Tether Bawl?

I thought Tether sounded like a dumb idea in the first place even if it was honest (and it sounded kinda scammy). Why the hell would I want to peg my crypto to a fiat currency?

Well, now the company's claim to have 100% reserves -- that is, for every supposed fiat-unit-worth of crypto, an actual fiat unit in the bank available for redemption on demand -- look like they may be moonshine:

Critics on Twitter, Reddit, in blog posts, and at a recent bitcoin conference have been demanding that the company prove its reserves through external audits. Not only has Tether failed to do so, last week it confirmed rumors that it had severed ties with Friedman LLP, the accounting firm on tap to perform those audits. On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission had sent subpoenas to Tether.

As the linked story indicates, this could end up in the crypto equivalent of "bank runs" as people try to get out of Tether and into real crypto ASAP.

But the line about it "potentially undoing much of the public’s growing interest in new technologies like bitcoin" reminds me of how the Office of National Drug Control Policy used to pay the television networks to slip anti-drug messaging into their programs. Crypto is here to stay, even if Tether breaks some banks. The concept is solid enough that bad ideas and scams are inevitably going to rise and fall on top of it.

Wow, the Republican Congress is a Train Wreck.

Literally.

One fatality so far. Unfortunately, it appears to have been a member of the productive class rather than a politician.

Another Reason to Use Earn.com ...

I've flogged Earn.com before as a way to pay to communicate with me, and a few of you have chosen to do that (so far as I know, that link is not an "affiliate link," nor as I understand it am I compensated in any way if you join -- which you can do for free).

But of course there are other reasons to use Earn.com, and I've actually made more money on those other reasons than I have on valued messages from my dear readers. Unfortunately they in Bitcoin, so the high fees and long wait times make it impractical to withdraw four bucks or so I have in my account at the moment, but I expect one of two things to happen: Either Bitcoin will get better, or Earn.com will go with a different cryptocurrency in the near future.

In Earn.com you can add yourself to "lists" corresponding to your interests. At present there are 93 such lists, ranging from "C++ Programmers" to "Stanford students" to buyers of, or people involved with, particular cryptocurrencies.

When you add yourself to a list, you are saying that people can pay to contact you about the topic of that list. This has happened to me several times, and I've made a few bucks each time.

Now, there's something new: Ethereum token "air drops." The shortest primer I can come up with:

Ethereum is a cryptocurrency.

ERC20 Tokens are little bits of Ethereum split out for specific purposes. I'm not going to go into "Digital Autonomous Organizations" and "Smart Contracts" and so forth, but think of them like arcade tokens. For a certain amount of Ethereum, you get a certain number of tokens that can be used for a specific purpose.

An Air Drop is when a token start-up company gets together a group of people it expects will use, evangelize for, or help it improve, its product and showers them with some free tokens to get them interested.

I've been invited to two "air drops" so far this week. To qualify, you answer a few questions (including giving them an Ethereum address to send your tokens to) and join a focus/discussion group, and you're in.

I'm going to start in with a limited evangelist bit on those two air drops. I am NOT (yet) endorsing these startups. I'm just telling you about the two so that you'll know what kind of thing you can get into via Earn.com. I am not overly familiar with them, and you shouldn't consider this investment advice.

CanYa started up in 2015 and is building a "blockchain-powered marketplace of services." What does that mean? As I understand it, it means that if I want to hire a web developer in Mumbai, Moscow or Marseille, I don't have to find a way to get rupees, rubles or euros. I just transfer CanYa tokens (fee-free and peer-to-peer) via the app, which will also help me find that web developer, etc. The developer can in turn use those CanYa tokens to get his yard mowed or whatever, or exchange them out for crypto or fiat.

SKRAPS is a "spare change" app. There are others out there, and I am not going to try to tell you which one is best. The way SKRAPS works is that whenever you make a purchase using a debit card that you link to the app, the purchase is rounded up to the nearest dollar, and that "spare change" is invested in a cryptocurrency portfolio of your choice "based on your risk aversion" (sort of like how some mutual funds invest only in stocks that seem "safe," while others go looking for hungry startups and hope for a much higher return). Presumably the token here is an intermediary instrument, i.e. it represents a certain amount of that "spare change" and can be used to purchase a share in the chosen portfolio.

Once the "air drops" actually happen and I see token balances in my wallet, I'll explore their use further and if they're interesting I'm sure I'll blog about them. In any case, if you are involved in, or interested in, cryptocurrency, I suggest you hit Earn.com and start getting some of this cool stuff for yourself.