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They've been relatively modest with their scam for quite a while, e.g. they printed less than 5 billion in the first three years of their existence. Then another 5 billion in just 6 months, and then it went completely off the charts and now they are printing billions weekly, 2 billion just in the in the last 7 days. If they kept it reasonable they probably could have kept it on for a while, but at this scale it'll have to collapse.

And meanwhile another 600 million has just been printed by them today. And a few hours later bitcoin price went up. Amazing daily coincidences.

Market cap is irrelevant when we don't know the trading volume, if I created a million random coins and sold one of them for a thousand, I'd have a billion dollar market cap coin, despite only having a thousand dollars of real money involved.

And we definitely don't know the real numbers, reported tether trading volumes are total nonce, they wash traded them to the point that they report higher volumes than all the world stock/bond markets combined.

Because they keep printing more and more unbacked money to the point that they are the 3d largest crypto currency right now and almost all crypto trading happens in tether, not actual dollars, so it's unclear how much actual money there is in that market and how much of it is fake dollars.

Nope.

It's "backed by other assets", not backed 1:1 but "is always valued by Tether at 1 USD" and "Tether makes no representations or warranties about whether Tether Tokens that may be traded on the Site may be traded on the Site at any point in the future, if at all." all on their website.

Tether fake dollar printer has been going crazy the last few days, they printed a billion and a half in just 3 days. And no surprise there's an exact correlation between crypto prices and the amounts they print

>why aren't there charges filed against the company?

There are, it's currently under investigation, lookup tether/bitfinex new york court case.

Tether is needed as many exchanges cannot trade in USD so need a crypto-substitute in a form of a 1:1 dollar equivalent stable coin.

Not being backed matters because it means a single company can essentially print infinite money and buy up crypto, leading to fast price increases, just like the one we are seeing right now. When you see $30000 price tag on a bitcoin you don't know what percentage of it is actually fake USDT dollars. Right now it doesn't mater as you can exchange usdt for usd 1:1, but one day the music will stop and a "bank run" will happen, which will expose a giant hole and a real price of btc, collapsing the whole scheme.

>why 1) isn't BTC tanking

My current theory is that they co-opted a lot of exchanges, if you read their website https://tether.to/ they admit that they are not backed by USD and mention "loans made by Tether to third parties" which sounds like they give exchanges billions of dollars for IOUs. So exchanges get free billion dollar loans and in turn tether can print more billions and trade it for real money on bitfinex which they own.

>The gains can be explained by nothing else than mania and speculation

And almost 22 billion fake tether dollars injected into the space.

See my comment below, they probably co-opted a lot of other exchanges on the scheme by giving out billions for IOUs

I think one of the reasons it's allowed to go on is that a lot of exchanges are in on it.

This passage on tether's website specifically:

>tether is always 100% backed by reserves which include other assets and receivables from loans made by Tether to third parties

makes it sound like if you are an exchange, you can ask for a billion dollars of tether and give back an IOU written on a napkin saying you pinky promise you owe them that billion. So tether gives out free cash to anyone who asks and in exchange can print fake money of their own and sell it on bitfinex.

Just read their website. It used to say that it's backed 1:1 by USD, period. Now it says a lot of vague things, e.g.:

>Every tether is also 1-to-1 pegged to the dollar, so 1 USD₮ is always valued by Tether at 1 USD.

So it explicitly says that it is not backed by USD, but is "valued by tether at 1 USD"

> Every tether is always 100% backed by our reserves, which include traditional currency and cash equivalents and, from time to time, may include other assets and receivables from loans

That passage probably means that they print fake dollars, then buy bitcoin with it, which rises the price of bitcoin, and allows them to claim that their reserves are "fully backed"

Over 17 billion total last year. A shady company with no proof of actually holding any funds and real proof that they were kicked out of all the banks they tried to use, a court case against them and a text on their own website that says that they are not backed by USD but "some other assets" prints 21 billion fake dollars and everyone is ok with that.

There's a direct correlation in the last 3 months between billions of printed tether and btc price. In the last few months they printed 11 billion fake dollars. Click "3 months" here and look at the charts of tether market cap (how much they print) vs Price (BTC), it's an exact correlation:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

Or 21 billion fake tether dollars.

Closest you can get are probably podcasts with those researches, for example https://peterattiamd.com/podcast/

Yeah, the risk premium is surprisingly low: http://www.untether.space/

My guess would be that the Usdt is somewhat backed, so you can exchange some amount of it for usd and as long as no one questions any of that arbitraging it across exchanges is basically free money. Once tether gets a bank run and it becomes obvious it's not fully backed, that spread will shoot up

They dropped the claim of being backed by cash and now openly admit it on their website that they are backed by "other assets", which is probably mostly bitcoin they buy with all that fake money they print, which in turn raises the price of bitcoin so their "reserves" go up on paper.

>Nobody in crypto wants to expose them because the value of their own holdings will plummet to zero

Gotta give it to them it's a pretty smart scheme. Print money out thin air and co-opt the whole crypto community to not question it as it'd crash everything.

I do wonder how much longer that can continue.

Organize extracurricular activities for kids in the worst neighborhoods. Giving kids positive role models and teaching them useful skills (e.g. programming) could greatly improve things long term

*your

I am not changing topics, my point is that when you see a price of $15000 on the exchanges, what you are actually seeing is mostly btc/usdt pairs, that is, you are getting 15k usdt for a bitcoin, not USD. You can see it in e.g. https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/markets/

It is currently pegged 1:1, so you can exchange it for actual US dollars for the most part, which allows exchanges to claim that USDT=USD and they merge them all into a single thing. But there is no reason to believe USDT is actually equal to USD as they keep printing billions of them without any proof that there's any real money behind it.

It's mind boggling, few guys in some offshore company claim to be holding almost 17 billion dollars in cash somewhere when it was revealed they were kicked out of all the banks they attempted to use, and they keep printing money in the billions with no consequences

It's 90%+ correct. Almost all trading volume is in Tether, which is erroneously assumed to be 1:1 with usd. Once the "bank run" on tether happens it'll be revealed that most of their billions are not backed by anything and the actual btc:usd price will become clear

>Which it is.

Until it isn't. There is zero proof those guys are actually holding their claimed $16,866,411,506 USD in cash somewhere, considering they were kicked out of all the banks years ago

Which all compose only a small percentage of the overall volume. You can't deny there's almost 17 billion "totally fully backed 1:1 by US dollars" tether floating around and almost all crypto trading happens against USDT, not USD

15000 usdT not usd, as most exchanges trade in tether, not actual dollars. Such price increase is probably related to Tether printing almost 7 billion dollars of (almost definitely) unbacked "USDT" in less than 3 months https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

Wasn't there a record turnout?