It's basically a giant game of bullshit - just the latest iteration of "Never give a sucker an even break."

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.

How do you think this would work exactly?

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?

Something like 80% of trades on the market currently involve tether, and tether accounts for ~$3 billion of (presumed) cash-like holdings. If it collapses then liquidity of the market is going to be severely hit, and the people trying to exit to fiat are likely to cause a variety of bank-run type situations.

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.