It seems all anyone cares about with crypto is how much richer they get in dollar terms when cryptos go up.
And yes, those who were busy explaining why Ethereum is garbage, **coin, etc, and why only they know better, would have been 10% richer in just 2 days.
If crypto is supposed to replace other currencies, then you don't get richer if it is worth more in dollars. The entire point is to not use dollars. But nothing is priced in crypto. If it was, there wouldn't be enough supply. Also nobody would ever buy anything with it, because why spend 100 on something today when 50 will buy it tomorrow.
So crypto has devolved into nothing more than a scheme to bid up whatever coin of the day becomes a MEME darling and FOMO kicks in. You don't want to lose out on getting rich, do you?
Don't give me the crap that DeFi everything is around the corner. It's the same thing as automated driving. It's been right around the corner for years.
Windows 95 hit and the entire world was online with email and www everything within three years. Crypto is going on more than a decade with no better use case than day one. Other than a few thousand whales who got super rich when they got the masses to bid up the coins.
It amazes me how many people are blissfully unaware of the rampant tether fraud and the effect it could have on the whole ecosystem. This is a view from a good friend of mine who is an expert on the subject and well in the know.
Nobody knows where the USD supposedly backing it goes. Most of it is in “commercial paper” they said, but the investors who work in that industry say they’ve never heard of them.
This seems impossible because at their scale, that would make them, like, the 5th largest commercial paper investor on Wall Street. How could commercial paper investors not heard of them?
Unlike Bitcoin, Eth, and other coins, Tether was always claimed to be backed by something which ensured its's stable value. Tether the company claims that their tether coins are each worth $1.
There are now >$60Bn worth of Tether coin issued. With that much money they'd be a very serious private financial institution, and yet they only have 13 employee's. They have never been audited by any independent third party. They have repetitively lied about who owns the company (the same people who own Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange own Tether, and yet did not disclose that until it was found out). They have receptively changed their story on what backs Tether coin (originally each coin had $1 in a bank account to back it, now it's majoritively unspecified "commercial paper").
There is nothing which proves that Tether actually is backed by anything and the billions in new Tether coin which are minted could very well be worthless. Institutionalized investors allegedly sending billions of dollars to Tether, despite tether lying about their reserves, committing fraud by claiming to be fully backed when they were not, and reported by Bloomberg to be under DOJ criminal investigation for bank fraud.
There was never anywhere near a trillion dollars put into the crypto system. The miners created multi-millions of imaginary tokens without putting any dollars into the system. Those miner imaginary tokens came out of thin air, not from people investing dollars into the system.
If only 10% of those tokens are cashed out instead of "hodl", the $50 billion in tethers and few other dollars would instantly be depleted. The miners have a lot more than 10% to sell.
It is a classic Ponzi. All is fine when more people are sucked into putting in dollars (to pay the miners who put in zero dollars). But when people want to cash out, there is not enough dollars in the entire Ponzi to pay 10% of the imaginary tokens. The small amount of cash in the Ponzi runs out and the Ponzi collapses. It is very simple and does not require any complex conspiracy theory.
