kind for 2017 which will save me a lot. If you do this you must file IRS form 8824 though!

n911 points out that the new tax law specifically disallows crypto-crypto transactions from like-kind treatment starting in 2018. This is actually good news for me, because it suggests that the IRS won't fight it for prior years and I wasn't planning to claim like-kind in 2017. So now I will claim like-kind for the 2017 tax year which will save me a lot.

Note if you do this you still have to file IRS form 8824.

Most crypto traders ignore the issues entirely. This will cost many a lot of money, time, and trouble. The IRS will catch up with those who don't declare their gains - there is a lot of potential revenue in there for them.

You can't buy Tether from Tether, their their banking relationships are... tenuous. That should tell you something.

You can wire money to Kraken and buy Tether directly there. That's the only exchange I know of that has a working USDT-USD trading pair.

Buy why would you want to? There are many threads on this forum addressing the reliability and safety of Tether. Suggest you read some of these before you commit.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/tax-free-bitcoin-to-ether-trading-in-u-s-to-end-under-gop-plan

The new tax law explicitly makes exchanges between cryptocurrencies taxable as of January 1.

This means that when you (for example) buy Monero with Bitcoin, you have to treat the trade as if you sold Bitcoin for cash and bought the Monero with cash, and must declare the gain/loss on the Bitcoin you sold as a taxable event.

Until now there has been controversy as to whether or not cryptocurrency exchanges could be treated as "like kind" exchanges. In a like kind exchange the tax basis for the currency sold is carried forward into the currency bought, and no tax is due until the second currency is later sold. This option has now been ended.

This might be good news for those of us who have not been claiming like kind status on our crypto trades as it kind of implies that we could get away with doing so for the 2017 tax year.

Tether: not even a scam: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1881199.0

https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/a-response-to-tether-releasing-their-prior-audits-cceab8989c70

I would be very interested to know your source for this. "Everyone knows" that this is true, but I'm pretty sure "everyone" is wrong.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/08/15/cryptocurrency-traders-risk-irs-trouble-with-like-kind-exchanges/#48a96c5626a8

There are many articles on the subject - just Google "cryptocurrency like-kind exchanges".

IANAL, but I have extensively researched this issue.

If you sell Bitcoin for an altcoin, or the reverse, this is a taxable event. You need to figure the cash value of the coin you sold at the time of the transaction and declare that gain or loss.  This is not a popular opinion, but the IRS does not care about popular opinions.

The only alternative to paying tax on these transactions is to try to claim them as like kind exchanges, which allow you to defer any capital gain until you dispose of the crypto that you bought in the exchange. To claim this you need to file IRS form 8824. Nobody ever actually does this. If you don't, you have no leg to stand on if you don't declare your gains when you trade between cryptos. Plus, it is likely that the IRS will not allow crypto to crypto exchanges as like kind transactions.

When you spend crypto on real world goods/services, you have realized a capital gain/loss on your crypto at the value of the crypto you have spent at the time of the transaction. Again, not a popular opinion, and again, the IRS doesn't care.

I expect numerous threads on this forum in 2018/2019 from people who are astonished to have heard from the IRS that it wants a lot in taxes, interest, and penalties on their crypto transactions. It is just not realistic to imagine that the IRS will ignore this very significant source of revenue.

They have data from the exchanges. We know about Coinbase. It is likely that they have data from the other exchanges as well.

I think there is a basic misunderstanding here. The Bitcoin blockchain does not store public keys; it stores public key hashes. When you do a transaction, your public key is checked against the public key hash in the blockchain to verify that it's your bitcoin, then the transaction can take place.

Quantum computers aren't particularly good at breaking hashes (which is why hash-based digital signatures are used in quantum resistant cryptography), and will not be able to get a public key from a public key hash anytime soon. The threat is that given a public key, they can calculate the private key and hijack the transaction. The window for doing this is at the time of the transaction and before the transaction is incorporated into the blockchain, because it is only then that the actual public key is exposed. If one were to keep some bitcoin in the address from which a transaction is sent, an attacker, having obtained the public key, could break it at his leisure and eventually access the rest of the bitcoin in that address. But this is already considered very bad practice and nobody does this.

The idea that the entire blockchain is vulnerable to a quantum computer is incorrect, at least for the forseeable future. Grover's algorithm can be used on a quantum computer to break hashes, but it's much less efficient than Shor's algorithm. Therefore ECC will be broken long before quantum computers can threaten hashes.

Or so I understand it.

The Quantum Resistant Ledger (QRL) is a coin that is designed to resist quantum computers. Others are Curecoin and Iota.

The price of Tether is supposed to always be $1. That's the whole point of Tether. It is a lot easier to keep it from going higher than $1 than it is to keep it from going lower.


That's what you're worried about? Everybody has AML language. What should bother you is this:


And this:


And this:


So if Tether says one thing on its home page, and another in its TOS, the TOS win! So much for that guarantee that Tethers are always backed 1:1 with money in the bank.

The terms of service are hard to find, but they are at https://www.corion.io/tos. In part:


So Corion tells us explicitly that we are not to rely on anything we are told on their website.

Lots of other very pertinent caveats too.

Can't get much clearer than that.

An overlooked point: this will be a cash settled market (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-31/cme-launch-bitcoin-futures-q4). No bitcoin will actually change hands. If you want actual bitcoin, you have to cash out of your futures contract and buy bitcoin just as you otherwise would. If you want to short bitcoin, you don't actually have to borrow a bitcoin, you just have to put up the required cash margin. Or so I read it. I think on most other futures markets you at least have the option to settle in the commodity traded, e.g. you can demand real gold or real pork bellies on those markets, though hardly anyone does.
 
This will have consequences, but I'm not smart enough to know what they will be. It creates an exclusively paper bitcoin market that will operate in parallel with the real bitcoin market, but the prices on the paper market will be set according to the "CME CF Bitcoin Reference Rate (BRR)" which is supposed to be an agglomeration of rates from various "constituent exchanges" which are Bitstamp, GDAX, itBit and Kraken - all trading in real bitcoin.

In a "real" futures market, if you shorted bitcoin you would have to borrow bitcoin and sell it, expecting to buy it back at a lower price, and this would push the price down. But in the CME version, no bitcoin would actually be sold on the real exchanges, so the downward pressure on the price would not be direct - and the effect on the CME prices would not be direct either, since the CME prices are fixed by the "real" prices.

My head hurts. This is as far as I can go.

I don't really understand the "platform" features. The whitepaper is badly out of date on some issues (including the initial distribution discussed above - the distribution by Bitcoin swap is "inoperative"). They say they will have it updated soon.

For more up-to-date information see the blog at https://medium.com/the-quantum-resistant-ledger.