Thank You Tether, You’ve Made Us All Much More Cautious

Oh, Tether. It amazes me how projects or should I say, scams rather, as big as Tether manage to stay afloat so long, regardless of the mounting questionable rumors circulating about them. It also amazes me how the people behind such large projects seem to think opacity and lies are better than transparency and honesty. With a few hundred million Tether being taken out of circulation every week or so, more and more legitimate and audited stable coins are coming to fruition.

If you aren’t aware, Tether is a stablecoin who’s value is supposed to be pegged to the US dollar. Therefore, it’s value should not deviate from $1.00, give or take a cent or two. Tether claims that every coin in circulation is backed by an actual physical dollar in some bank account. The problem is that Tether has yet to conduct a legitimate audit on their bank accounts and show that they indeed do have all of these dollars. Not to mention that no bank wants to work with them due to their shady business practices.

There is much concern surrounding Tether as to what could happen to the rest of the cryptocurrency market if Tether disappeared tomorrow. Since Tether accounts for the bulk of trading pairs on some of the biggest exchanges, if all their tokens suddenly disappeared, it would most certainly have a drastic effect on prices. Whether that be positive or negative remains to be seen. Seeing as how bitcoin’s price shot up suddenly by almost 10% in a few hours on the morning of October 15, possibly in response to Tether removing 400 million coins out of circulation, may be an indication that the vaporization of Tether could actually have a positive impact on prices as everyone takes shelter in other coins. Tether’s value dropped to almost $0.90 during this time as well, reflecting the increasingly unstable nature of this so-called stablecoin.

Many speculate that bitcoin’s price is artificially inflated by Tether and that the $20,000 bitcoin price in 2017 was completely falsified by Tether’s backed by nothing. My question to everyone is why are you still using Tether? Why is it still the #8 ranked by market cap coin? There are plenty of alternatives yet people still use Tether. TrueUSD is one such alternative stablecoin that is transparent, audited on a monthly basis and is not directly controlled by the team behind TrueUSD.

Dozens of stablecoins like TrueUSD have popped up throughout 2018 in response to Tether’s fraudulent business activities. Tether has put all of us on our toes and has been a catalyst for the production of stablecoins who make it a point to be transparent and conduct frequent audits. Therefore, I thank the Tether team for being extremely shady and making everyone else be extremely “unshady”.

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Originally published at www.datadriveninvestor.com on October 30, 2018.