Article: Tether's Troubles Could Soon Include Antitrust Law
Key paragraph:
According to the plaintiffs, Tether controlled “more than 80% of the market for stablecoins in the United States and the world. Tether therefore ha[d] monopoly power.” On that basis, the plaintiffs argue that the “issuance of unbacked USDT was designed to gain greater market share so Tether could eliminate stablecoin competition and maintain pricing control over the bitcoin and cryptocurrency market.” This supposed monopolization practice “inflate[d] one of the largest bubbles in history.”
The article is written by Thibault Schrepel, the author of the recently published “Blockchain + Antitrust: The Decentralization Formula” (Edward Elgar, 2021), available through open access.
The fundamental issues run deeper than just Tether.
Here is a video promoting the book:
Mercifully, there is also a transcript here.
A snippet:
Part Two of the book is dedicated to those frictions that appear when blockchain communities and users infringe antitrust law, and when antitrust policy and enforcement endanger blockchain survival. I analyze all past and current cases of blockchain antitrust and explore how blockchain will be used to infringe even more antitrust rules in the future, be it within the blockchain ecosystem or outside. More specifically, I focus on how smart contracts will strengthen collusion, the design of monopolization practices, and address the topic of mergers between blockchains.
I have said many times that just because a system claims to be decentralised, or even starts that way, does not in itself guarantee that it will remain so. Any mechanism that facilitates convergence towards centralised control must either be mitigated or that system must admit to not being decentralised at all - my own test is whether it is decentralising, or not.
Collusion is a huge problem, and a mathematical headache, as it takes place largely outside of the system and hence is difficult to reveal until it is too late to reverse.
They hate that Tether can be used as a stable corner to jump in and out of various crypto to shore up gains made by commoners. Can't be having the riff raff make lots of money by allowing something like Tether to operate as if they were a central bank. Next thing you know the commoners might start showing up at rich folk places where they don't belong, then there goes the neighborhood.
The value of an alpha numerical string is all a card game to begin with, and all Tether did/does is allow one to jump in and out of those agreements while pumping the agreed values up and down. Almost sounds like the stock market pairing up with central banking, only for the masses.
Yes, central banksters have been doing the same - ultra-cheap loans to their bankster brethren to either buy T-bonds or stocks. From its early days, I've often wondered who is protecting Tether, coz on paper it looks an obvious scam. Now, the majority of USDT is held on the Tron network ;-) so the danger here is that something that pretends to be a US currency is managed by a Chinese corp.
Not a popular thought I hold here, and in no way an endorsement of China.
But as I find myself under the geographical rule of the US and have dug deep into the corruption here and their real treatment of those of us both here and then abroad under the guise of "muh freedumb" I tend to fear my own government a little more right now. The war on terror could more aptly be called the war of terror.
The question is whether USD stablecoins are a separate market from USD generally.
How can they be separate when they claim to hold reserves of Federal Reserve Notes? ;-)
I actually prefer DAI - until they made some unwise choices.
One way to think of all these dollarised coins is as zero-coupon bonds. Then they could be classed as derivatives.
nice article, i think descentralization is a idea that is relative, a system can be descentralized but users still can take a part of the network and then bring centralization to the system, a real descentralization is something that maybe still needs to be discussed.
Have a great day,
Hi, @rycharde,
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Oh bollocks, I have been selling pkoin for usdt.
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Felicitaciones, su publicación ha sido votada por @ dsc-r2cornell. Puedes usar el tag #R2cornell. También, nos puedes encontrar en Discord
I haven't read your posts in a long time, sir. Thank you for enlightening us.
There is always in the back of my mind that they are printing Tether and buying Bitcoins @rycharde especially in the major BTC pumps? If Tether executives can do that then I do think that they are now too powerful to control if not regulate or shutdown.