Please link your sources, their reserves as I understand may in some part consist of unspecified collateral, even if they are crypto which I seriously doubt due to its volatility the fact remains that Tether is trusted enough to be supported by the majority of major exchanges. The imminent demise of tether has been predicted for many years now. You can short tether at Kraken or choose to use one of the many other USD stable coins.

> The imminent demise of tether has been predicted for many years now.

One thing that has stuck out at me from a white-collar crime reading spree is the amount of time that passes between something widely being seen as fraud by those who looked closely and when the walls actually start crumbling down. Enron, Madoff, Theranos, etc. all had people ringing the alarms long before the music stopped.

Wirecard was one of Germany’s largest tech companies with a market cap of $25B until recently.

Short sellers first identified suspicious activity at the company around 2006. But it took 13 years for the house of cards to collapse. For over a decade, Wirecard stock just went up.

The company is bankrupt and worth practically nothing today.

If/when shit finally hits the fan at Tether, the crypto bagholders will look back with the same bewilderment as Wirecard investors did: “Wasn’t all this talk about fraud proven false long ago?”

This isn't even new news: Tether changed their terms last year, and admitted/claimed to the NY Attorney General that they only have 74% cash last year.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/changes-to-tethers-terms-of-r...

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/holders-are-not-at-risk...

Note that all of this is over a year before the Tether printer kicked into overdrive around April this year and started inflating from $4B to the current $18B+.

Never short crypto it's a rigged casino, first of all. Second, the fact tether is trusted and used by exchanges is more out of necessity than desire. They would die if they had to ask their so called customers to verify their identities and so both sides look the other way and pretend in a classic emperor has no clothes situation. I'm sure the tether based exchanges are squirming in their pants as tether prints another 2 billion fun bucks per month.

Unless of course you have a theory about where an institution without a banking relationship, let alone an American banking relationship is storing just shy of twenty billion dollars US? And why legitimate investors are plowing two billion dollars per month into this scheme instead of putting it somewhere with audits and regulation like gemini or coinbase.

Kraken has many banking partners and do require KYC. A larger issue is that not everyone is in America but still require USD as is it is the most liquid exchange pair. I guess that this leads to many trusting USDT over American based tokenised dollars that are more subject to US courts. A better option could be DAI . though that is only backed by crypto assets thus far.

(1) Kraken is way more likely to have the money but that's not what I mean by a rigged casino. Arbitrage bots ensure that prices remain in lockstep between the frauds and the more legitimate, so while they may be good for the payouts, the price action remains as rigged as ever. I believe it's this model that Bitfinex relies on when they buy BTC with fake Tether, as they can then move it into legitimate exchanges that arbitrage bots have brought into lockstep and sell for cash.

(2) A larger issue is that not everyone is in America but still require USD as is it is the most liquid exchange pair.

Sounds like what they need is more liquid exchange pairs in global currencies instead of fictitious money.