What do you get out of participating in the market if you expect Tether to be fraudulent? You'd personally price it at zero, then, right? Can you profitably short it, or does everything just break down if you're right?

That is, if you hold USDT and want to sell it for cheap, who is going to buy it for cheap-but-nonzero?

The market price for one Tether is currently $0.9984 because traders are buying at that price.

So if anyone holds Tethers and believes there's greater than 1% probability that it goes to zero, the rational trade is to sell.

The fact that the price holds at parity tells me that Tether is not an obvious fraud.

When you have nothing to trade but trust and hope, people who take advantage of trust and hope are always massively rewarded.

Occasionally someone crosses the wrong people and jail time ensues, but if you're politically adept enough to avoid that - at least until you die and/or disappear - no career pays as well as financial fraud.

If traders begin to lose faith in Tether, wouldn't they sell Tether and buy BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, LTC, EOS etc.?

So wouldn't that cause the USDT price to decline to $0.97, $0.95, $0.90, $0.75, etc.?

And at the same time the demand for BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, LTC, EOS would cause their prices to rise, wouldn't it?

I suppose at some point, after the $3B of Tether is liquidated, people could lose confidence in the entire market, but until that happens wouldn't cryptocurrency prices increase rather than decrease?

These will be exacerbated by exchanges which have been run in bad faith and which do not have either the cryptocurrency or fiat reserves they claim (see Quadriga CX for a recent example).

Either way, it's going to be interesting to watch.

On exchanges of questionably integrity. And where it is impossible to reliably short the instrument.

I see this a lot, if you can't sell short then the price can't decline?

If I held Tether and thought it was worth less than $1.00, I would sell it.

If most people think it's worth less than $1.00, they would sell it and the price would drop to reflect the risk.

Why doesn't this happen? Is is just crooked exchanges posting phantom orders? If so, why don't smart traders sell into that and liquidate?

Also there is empirical proof short selling matters because during the banking crises they banned short selling which causes certain bank stocks to jump up, and then when they allowed it again the prices fell like a rock.