1:1
You're American, I'm Australian, there really shouldn't be any problem here with finding a 3rd party intermediary, though I'm not sure about US laws on these sorts of p2p wagers.
You truly want to get $125,000 in return for my $5000 bet on tether maintaining the peg? Surely that says something about your faith in them asking 25:1 that they go under in the next year? I'm sort of tempted at the offer of 1/5th of that, as unfair as it seems.
Happy to do it if we each donate to the charity of the other's choice? 1:1? You can keep the tax benefit.
Keeping the peg is the least of the problems. If they somehow showed up tomorrow and said "Listen, we finally ran an audit and we found out that we really have only $0.90 for every minted USDT. But given that the small print says that we are allowed to return whatever we want, whenever you want, we decided that everyone will get a 10% haircut, ok?", you would bet that the market would shake for a week or two, but most of them would just scream Finally! and continue gambling what was left on the next project.
The real problem is that all that comes with that lack of transparency: the market manipulation, the cop-out to become a unregulated central bank, the inability for others to make a true assessment of the health of the market.
Tether basically took all the work from the cypherpunks and turned into a Casino that can't even be properly audited. They can manage to keep the peg for 20 more years for all I care, but each day they are still around is another day wasted that could be used for more meaningful things.
The fact that you don't want to engage in 1:1 odds means you are less sure of your own position than he is. Just sayin' :)
Now one could take that as a salesmans tactic to try and extract better odds from Grimburger but at that point the monetary aspect would become the focus and not the wager itself. A wager between two people who are in it for the sport and both sure of their positions should carry 1:1 odds. One could ask for a lower amount or refuse completely on monetary grounds but not request odds in ones favor.
If there are two people offering you a bet:
Person A offers you 5:1 odds in your favor saying that a random dice throw will yield a number small than 3.
Person B offers you 1:1 odds in your favor saying that a random number chosen between 1 and 10 will yield a number bigger than 6.
Thinking about the wager with Person B is independent of the wager with Person A. When deciding which bet to engage in the answer is both because in both cases you should be convinced that your chances of winning are >50%. Refusing the second bet would lower your overall expected winnings.
The emperor is clearly not wearing any clothes.
There's lame horses that get better odds in races than what is being offered to me if Tether collapses (and even recovers in a few days after that) right now.
The peg just needs to collapse for a tiny fraction of the next year for them to win this wager. Why wouldn't anyone take such a guaranteed profit? :)
And to be fair I doubt it's the loss of money that scares Patrick, it's the USDT/USD price on May 21st 2023.