What is failure specifically? USDT (despite it's shadiness) trades at 1USDT:1$ on pretty much all exchanges and you can short it if you truly believe it'll flop anytime soon.

The question is are there really $1 USD for every $1USDT? The answer is surely not. You may be able to get your money out today but in the long run there is nearly a 100% chance you lose it all.

https://bitfinexed.medium.com/tether-is-setting-a-new-standa...

There isn't 1$ for every 1USDT, they said so themselves. It will eventually fail != "USDT failed a LONG time ago".

If you truly believe what you say, then you should definitely consider shorting it, if you're right you'll make a lot of money.

The failure spoken of is clearly the breach of the promise (and associated changing of literature) to back each by one USD.

However I'm very interested in the idea of shorting a "stable"coin. Who would possibly enter into this contract for an asset that has an upside of zero and a (potential, long-term, depending on your bearishness) downside of 100%?

In any case, with the strong likelihood Tether themselves are effectively shorting it by selling it unsecured by any real assets it would be a tough market to get in on.

Which is why I asked what they meant by failure specifically.

You have to borrow it to short it, so there's a 1-3% APY cost associated with shorting it. You have to calculate the tradeoff of the likelihood of it going to 0 within the next couple of years vs the cost of borrowing USDT to short it.

Say you short 1M$ worth of Tether, it goes belly up within 4 years, it cost you like ~40k$ to short it, but your upside is 1M$. If it never actually fails because the market is irrational or by some miracle Tether was doing the right thing, then your cost depends on when you close your position. It's a relatively cheap way of making lots of money depending on your conviction on Tether's likelihood to fail.

I bookmarked this comment from a few months ago on how one might make such a trade: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26174690

Nobody that's ripping on tether in here is going to short it lol, they're not that confident in their own words.

No kidding - each of the these crypto folks go "trust us" - and then even the simplest things (1:1 US Dollar backed coin - seriously - how hard is this!) turn out to be a full of crap and lies.

And if you believe USDT has been 1:1 backed by us dollars for its full history - dream on. If you believed they would actually get audited when they said they would - hahah.

Your statement "how hard is this" shows your complete incompetence regarding the backing of anything.

Nothing of value is backed in our world. If a mere 7% of bank account holders go to the bank to collect their money, the bank collapses. They don't have your money, it's not there.

If all owners of gold (gold value papers) today claim their physical gold, it can't be done. There's 400% more value paper compared to the total supply above ground.

If all owners of Apple stock today decide to sell their stock all at the exact same moment, they won't get out the full market cap. Because the entire thing crashed before that. But that won't happen, because the exchange will simply stop the trade.

Which is the same thing crypto exchanges do when things get too heated.

The difference is that Apple doesn't claim to have a 1:1 reserve of dollars to back the value of their stock. It should matter to you that the USDT folks are lying (over something important).

We're in agreement that lying about backing is wrong in any case, no argument there.

I in particular object to the notion that things of value should be 100% backed by actual USD, in bank accounts or cash. That's not how liquidity works, yet a lot of people intuitively believe this to be so.

They said it wasn't hard, not that it was necessary in all circumstances.

Banks and gold deposits re-lend money because it makes them money and they can sell the storage service for cheaper. If you want something that won't be loaned back out then you can buy that service pretty easily.

And stock prices changing is a very different thing. The actual supply is there, and entire markets caps can and do get sold in things like mergers.

The supply of a stock in itself is meaningless, the only point of a stock is its USD value representation. In the case of a mass sell-off, sure, the same amount of stocks exist, but its monetary value sinks. Hence the market cap goes up in smoke.

This is also why a fraction of a market cap (say a few billion) can dramatically move a stock price of a 1 trillion market cap.

Same for Bitcoin. If its market price crashes, the same amount of Bitcoin exists. Yet this means nothing as only the BTCUSD pair is worth anything.

I obviously understand this better than many of the experts then.

The buyer of all apple stock gets a claim to all apples future profits (and control of the corp). This happens regularly - all sellers selling when businesses are taken private. In general, this results in a premium to present value, not a discount. And even if the price went to zero, I still end up with this profit generating asset.

What crypto people don't understand is that the constant LYING (!) undermines their arguments.

We understand how banks work. FDIC insured to 250K, you can do an ICS or other accounts to spread your cash to get FDIC coverage for about $100M of your balance. For most folks that is plenty of cash insurance for funds if they need it. If not, buy 13 week t-bills.

What you totally fail to understand, is when someone says something is backed 1:1 by a related asset, then when someone buys item A, the issuer needs to be 1 unit of the related asset. This is not complicated math. This actually happens all the time in the real world. Even the title to my vehicle even is backed 1:1 by my vehicle.

Even your "successful" 1:1 backed crypto is likely anything but that, and yes - when the run starts, we will find out how bad it is.

>Nothing of value is backed in our world. If a mere 7% of bank account holders go to the bank to collect their money, the bank collapses. They don't have your money, it's not there.

Considering negative interest rates in the Eurozone you would be doing the banks a favor. They don't want your deposits.

I know. I recently closed a secondary account there, had to do it in person. Their attitude was "good riddance", they truly do not want my money.