There are also rumors that Deltec has been hacked, which is the bank Tether supposedly uses to "back" the Tether stablecoin. Supposedly there is one dollar for each tether, but its looking more and more like that is not the case.<p><a href="https://www.coindesk.com/nyag-tether-bitfinex-loan-documents-coming-weeks" rel="nofollow">https://www.coindesk.com/nyag-tether-bitfinex-loan-documents...</a><p><a href="https://twitter.com/deltecleaks" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/deltecleaks</a><p>I have not fact checked the leaks.<p>EDIT: <a href="https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-ends-virtual-currency-trading-platform-bitfinexs-illegal" rel="nofollow">https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...</a><p>NYAG taking action against Bitfinex/Tether!
In modern bitcoin, what is the role of an exchange? Do most people hold their own wallet? If you have an offline wallet, what's the work involved with using that cold key to perform a transaction?<p>And for an organization like Tesla, do they now have 2 FTE to manage their holdings or do they just have 3000 wallets with different amounts of BTC some of which are online and some of which are offline?<p>This all seems like an enormous PITA to actually use for 99.9% of human sized transactions; an exchange seems like a reasonable mitigation against that, but now you're 100% at the mercy of something that's as trustworthy as an 1830's bank.
(Word is some "whale" [big holder] got the correction going by selling off some 150M+ at 58K, cashing out ...<p>I do not think valuations are in doubt - as much as they've ever been, at least ...)