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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and although likely a scam, here's another datapoint:

Coinbase, an Y combinator unicorn, is behind Centre/Circle and the USDC stable coin. And there are now $41.5 bn USDC circulating.

At one point it was billion of USDT circulating and USDC didn't exist yet.

Then USDC began to took off and there were, out of memory, $5 bn USDC and $23 bn USDT.

But, overall, the trajectory is clear: USDC is growing faster than USDT.

It's $41.5 bn vs $76 bn today.

Maybe in a few months USDC shall catch up, then maybe even surpass USDT.

Do we all believe Coinbase and its Centre/USDC stable coin is a scam? It's an american company, with real people behind it. It's not some scammy thing in the Bahamas.

Now here's an intriguing question: if we believe Coinbase isn't a scam and that these $41.5 bn USDC are really mostly or all backed, does tether's $76 bn really look that unthinkable?

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Issuing stablecoins isn't a scam by itself. The whole crypto ecosystem cashflow is the real scam. There is no liquidity. All it takes is a few people that panic and the whole thing falls apart, UNLESS there is someone ready to print money and prop up the market when panic sets in. That is why people need to understand what is going on with Tether. Bernie Madoff got shutdown because a whistle blower got the SEC to look at his books. If tether gets shutdown and no one is propibg up the market, it will crash hard.

China has banned Bitcoin several times, there’s been hacks, there’s been central banks going after crypto - yet it’s still here. Why do you believe the whole thing might fall apart?

What you’re missing is that whenever there’s panic selling there’s always someone on the other side finding a great discount.

That is what they said about housing in 2007. I'm not saying that crypto is going to go away and never exist. I'm saying it could go down by 80% during a liquidity crisis induced panic.

Yeah, also bitcoin isn't a stablecoin, there were never any guarantees.

> It's an american company, with real people behind it. It's not some scammy thing in the Bahamas.

All scammers are real companies with real people behind them. Until they aren't. Location of a company doesn't matter.

"Ponzi Scheme" literally comes from a man who was scamming his victims in the US and Canada.

> It's an american company, with real people behind it. It's not some scammy thing in the Bahamas.

Enron would like a word!

> It's an american company, with real people behind it. It's not some scammy thing in the Bahamas.

Oh yes I forgot Americans can't be scammers.

That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation.

Americans who are under the watchful eye of a hostile SEC and face serious prison time if they get caught are much less likely to be scammers than some anonymous group from the Bahamas.

Another datapoint: USDC minted 7b in the last 30 days. Does 3b tether in the same time period seem unreasonable?

The problem with tether is not the amount minted/in circulation. The problem is that they definitely lied previously about their backing and are probably lying now. If you claim to be one of the worlds largest commercial paper holders yet no one knows whose commercial paper you are holding then that is suspicious. It’s unimaginable that a new large player entered the market and nobody noticed.

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