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kleinbl00  ·  2258 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Tether Conundrum

This is a shit article.

Look - Tether is a risk arbitrage. Want the glamour of playing with cryptocurrency but none of the gains? Well Bitfinex has just the shitcoin for you - we'll sell you USDT and buy Bitcoin with it. Then if Bitcoin goes up, you enjoy none of the gains. And if Bitcoin goes down, hopefully it won't go down far enough to blow us up. That's literally their business model.

Bitcoin went from a peak marketcap of $295b to a trough marketcap of $159b. Tether's marketcap is $1.6b. as currency props go, that's sort of like using chopsticks to hold up your garage. "Loan us money at 0% interest so we can play the ponies with bitcoin" is not a compelling business pitch as far as I'm concerned but there are enough stupidheads out there that they've gotten $1.6b worth.

It sucks that there are people willing to trade Tron on an unbacked exchange incorporated in the Virgin Islands but generally speaking, we don't nerf out the bobsled course until a few skulls have been cracked open. I for one don't wanna hop in but I also don't see that the raw, naked greed of the situation has been masked in any way.