> I could post a similar chart showing that my trips to Costco pump BTC.

Obligatory mention: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Baffling how you think that's relevant here.

A relevant analogy would be a correlation between "trips to Costco and dollars spent at Costco". Do more trips to Costco definitely cause more dollars to be spent there? Maybe, maybe not, but there is strong reason to believe so.

It’s relevance is in how clearly it illustrates the ease of being able to correlate two unrelated things, but despite this fact many people repeatedly try to use correlation to imply causation.

> Tether has a blockchain

How can they create new tether on demand if it's backed by a blockchain? Do they control all the mining?

It is not really on its own blockchain. Tether exists on top of the bitcoin blockchain through the OMNI layer protocol. I discovered this the hard way by trying to transfer some Tether once and it was taking forever and I researched why. Bitcoin itself is very slow due to congestion from the silly 1 mb blocksize limit and 10 minute blocks.

Something like that.

Stupid, right? Why don't they just use a Postgres database?

Because then we wouldn't have a known number of issued coins as well as the full set of holders of those coins? Nor would we be able to trustlessly send them anywhere?

> Nor would we be able to trustlessly send them anywhere?

That’s not the case anyway, since Tether can retroactively refuse to honor tokens that were allegedly stolen. What if the attacker had traded his 30m Tether-USD in exchange for bitcoins? Then the seller of these bitcoins would be left holding the bag, because the central party that is Tether refuses to honor these obligations.

Tether can never be trustless, because it’s credit. Some party needs to redeem tether tokens for USD, and if that party refuses to do so then your money is gone.

people who hold Tether trust the Tether system that is enough to keep the peg to the dollar for now, but I have doubts the peg holds

I don't understand your point. Are you saying Postgres is not capable of storing a list of accounts numbers with balances?

Also, how is something "trustless" if all the miners and validators are run by the same person?

Because the cryptocurrency set is more easily impressed by a "blockchain" than a "database". E.g. this nonsense: http://www.ibtimes.com/un-will-use-blockchain-ids-fight-chil...

Amazing.

/r/bitfinex has quite a lot of people claiming both ways. The people having problems withdrawing say support is non-existent.

This is why I qualified with "widespread". All the exchanges have poor support, and all of them have haters. It wasn't long ago that even seemingly knowledgeable people were urging people to get out of Poloniex because they were about to be the next Gox. Nothing yet, in fact they've gotten better likely because the exodus of many traders eased the support and scaling burden. Again, I don't mean to defend any exchange in particular, it is still the wild west and I'm sure a lot of shady stuff goes on. There's just a lot about the Bitfinex narrative that doesn't make a lot of sense, and it seems mostly because one guy has built a successful brand around beating his drum the loudest.

> It wasn't long ago that even seemingly knowledgeable people were urging people to get out of Poloniex because they were about to be the next Gox. Nothing yet, in fact they've gotten better likely because the exodus of many traders eased the support and scaling burden.

I have no idea what the truth is there, but this sounds a lot like "people said Y2K would be a big deal and spent millions fixing code and then nothing happened!"