[nejsjsjsbsb]

Stablecoins are risky because companies like Tether work offshore and don't submit to full audits. There is no guarantee your money won't disappear and no government bail out.

In some sense Bitcoin may be safer although it has volatility risk and is essentially a negative sum game requiring the "tithe" that is mining to keep being paid. So pick your poison.

If Karsa can provide effective a deposit guarantee that would be good. You may be able to sell that risk to the markets. It would be a great way for the Tether folks to extract value from developing economies and VCs!

Why not just... be a bank for them?

Hope you pivot or fail. If you stick and succeed then a lot of working class wealth will be at dire risk.

[krupan]

How is Bitcoin a negative sum game? Any and every currency or asset has costs associated with buying, selling, and securing it, Bitcoin included (paying the miners is one of those costs).

[nejsjsjsbsb]

Fiat is also negative sum. If you HODLed a dollar in 1930 it would be worth less today. Mostly because of inflation of supply over cost of printing. But in some sense inflation is the tax that keeps money free (a hard currency would require banks to charge you to hold and then you see the cost).

Investments have costs but they produce value. NVidia of 2025 is actually doing more than Nvidia of 1999. Forgetting currency, it is actually more valuable.

Bitcoin is like a currency not an investment. In addition the $ cost of mining is huge compare to it's inflows. That is why bitcoiners love to compare this cost to the whole trad-fi cost including branches and AML and credit card issuing etc. Rather than compare it to what the federal reserves server rack does.

Bitcoin needs $50m a day paid to miners. That money needs to come from new "investments". Yet a bitcoin does the same thing as it did in 2009. And yields the same earnings per share, zero.

[krupan]

My friend, you are stating falsehoods, mixing metaphors, and jumbling up concepts in ways that I can't begin to untangle. But clearly you know more than the big investors getting into Bitcoin now and the finance firms offering Bitcoin ETFs, so keep at it!

[nailer]

Tether is risky. US based stable coins like USDC and PYUSD are much less risky.

[KaiserPro]

all stable coins are risky, because the peg requires reserves to maintain. the peg break just at the point when you need it to most be in place.

[nailer]

Yes but US-based entities are more likely to have reserves. Tether stopped publishing their ages ago.

[krupan]

"more likely" is so reassuring!

[hlynurd]

After following the work of Zeke Faux I would not touch Tether with a 10 foot pole.

[nailer]

Likewise. It's fine for transient balances but I wouldn't hold anything in USDT for longer than a few minutes. If I was going to pick one thing that would be the next major scandal, Tether would be it.