The argument against this view of Tether often seems to come down to: "If something this big was a scam, surely it would have been exposed a long time ago."

That's exactly what was said about Enron and the Madoff fund, though. If anything, Tether is flashing much bigger warning signs.

Bitcoin proponents make a big deal when some giant fund invests an experimental $100M in crypto tokens (a small fraction of a percent for the fund), but they don't seem to care about $20B of fake money from Tether (a large percentage of the total money supposedly in Bitcoin).