[grey-area]

If you cashed out to fiat and retired on your stash in this last bubble you’re doing great, though that is at the expense of millions of retail bag holders who bought your cryptocurrency hoping they’d get rich too.

If you didn’t cash out already and are taking your coins offline etc, you’re the bag holder.

[reidjs]

This assumes the USD stays dominant indefinitely, right?

[WalterSear]

It assumes that the fraudulent stablecoin created by Binance, and involved in the vast majority of trades, (more 70%, a few days ago) unwinds.

https://crypto-anonymous-2021.medium.com/the-bit-short-insid...

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

USDC (the second largest stablecoin), isn't appreciably better.

[BLKNSLVR]

Tether is associated with the Bitfinex exchange, not Binance.

Binance has its own stablecoin: BUSD

USDC is associated with Coinbase, the exchange that recently went public, so I'd assume it's far more trustworthy than Tether.

[WalterSear]

USDC is avoiding audits too.

[WalterSear]

This Binance?

https://wallet.tether.to/richlist

[BLKNSLVR]

Binance has holdings in all sorts of cryptocurrencies that it has no involvement in the creation or minting of.

As a cryptocurrency exchange, Binance must hold Tether to operate.

As the most popular cryptocurrency exchange on the planet, they're likely to be on the larger end of Tether (and various other cryptocurrencies) holdings.

I'm not defending Binance here, I think there's fair potential that they're doing shady stuff, but they're not responsible, in any way, for the minting of billions of dollars of Tether, or involved in any of the dodgy accounting around Tether's backing.

Same goes for Huobi, who are second on that list. They're an exchange. Holding Tether is an essential part of being in that business.

[grey-area]

There are also deep and to my mind suspicious links between the two, this fraud is a shared endeavour.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/a-by-the-minute-look-at-tethe...

[nemothekid]

I don't understand the implications of this assumption. Are you assuming that if the USD wasn't dominant then BTC would be better to hold?

BTC is functionally a security. Under any duress of the USD I'd expect it to perform no different than AMZN stock.

[grey-area]

Nobody is actually using Bitcoin to pay for things, because it is a terrible currency due to fundamental design flaws. At this point the narrative of Bitcoin the world currency is dead, it’s now a get rich quick scheme.

[nl]

No really.

If you traded your BTC for some non USD currency the same point remains.

[randomhodler84]

A bag thats value getting heavier every year while the bank balance is losing value every year. Are not fiat holders the true bag holders? When you accept that everything is relative value, the dollar is not absolute (far from it!), holding fiat for long times seems foolish.

[dragonwriter]

> holding fiat for long times seems foolish.

Yeah, sure, but everyone except cranks who works in fiat openly acknowledges that. Fiat (well, major fiat currencies like the dollar) are good for low-volatility liquidity. For long-term accumulation of value, you invest in productive assets, which are both riskier over the long term and higher volatility over the short term, but have higher average long-term yields. And, ideally, you diversify investments in ways that maximize independence of at least long-term variation, to mitigate risk and get closer to consistent long-term average results.

Crypto“currency” that isn’t fiat-pegged tends to be worse than major fiat at the things people who prefer fiat think fiat is for, while (in the best cases) being a very high-volatility speculative asset with very good average performance over its history to date (which isn’t very long term). It’s thus not a great replacement for fiat, but potentially a bice addition to the stable of available investments.

[randomhodler84]

Replacement, maybe, no, I don’t know. It radically changes things back about 200y to a pseudogold standard but universally harder (energy usage over physical gold supply). I know I spend fiat over harder money. (I don’t spend bitcoin, I save in it).

I think you should not ignore the forest for the trees here. A small purchase today held for another 5-10y could prove quite lucrative for you.

[lasc4r]

I think we all know that stuffing your cash under a mattress is a bad idea.

[nl]

If you are concerned about inflation, then buy a basket of high liquidity stocks.