I dunno, I think Sam Bankman-Fried is a smart dude and you're not giving him quite enough credit here. He didn't give a ringing endorsement of Tether, but he spoke from his experience actually dealing with them and various ecosystem counter-parties and seeing billions of dollars (USD) flow into the thing and saying he thinks people are a…
I dunno, I think Sam Bankman-Fried is a smart dude and you're not giving him quite enough credit here. He didn't give a ringing endorsement of Tether, but he spoke from his experience actually dealing with them and various ecosystem counter-parties and seeing billions of dollars (USD) flow into the thing and saying he thinks people are a little hysterical about the situation — which seems fair!
If someone told you your money market fund fell to 0.88, you'd (rightfully) think it must've been the heist of the century; you'd be outraged and angry and there'd be a lawsuit armageddon.
Sam's key point/insight here is that there are (at least) legitimate *inflows* to Tether that he's seeing, and that de-risks the proposition that the coin is just purely illusory. *Someone* has that money, and it's almost physically difficult to lose so many billions of dollars so quickly. There aren't factories failing to produce products that are flopping in the market here; it's just cash shuffling around. The very fact that it's *billions* of dollars being shuffled instead of millions makes a smash-and-grab just very hard to do, logistically speaking. Where would you go? How could you possibly use that money, even if you got it into, like, uncut diamonds or something? You'd be more wanted than Bin Laden.
The fact that it's conceivably already taken a 10% haircut under the hood is incredibly outrageous in its own right, really, and evidence that the crypto community just has incredibly higher tolerance for risk and instability than "traditional" finance, but I'm very open to his point of view that a true 0 on USDT isn't really conceivable. That's not a real endorsement, that's someone who's used to systems thinking trying to match his facts & perceptions with truly conceivable outcomes after thinking through different possibilities.
I dunno, I think Sam Bankman-Fried is a smart dude and you're not giving him quite enough credit here. He didn't give a ringing endorsement of Tether, but he spoke from his experience actually dealing with them and various ecosystem counter-parties and seeing billions of dollars (USD) flow into the thing and saying he thinks people are a little hysterical about the situation — which seems fair!
If someone told you your money market fund fell to 0.88, you'd (rightfully) think it must've been the heist of the century; you'd be outraged and angry and there'd be a lawsuit armageddon.
Sam's key point/insight here is that there are (at least) legitimate *inflows* to Tether that he's seeing, and that de-risks the proposition that the coin is just purely illusory. *Someone* has that money, and it's almost physically difficult to lose so many billions of dollars so quickly. There aren't factories failing to produce products that are flopping in the market here; it's just cash shuffling around. The very fact that it's *billions* of dollars being shuffled instead of millions makes a smash-and-grab just very hard to do, logistically speaking. Where would you go? How could you possibly use that money, even if you got it into, like, uncut diamonds or something? You'd be more wanted than Bin Laden.
The fact that it's conceivably already taken a 10% haircut under the hood is incredibly outrageous in its own right, really, and evidence that the crypto community just has incredibly higher tolerance for risk and instability than "traditional" finance, but I'm very open to his point of view that a true 0 on USDT isn't really conceivable. That's not a real endorsement, that's someone who's used to systems thinking trying to match his facts & perceptions with truly conceivable outcomes after thinking through different possibilities.