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It’s been years since anything Tether minted was plausibly 100% backed by real assets. Both times they’ve been forced to show the books, they only had fractional backing. And they’ve minted tens of billions of tokens since.

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And yet people like the parent and those with billions invested in Tether seem to believe that it's all backed and fully solvent and minting new money from thin air is completely reasonable.

It's remarkable to me how long this scam has lasted and how much confidence people have in it, in spite of the very shady characters involved and the likelihood of fraud.

Personally I'm skeptical of Tether. But you don't need to trust them to believe that if they permanently freeze Z USDT and then mint Z USDT then their ratio of reserves to USDT is unchanged.

Well I think you do need to trust them: you are taking at face value their statements and assuming they do what they say they will. What if they mint coins without collateral (they have been caught doing this before), what if they unfreeze coins later (they have done this before)?

These stablecoins are just a database owned by untrustworthy people and backed by nothing but their promises, they're just one step up from NFTs.

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