If that's true, and it Bitcoin has tripled since then, doesn't that mean they could be over-collateralized now?
I don't mean to defend Tether here because I don't have evidence either way, but the skeptics would be more believable if they followed their own accusations to their logical conclusions.
I didn't know that people say some of the apparent cash was in Bitcoin, I was assuming that 74% was all in cash. Even if we assume the entire $1.85b all in bitcoin though, the tripled price only takes you to ~6b. And they've apparently now put out 8x as many tether, which means they (if I understand correctly) claim to have 8x as much cash/assets on hand. I don't understand how Bitcoin holdings would cover that increase, and I even less understand how anything they could claim was cash could.
To be honest I just don't get the model, which is why I'm not making any claims or trying to follow it to a logical conclusion. I just don't get why they can't prove they hold ~$20b in ~cash if the entire point of tether is that they do so.
So 7/8 of tethers have been printed in the last ~20 months? Is there any reason to think they've increased their cash holdings by anything like $17.5b in that time? They claim to have increased it from $1.85b to something close to $20b since April 2019?