On the other hand, it takes very little effort ($100K) to prop USDT price up. Rumor has it that Tether themselves are propping up the price on Kraken.
Sad part is that once the prop crumbles, everyone in sell-side of the chart will become bagholders because USDT will be worth nearly zero.
What will be interesting, if that's the case, is what happens if their reserves are not enough to cover the outstanding supply. Things could go sour very fast.
They'll keep buying back Tethers...until one day, they won't. And, I'd guess that day will come when there are a couple billion Tethers out there, and the folks running the scam decide it's enough to buy an island to retire on. What's that you say? There are already a couple billion Tethers? Well...I guess anyone unlucky or dumb enough to be holding Tethers ought to GTFO if they can.
Its obvious that holding USDT has lots of exposure, but i dont understand the implication of the bitcoin price today. A 2 billion sellout of crypto must ravage the market. And with such an obviously looming effect, I cant undersatnd how this situation is sustaining itself , even accounting for what you are saying.
The only question remaining is where's the cash? If Kraken and Binance and Poloniex are sending USD to Tether and getting USDT back, they're nuts. I'm guessing people are moving money between exchanges using USDT (which is one of its intended purposes, after all, and a good bit of utility if the steward were trustworthy), and then Tether buys it back, keeping the other exchanges in the dark about what's going on.
Given how difficult it is to deal with fiat for crypto exchanges, I think they really want/need Tether to work. If it were legitimate, it would be a great thing...I think there's a lot of wishful thinking keeping anyone at the USDT supporting exchanges from looking too closely.
I dunno. It looks so freakin' shady, to me. I don't really understand why seemingly trustworthy exchanges are participating, and it makes me hesitant to deal with any of them (even though I'm not overly fond of Coinbase and its huge fees). Being trustworthy is kinda the most important thing in this market, though.
If people didn't value tether at $1, then the price for X/USDT pairs (on other exchanges) would be lower.
As it isn't the case, if the price dropped below $1, you could buy USDT here, transfer it to a different exchange and make a profit by buying back your coins there.
You can't engage in arbitrage if nobody is paying more than 50 cents on every dollar.
Its possible tether is able to sell tethers to exchanges alone and mint tokens at 1 on 1 rate and so it should tend to be so, but considering tether is issuing through bitfinex..