Billionaire Giancarlo Devasini of Tether wants to maintain the stablecoin’s freedoms; his rival, Jeremy Allaire of Circle, is working hard to rein in his competitor with regulations.
LUGANO, Switzerland—Giancarlo Devasini, one of the world’s newest billionaires, leads a reclusive life in this Alpine town. He stays in a modest apartment by the lake, strolls the cobbled streets with a black hoodie pulled over his head—and rages about the American rival he believes is trying to kill his business.
Devasini is the main owner of Tether, whose eponymous digital dollar is an indispensable part of the cryptocurrency industry. Tether’s centrality has earned Devasini tremendous wealth and vast influence over the sector, and the support of a top ally of President Trump.
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By racked 2025-03-045:46 By kinakomochidayo 2025-03-046:571 reply I hope Circle wins out in the end. Tether is super sketch. The fact that they they’ve only done attestations but haven’t done a full audit says everything.
I hope they both die slow painful death. As they are looking now for the last fool who will pay for everything. Musk is not doubt involved. Hope Trump is smarter than that and will not funnel taxpayers money (my money!!) into crooks pockets.
By masklinn 2025-03-047:32 > Hope Trump is smarter than that and will not funnel taxpayers money (my money!!) into crooks pockets.
How many bad news are you ready to hear?
By natosaichek 2025-03-0413:47 Trump isnt smarter than that. Also his goal in taking office was to smuggle taxpayer money into crooks pockets.
By comte7092 2025-03-0416:08 A fool and his money are soon parted
By amitrip 2025-03-0410:16 [dead]
At what point would it be profitable to run a 51% attack on any of the big chains?
both stablecoins (and many others) are implemented as tokens on other chains, mainly Ethereum but also TRON, BNB and others. So you would need to 51% attack these chains to attack assets on these chains. Leaving aside, 51% attacks will not work for Proof of Stake based chains like Ethereum, it is more like 66% if not more.
A more feasible 'attack' would probably be to just make the private companies black list addresses like they did last week with the bybit hack.
By Ferret7446 2025-03-049:011 reply 51% is also not very viable for proof of work either.
What 51% gets you is that 51% of the time, you get to choose which transactions go into the blockchain. This is mostly only useful if you want to prevent someone else's transactions from getting in, or for complicated scams where you want one person's transactions to get in before another person's. 49% of the time, those transactions will still get in, so 51% actually doesn't buy you a lot. At best you cause a short term chain split and people will wait longer before the chain stabilizes.
By c0ffeebabe 2025-03-0412:073 reply You are misunderstanding the attack. At 50+% of the hashing power, you are guaranteed to win a race against the honest block producers. The attack is a double spend: you spend a coin C to pay ADDR_A while mining a private chain that spends the coin C to pay ADDR_B (you can, of course, be ADDR_B).
One ADDR_A accepts your payment, you post your private chain publicly. You coin C cannot be spent to ADDR_A and ADDR_B, so the chain must choose which one is it. Because you have 50%+ of the hashing power, your private chain necessarily has more work (generally simplified to "is longer") than the public chain.
You've now successfully double spent.
In fact: you don't even need 50+% to attempt the attack. I did some math recently I believe something like 40% gets you 75% chance of successfully executing the attack over a 10-block-period. The Bitcoin paper has the exact algorithm to calculate this, it is a random walk.
By null0pointer 2025-03-0420:06 You are never _guaranteed_ to win a race against honest block producers for any finite time horizon, even if you owned 99% of all hashing power.
A double spend via 51% isn't really feasible anyway. A double spend attack, in the simplest case, is to:
1. Pay for good or services
2. Receive delivery of the goods or services
3. Invalidate the original payment once the goods or services are no longer revokable.
For a double spend to be worthwhile the value of the scam must exceed the cost of the scam. Maintaining >50% hashing power is extremely expensive and is more and more expensive the longer you maintain it. Therefore the value of the scam must also be extremely large. For crypto transactions it's common sense to wait for more and more confirmations (additional blocks mined after the block containing the transaction) before delivering the goods or services as the size of the transaction grows. Since it's trivial to wait for N+1 confirmations as the seller of goods or services it's trivial to defend against double spends for any meaningful amount of money.
By senordevnyc 2025-03-0415:261 reply Isn’t this detectable by the market though? So keep going: what happens to the Bitcoin network once this happens?
By c0ffeebabe 2025-03-0418:15 It is detectable once it happened. If you run your own node, you can tell when it is "reorganizing", i.e.: discarding one branch for another. One block reorgs, or two block reorgs are somewhat common (citation needed, I don't have the numbers at hand). That's why you see most merchants considering your Bitcoin "paid" only after six confirmations. They are protecting themselves against a Bitcoin reorganization of more than six blocks. The more money you accept, the longer your confirmation period needs to be. Some protocols require 100 confirmations.
What happens to Bitcoin when this happens: to "Bitcoin" the software, nothing. Everything just keeps going. To "Bitcoin" as a currency, your guess is as good as mine. It depends on what the "social layer" (the community - devs/users/stakeholders) decide is the best course of action. This would be considered an emergency event.
EDIT: You might be wondering why it is not detectable before it happens. It isn't detectable before because the attack would be privately mining their fork. That is: they would not broadcast the evil blocks.
By corimaith 2025-03-0419:44 Yeah, but what kind of transaction justifies the cost of running such an attack?
