[anm89]

I have nothing but respect for Patrick, and he has done great investigative Journalism (or at least curation of other peoples journalism) but I still feel like he is cherry picking facts (that there certainly is some shady stuff going on around Tether) here to support a predetermined conclusion(Tether is bad because crypto is bad because crypto's primary use case is money laundering) which seems to be an undercurrent of all of his writing on the topic.

If we held the industry that Patrick works in to the standards that Patrick wants to hold the crypto world to we would call all of them "scams". Basically every international bank has a long history of money laundering. Every single large bank is doing much more complicated and riskier things with their balance sheet than Tether.

I don't think they are scams but I don't think Tether is either.

In many ways this is just the crypto world leveling down to the level of sketchiness that the average large bank exists at. Which is really not a defense, I dislike those banks and I dislike and distrust Tether.

But I don't think the risks of some kind crypto solvency contagion event are even as high as what's going on in the traditional banking world right now and that is given that traditional banks balance sheets at least on the surface are in the best shape they've been in in a decade.

Any way tldr: I think Patrick is technically correct but framing the large picture according to a big double standard.