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Comment by jasoncartwright | Hacker News Reader

It's anecdata, but none of the retail crypto speculators (five or six now) I've spoken to IRL have even heard of Tether.

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Fair. Regarding my first paragraph, I just meant of the people who do know what it is, I think 80 - 90% would probably say it's likely a scam. (I'm sure a good percentage of investors know nothing at all besides the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and hodl.)

Is that because they're using non-tether exchanges (eg. robinhood or coinbase)? If you're using something like binance I find it hard to believe that they don't know about tether (or at least heard of the term) considering that "USDT" is plastered everywhere.

Coinbase added Tether in May: https://blog.coinbase.com/tether-usdt-is-now-available-on-co...

And then recently rolled out their own stablecoin in USDC: https://www.coinbase.com/usdc/

But by default (eg. someone buying BTC or DOGE) they're probably not touching USDT right?

There's a pretty rich history of exchanges suffering "hacks" or other losses and giving all of their customers a haircut on assets to make themselves whole. Coinbase is a little less sketchy than offshore, unregulated exchanges, but if they are holding a large amount of Tether when it goes bust, I wouldnt assume any balances held on Coinbase are necessarily safe.

>but if they are holding a large amount of Tether when it goes bust, I wouldnt assume any balances held on Coinbase are necessarily safe.

That's only an issue if they blend USDT and USD balances together, which to my knowledge they don't. If you sold a bunch of your bitcoins for USDT rather than USD (which seems unlikely, seeing that BTC-USD has 28x the volume of BTC-USDT), and USDT goes bankrupt, that's on you.

It’s hard to imagine someone invested in the crypto market who isn’t aware of stablecoins.

You'd be very, very surprised, then. I would wager probably at least 60% wouldn't even be able to make heads or tails of the term "stablecoin", and possibly up to 80% or 90%, even.

Sometimes crypto investors do their investing through means that can be several times detached from the nitty and gritty (e.g. would buying COIN or MSTR stock be considered crypto investing? Some say it would) so it doesn't surprise me that much. I don't think it's too healthy, but hey.

I'd be shocked if more than 10% of the people investing in crypto on Robinhood know what a stable coin is. I bet a fairly high percentage of total crypto investors (not by amount of crypto, but count of individuals investing) are on Robinhood. I'd expect that other casual-friendly trading platforms with crypto support are similarly skewed toward people who don't know much about the space, though probably not quite as much as Robinhood is.

Oh, the OP said “crypto speculators” which in my mind is a bit more involved than random dudes buying Doge on RH.

buying doge on RH is the most obvious accessible kind of speculation.

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