It's not useless even if it is volatile. On longer time scales, it is not volatile but consistently appreciating in value, which makes it a great savings vehicle. It's inherently a better currency, and that's why more and more people choose to use it. Increased use decreases volatility, which in turn makes it more attractive as a currency, and so on.
Yeah, let's just forget about the fact that every BTC up move was preceded by a fat Tether print since mid 2016. It's not Tether pumping, it's the people choosing bitcoin! derp
The amount of Tether just tracks the amount of money deposits, which are tokenized into USDT. Tether is just a small fraction of all the money entering exchanges.
Big crypto guy here; Tether is the bain of crypto. It is a centralized medium, that is accepted on centralized exchanges as fact with no audit on how much asset to coin ratio exists. Tether can print as many USDT as they want, buy up all the BTC on 100x leveraged long and no one would be the wiser. BTC's $700B market cap could be fairy dust and no one can know.
You say "can" but they "have"
No it does not. Tether dollars are not backed by real dollars or fairytale "customer deposits". They print Tethers and use them to pump bitcoin price to draw the attention of people like you (and me)
> It's not useless even if it is volatile. On longer time scales, it is not volatile but consistently appreciating in value, which makes it a great savings vehicle.
Either it's good as a currency, or it's good as a savings vehicle.
You seem to be confused about which line you're pushing
A currency that isn't a good savings vehicle is a bad currency. In a free market, people will choose to use a currency that doesn't lose its value.
This just isn’t true, else everyone would put their pension in USD.
I'm not sure what's your point. USD is inflationary, that's why it's a bad currency / bad savings vehicle.
I'm not sure what your point is. You keep goalpost shifting. Bitcoin clearly is unfit as a currency as it stands. If you're will to argue that an asset with a 3% daily vlt is viable as a currencty, I don't think we will be able to find common ground.
There's no such thing as viable currency. For me it works fine. I'd rather choose higher volatility with long term value appreciation, rather than lower volatility with long term value depreciation.
> There's no such thing as viable currency.
Of course there is, for example it would be necessary for it to be useful as a medium of exchange. Which, bitcoin certainly isn't.
I can't purchase, for example, >50% of the basket of goods that comprise the CPI with bitcoin.
Sure, you can argue that anything which can facilitate more than 0 exchanges with more than 0 counterparties is, at least ephemerally, a currency. But if you're arguing that, you've already lost.
Volatility is an an inherent property of an asset/currency/whatever(stddev of (log)returns), as long as you have a fixed and distinct numeraire.
Sure, you can argue that bitcoin may _be_ the numeraire one day, but what's the path towards that when it's so useless as a currency presently?