It's actually pretty lousy idea, because in practice it's exactly what we already have in normal banking system, where the "bank-USD crypto", that is, the numbers in your bank accounts, are already backed 1:1 by actual government USD, with government regulations backing the companies and the exchange rate.

If you can freely exchange cryptocoins to USD, there's absolutely no reason to ever consider a stablecoin, unless your goal is to evade money laundering, KYC, etc regulations, hence Tether.

Thanks for saying so. I see so much hype about digital money from people that apparently have never used direct deposit and a debit card, which is exactly digital money.

That's an important and needed service.

Furthermore, even in a fractional reserve banking scenario, your bank will have 1:1 assets backing it up, since the money it loans out is counted as an asset, although it needs to be recognized that the loan is valued at less than par because of the risk of default. There is quite a lot of legal regulations on what capital can back up accounts, and the minimum ratios of various kinds of quality of capital.

Only a fraction of those reserves are cash. Hence fractional reserve. The remainder aren't liquid, but they are worth enough to cover the reserves, under best accepted accounting practices.

Tether's non-cash reserves largely consist of "A money launderer stole our money, but pinky swears that they'll give it back." It's not like a fractional reserve bank, it's just a straight up fraud. It's why despite many assurances from Tether, it has still not been independently audited.

Although Tether's purpose has largely been to avoid regulation, and participate in cryptocurrency speculation, a stablecoin would be superior for actual commerce. Bitcoin has failed for commerce, to some extent because of instability and speculation.

Being able to use something equivalent to cash to transact digitally, with client-side security seems like a desirable technology to me.

Superior to bitcoin, surely, but no superior to dollars. I have absolutely no difficulty with using my dollars to pay for anything I want.

The biggest reason one might not want to use dollars is to conceal one's identity, and while I admit that there exist valid uses for that, most of the market for anonymous commerce is illegal activity.

The currency exchange rate is a minor price to pay for such a convenience.

Meanwhile with <insert literally any cryptocurrency here> it’s just a simple <convoluted 20-step process not even guaranteed to work and with no consumer protection>.

But the same old tropes about crypto always get the upvotes.

It's similar to Google's "make the web faster" efforts (Chrome, V8, AMP, mod_pagespeed, hosting JQuery & other AJAX libs, developer education). If the web is faster, you visit more pages. If you visit more pages, you search more. If you search more, you click on more ads, which makes Google more money.