Yes, if there's anything I've learned from the crypto markets lately it's that a few years of (apparent but vigorously unaudited) success is proof that it is very safe and won't come apart precipitously.

not sure whether this was sarcastic, but if it really is, then you shall just extend your time horizon. Those who bought bitcoin at the worst moment of 2014 are still now at a comfortable ~20x (and roughly ~2x on the spx)

How does that help whether to buy or sell in 2023? You could say the exact same paragraph last year, but someone would’ve bought and lost 2/3 now. That means it could happen again.

Hey now. The Bitcoin price is heavily dependent on financially naive people putting dollars in. If you're just going to run around countering hype with facts and reasonableness, how are they going to get the bubble to reinflate?

Oh wait, is the game we're playing Pick an Arbitrary Time Period That Lets Me Be Right? How fun, let me try.

In which case I am happy to extend my time horizon. We could go back 15 years, where all of this stuff was worthless. We could go back 20 years where the online currencies Beenz and Flooz had just collapsed into worthlessness. We could go back 150 years to the wildcat banking area, the last time we let chumps just make up magic money, which was such a disaster that it was foundational to the modern regulatory regime. Or how about we go back 300 years and look at the South Seas Bubble and Isaac Netwon's time reforming British currency so it was less of an exploitable clusterfuck.

You're right, extending my time horizon really does help put cryptocurrency in perspective.

Must all criticism of Tether be FUD? Their past behavior alone makes me skeptical that it'll ever be trustworthy no matter how rich the gold mine they may have fallen into.

The thing is that any and all criticism can be dismissed with "FUD", and that the person can continue to live in their own bubble and avoid the bother of cognitive dissonance.

It feels very similar to the thought stopping techniques that destructive cults use. Trump's word for this is "fake news".

Nope, there is a lot of legitimate concerns but the fact is that they are still here. Taking a trade is about taking a bet with a probability to win/lose, and it's just that betting against Tether is worth at most a meagre 2x with a lot of related risks as outlined in the article, whereas there are much faster and safer way to do a 2x in crypto.

After all, big money tried: spreading cheap FUD at the worst moment (FTX), betting heavy against... It didn't work out for them, but they tried and relative to their size, it didn't even cost them that much, I'm sure and it was worth the shot (as despicable as it looks).

So evidence that this article is FUD is that Tether is not yet bankrupt?

Couldn't the same have been said of FTX right up until the moment its insolvency became public knowledge?

I'm curious what you consider safer ways to double ones money in crypto.

Something existing for a long time increases the probability of it being stable, but does not guarantee it. It could be that Tether falls apart in a certain set of conditions that just has not happened yet, such as FTX/Alameda being exposed by bad crypto conditions in 2022. It took Theranos 15 years to fall apart.

For the majority of folks to be convinced, Tether both has to exist for a long while, and provide a basic level of introspection into how the reserves are handled.

The way I look at it - Its not a matter of if, its a matter of when. Even the die hard crypto bros know tether is nothing but a giant ponzi scheme.