Beyond the fraud allegations, the idea that an organisation can just print extra money as they see fit, doesn’t that go against the principles of crypto finance? I am genuinely curious why people think that is a sustainable idea.
edit: ok the other "principle" might be that all (most?) cryptocurrencies are independent from government, they are owned and managed by individuals, companies and groups of people/devices (if you're lucky).
Who thinks Tether is sustainable?
Tether is just someone with digital Monopoly (game) money basically.
There isn't really such a think.
There are many crypto currencies with different goals and approaches to handling market dynamics. And there are some where doing such a think is fully against there principles and would brake their marked dynamics. But not necessary for other reasons. But this also means you need to look at the specific crypto system in question to decide why it might or might not work.
I don't know much about Tether specifically, but lets say you have a new arbitrary crypto currency you try to make price stable, but like many crypto currencies it end up having deflationary tendencies (more demand, money getting "locked" in, etc.). In which case minting new coins would not only be sustainable but likely necessary.
or maybe the crypto community isn't a monolith, and all the cryptoanarchists aren't the people who hold/support tether?
They appear to all be playing by the rules Tether is setting.
What makes you sure that at least some of the "tether is a scam (or is at least shady)" people aren't also crypto "participants"?
>They appear to all be playing by the rules Tether is setting.
Or maybe they're voting with their feet and moving to an exchange that doesn't deal in USDT, and so won't be subject to tether's rules?
I imagine there are many people that believe in crypto and participate in the markets, but dislike that Tether is behaving like the fiat central bankers they abhor so much.
> Or maybe they're voting with their feet and moving to an exchange that doesn't deal in USDT, and so won't be subject to tether's rules?
Unbacked Tether inflates the price of any coin that it's used to purchase, so what you're describing would have no effect. When Tether's $1bn pump pushes up BTC's price from it's 20% overnight decline, are the theoretical USDT-free exchanges going to reflect bid/ask prices as they were pre-pump? Of course not.
Tether: hold my beer
At what point did people claim that "price manipulation of [bitcoin]" was "impossible"? I think you're mistaking "price manipulation" with "dilution" (eg. quantitative easing or debasing).
Satoshi intended certain principles with the creation of bitcoin, but these are not the predominant driver of its use in actuality.
that's not what most people mean by principled. Also, in that sense, crypto also has principles in that most altcoins are built on ethereum, which also has algorithmic constraints.
Ethereum's algorithmic constraints are merely algorithmic constraints that can be changed easily, whereas bitcoin's key algorithmic constraints also are actually principles; changing them results in a non-bitcoin fork.