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Tether came out in 2014.

This is a pretty good overview of all that's happened and why the parent's comment is actually relevant.

https://www.theverge.com/22620464/tether-backing-cryptocurre...

By 2014 BTC had already gone up from $0.0000000001 or something like that to $30. To be conservative you could use the early exchange prices of $0.10 or so. Do the math. It was blowing up way before Tether. Yes, Tether is one of the biggest frauds on the planet right now. I repeat, Tether’s fall would not cause the collapse of Bitcoin. These other comments saying “oh it’s smaller than usdc so btc would be fine” are even missing the point. It’s like nobody can mentally conceptualize an asset that has gone up 100,000% or much, much more. $1000 spent on MtGox in the early days would be over $200,000,000 today. It’s not one coin or one tweet or one company driving that absolute monster of speculation. But in my opinion Bitcoin’s collapse, a real one that goes to zero, would represent such a significant shift in the upward paradigm that it would mean the end of every single other cryptocurrency in their current iteration, including Tether and even Vitalik’s world computer. They would return in another form. Just my thoughts.

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