Tether prints tokens in exchange for money. Them disappearing means they took the money and abandoned their magic bean IOUs.

You'd still have your token though.

Do they actually exchange them for money or are they just creating them? There has never been a reputable audit of Tether.

Yes, of course. In fact its market cap decreased by like 20B at one point.

Tether's 'market cap' is like 60 billion or whatever, I think most of that was just created out of thin air, but I think some of it was exchanged for real dollars, like a few percent, maybe a couple of billion dollars. In which case, when the fraud comes crashing down, they will have stolen hundreds of millions, to maybe a couple of billion dollars.

Imagine if somebody stole a piece of art worth hundreds of millions of dollars...

The way I always thought about it was they printed Thether and used it to buy other POS/POW tokens like BTC + Eth, and then sold those for real $$$.

> Tether's 'market cap' is like 60 billion or whatever, I think most of that was just created out of thin air, but I think some of it was exchanged for real dollars, like a few percent, maybe a couple of billion dollars. In which case, when the fraud comes crashing down, they will have stolen hundreds of millions, to maybe a couple of billion dollars.

> Imagine if somebody stole a piece of art worth hundreds of millions of dollars...

Buy some bs art for peanuts, get bs appraisal that it's worth millions, donate it to some bs gallery and reap tax deductions. Art was turned into a tax evasion scheme, and it compromised any value it ever had.

They did handle several billion in redemptions without any hiccups when Luna collapsed.

But then again, everyone knows that if Tether blows up, every single crypto entity collapses. If Tether had a hole of a few billion, other entities might have stepped in.

Will they do so again? Hard to tell.

Regardless, Tether is a ticking time bomb.

It would be a fantastic business if they did indeed have all that money. 70B in depsoits. Even in safe short-term t-bills, that's a crap load of risk-free interest income for basically doing nothing.

Tether and Bitfinex have the same owner. They print the Tethers for free, move them to an exchange, exchange them for Bitcoin or other token, convert that to USD.

As long as it happens slowly enough and with enough steps, that's 1 USDT converted to 1 USD.

The damages are everyone with money in a USDT denominated exchange who believes that the actual USD still exists somewhere in the system. It left months / years ago, the people still playing are the ones holding the empty bag.

They received dollars for the magic beans, and it’s the dollars that are worth something.

It’s a game of musical chairs where people holding the magic beans are dancing around and the dollars are the chairs. There’s only so many dollars to go around when the music stops, and they will go to the exchanges and the ones who “cashed out”.