Tether

1. Tether is a company, not a stablecoin/bitUSD. It might as well be Mt. Gox credits.
2. It's a huge black swan risk that won't be "obvious" until after a blowup.

Tether just redeemed/burned another $500,000,000.

This is good for the ecosystem. Having one stablecoin with so much gray area surrounding it be so dominant among UAD pegged tokens is unhealthy.

The slow decline of USDT plus competition without FUD is healthy.

Risk is something I’ve grown quite comfortable with as an investor, but I still get super nervous holding Tether for more than a few hours.

If markets thought Tether was insolvent, it would not still be trading (even against USD) at 1:1.

I worry that a lot of the proposed implementations will appear stable… until they aren’t - a huge left-tail risk. In the Tether model, the failure point is known (counterparty risk). In risk mitigation, the devil you know is better than the one you don’t.

Tether is a systemic risk in that if it explodes, billions of dollars could effectively disappear and cause exchange insolvencies. An alternative to Tether hugely reduces that risk.

Tether is still shady as fuck though, but as a principle it could be applied to other tokens and is an interesting development.

Tether is kind of like USD, except instead of being backed by the United States government, it was created by a guy who fled the U.S. following allegations of raping children and who claims if he needs more money, he just invents a new token.

Everyone seems to think that Tether's main problem was whether it's 100% backed...but it's main problem is that it's centralized. And GUSD and USDC are just Tether 2.0.

Just because a document shows a certain bank balance amount on a certain date doesn't mean the funds are unencumbered/free and clear.

An audit, which Tether refuses to provide and which companies large and small undertake on a regular basis, would answer that question.... Additionally, assuming, arguendo, that Tether is backed 1:1 (which I otherwise do not), that much cash sitting in a bank should trade not at par but at a discount commensurate with the credit rating of the bank.

Tether’s withdrawal fees smell like shit. Absolute shit. Can anyone name a single financial service with a withdrawal fee that increases in size as a percentage as the size of the withdrawal increases?

I'm afraid Tether is an accident waiting to happen. I won't be surprised if bank accounts freeze on accusation of abetting with money laundering.

If Tether can't just publicly show their bank statements, accounts, signed powers of attorney docs, and executives' authorized signatures against issued tokens, then it's very likely it's a fractional reserve gone *very* wrong.

Lesson: Trusted third parties are security holes.

Tether is the bastard child of global capital controls.

(If USD could be traded easily and seamlessly by everyone, there would be no need for stablecoins.)

"**Yes, the top 0.2% owns over 90% of the token’s total supply.** This is more than double BTC’s wealth concentration." (bolded in the article)

So? Tether is a tool to move USD around between exchanges. Why is it bad that a small number of exchanges mainly use this tool?