The difference is I can choose not to hold Tether. Removing my exposure to dollars as a US citizen is a lot harder. Not to mention people that are on a fixed income like my parents. So debasing fiat is a lot worse
Did you miss the part about them lying?
"I have a right to choose to buy something" for whom the value is deceptively obfuscated is quite the argument.
Pretty sure the answer is no, because they have so much power they don't need to lie. They do what they like then change the rules so they can do the same thing legally.
The argument here isn't that what Tether is going is good (it isn't). It is that if the government did it, it would come with "and all you plebs have to join in because bankers making money is good for us all".
Tell that to an Argentinian who has had their life ruined because of the lack of foresight from the the people who run their society.
Many considered this a violation of their rights. Justly so. I would say that "no such right is necessarily guaranteed" is only true in the sense that no rights at all are necessarily guaranteed.
Society abrogates individual rights by its very existence, and anarchic utopias that exclude all abrogation tend to fail comically^^ and/or catastrophically^^^. It turns out that compromise is a necessary factor of coexistence with other human beings, especially those we disagree with. If you don't feel that your rights are being abrogated by society in some regard, then you either are unfamiliar with the unconscious rights we all take for granted, and/or your circumstances align with the corruption that rich and well-connected people benefit from.
In the US, the Constitution guarantees you specific and inalienable rights, and lays out clear terms that the government is not permitted to violate without consequence. While corruption exists, and no constitution is ever written or enforced perfectly, your declaration that no rights are guaranteed is incorrect for US citizens in the US. Other countries have similar guarantees of rights, such as the EU and GDPR, not to mention many older ones as well, so that statement is incorrect in various ways for those as well. Societies vary wildly in who is granted rights and what rights those are and when they may be abrogated without consequence. Corruption is endemic to virtually all modern societies, small and large. Regardless, rights are granted in most of them.
I respect those that feel that their rights are violated by the laws of the society they are members of, but that is no excuse to declare provably false statements ("no rights at all") as if they're facts. You'll need to invest more effort in your arguments to make headway with that declaration, or define what "rights" means to you that lets you declare that you have none, or declare that the society you are a member of does not guarantee you personally any rights whatsoever.
^ For example: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/294/330
^^ For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28441794
^^^ A popular counterexample is an Icelandic system of government from a thousand years ago, frequently held up as an example of libertarian utopia that lasted for centuries. However, the governmental laws that implemented the godord specifically abrogated the rights of the citizens of Iceland, binding them without individual consent to the societal system of godords, laws, courts, judgments, and enforcements. If you ignored the judgment of the courts, you were stripped of your societal right to live; anyone could kill you without being punished for doing so. Ironically, this meant that in this ancient system, societal outlaws were truly freed from all abrogations of their rights, as they were cast out from society as a whole. However, being marked for murder by those who do accept societal abrogations tends to diminish the enjoyment somewhat.
Interestingly enough, the Supreme Court of the time seems to have upheld part of what was done to the Japanese-Americans[1]. "In effect, the two rulings held that, while the eviction of American citizens in the name of military necessity was legal, the subsequent incarceration was not"[2]. About the first ruling, Wiki says: "Chief Justice John Roberts explicitly repudiated the Korematsu decision in his majority opinion in the 2018 case of Trump v. Hawaii. The case is often cited as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time."
We haven't gotten as far as large-scale violations in the U.S. of a right to not be killed by official government policy (death penalty notwithstanding). (Also notwithstanding the FDA delaying the introduction of lifesaving drugs.) It has certainly happened in other countries, though. In the small scale, the U.S. government does sometimes assassinate individuals, and seems not too squeamish about killing whoever else is in the blast radius (some may protest that those people aren't citizens). I would admit it's pretty unlikely they'll go that far on this particular right (in the absence of a revolution), but for the majority of rights, it seems there will be circumstances where politicians will plead "emergency" as a reason to violate them, and often enough will get their way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
If you ignore the genocide of Native Americans, which in many cases did not stop once those Native Americans accepted US government jurisdiction, maybe.
Many people told that society where to shove it when they came to repossess their assets by force.
If you are trying to explain why I owe some debt to society to support their currency you aren't making a very convincing argument.
How much of the demand for these tokens is being driven by money that never really existed? 100%? 50%? 0.02%?
There’s no way of knowing until it crashes - then what? e.g. if the price dives by 50%, and that really equates to 200% of the actual capital ever invested, what happens then?
I was listening to Darknet Diaries episode 102 today about the Canadian money printer, and I was thinking the entire way through it that it was basically describing tether but with paper and ink.
It got especially eye-opening when he talked about having to manage how it was released into circulation slowly so as no-one could track where it was coming from.
I don't think very many average people are invested in crypto significantly, if at all, despite the hype, so hopefully the harm would be limited.