France to allow blockchain for trading unlisted securities
 
PARIS (Reuters) - The French government opened the way on Friday for trading unlisted securities using blockchain digital ledgers with the adoption of new rules aimed at improving Paris’ image as a center for financial innovation.  

Every tether is always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves. So 1 USD₮ is always equivalent to 1 USD.

We at Coinbase couldn’t be more excited by the explosion of interest in digital currencies. The last few weeks has seen an unprecedented increase in the price of digital currencies. More people are engaging with our platform than ever and that bodes well for the future of the digital currency. At the same time, it does create extreme volatility and stress on our systems. We take this very seriously and wanted to share some important thoughts.
 
We’re continuing to invest heavily to scale our platform
 
Over the course of this year we have invested significant resources to increase trading capacity on our platform and maintain availability of our service. We have increased the size of our support team by 640% and launched phone support in September. We have also invested heavily in our infrastructure and have increased the number of transactions we are processing during peak hours by over 40x.
 
There may be downtime which can impact your ability to trade
 
Despite the sizable and ongoing increases in our technical infrastructure and engineering staff, we wanted to remind customers that access to Coinbase services may become degraded or unavailable during times of significant volatility or volume. This could result in the inability to buy or sell for periods of time. Despite ongoing increases in our support capacity, our customer support response times may be delayed, especially for requests that do not involve immediate risks to customer account security. You can read more in our Coinbase User Agreement.
 
Be an educated investor
 
We also wanted to remind customers of some of the risks associated with trading digital currency. Digital currencies are volatile and the prices can go up and down. Due to the rapidly changing price of digital currencies, some customers may not have sell limits that are sufficient relative to the value of total digital currency they are storing on Coinbase. Sell limits are one of the many measures Coinbase takes to protect client accounts and assets.
 
As a proactive measure, we encourage customers to check the following items on their accounts:
 
    Ensure your email address is properly receiving all communications and notifications from Coinbase. To learn more about ensuring email delivery, please refer to this support article.
 
    Ensure your two-factor authentication is updated and functional. If you have recently switched mobile devices, your two-factor authentication needs to be properly migrated to the new device. In addition, please migrate from SMS two factor to Google Authenticator to enhance the security on your account, if you have not already done so. To learn more about two-factor authentication, please refer to this FAQ.
 
    Familiarize yourself with your buy and sell limits. They can be found here.
 
    Complete any pending identity verifications. During times of significant volatility, ID verification may become degraded or unavailable. To learn more about identity verification on Coinbase, please refer to this FAQ.
 
    Expect payments to take the maximum number of days indicated when making a deposit or withdrawal.
 
Stay up to date
 
We will continue to update customers for our website, our status page, in our apps, via email, on our blog and on Twitter.
 
We will keep you informed
 
We are committed to safety, security and transparency. We are working tirelessly to provide the best service and support but we can’t promise perfection during the periods of extraordinary demand. We will continue to do our best to keep our customers informed.
 
Thank you,
 
The Coinbase Team  

Its price has stayed near $1 for most of its life because Tether, the company behind the digital token, says that every tether is backed by one U.S. dollar held in reserve. Since there’s $814 million of tether circulating, there should be $814 million parked in bank accounts somewhere.
 
Not everyone believes there is.

Some wonder whether tether has helped pump up the price of bitcoin, which recently surpassed US$13,000 after beginning the year below $1,000. Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, the world’s seventh-largest cryptocurrency, wrote in a Nov. 30 Twitter post, “There’s a fear going on that the recent price rise was helped by printing of USDT (Tether) that is not backed by USD in a bank account.”

4.The primary difference between Tether and virtually every other cryptocurrency in existence is that it does not have to be mined into existence. It can simply be "typed" into existence through a keyboard. Go ahead, type a number on your keyboard. $100,000,000? No problem. Done.