I'm not going to do the job of Tether's accountants. There is no compelling reason to hold it given this risk. Nevertheless people do, and the reason is what I said + they additionally believe the claims about it being redeemable 1:1 for USD + it's easier to buy and sell crypto with it than actual USD.

Uh yeah, predicting the future is the entire idea. People are always guessing what the price is going to be in the future. If you guess correctly you make money when you sell later. If you don't, you lose money. Lots of people are highly incentivised & therefore trying really hard to predict the future, and this is what makes capitalism an efficient resource allocator. That's not only true of metals exchanges. If you think the price of copper is going up, you could also survey for and build a copper mine. That knocks on to labour markets, as you're now hiring miners. So the market's predictions can move the price of everything, and everything readjusts itself to match, all on its own, and finds itself ready (i.e. a whole mine built & ready to go) for when the prediction comes true, or adjusts itself back when it doesn't. The effect of efficient resource allocation + predictive power is that when e.g. supply goes down but demand is up, people have tried to predict this and have already built capacity for more supply. This is pretty fundamental to how most of the world works.

Markets function in general terms as information -> price machines, where people are rewarded for seeking out information and converting it into prices by moving money. If you HAVE INFORMATION that suggests copper's going to go up in value, you buy copper, and because you did that, it DOES GO UP A BIT. So the information becomes a price signal, in advance of the event that actually affects copper supply/demand. If you predict a supply/demand change, and then your prediction "comes true", the price moves, and you can sell at a profit. Magic. You are rewarded for predicting, and in exchange the market learns the correct price a little bit earlier by incorporating your "bets" in the market price. This is known as news being "priced in". Every single day watching financial markets involves big news that some analyst at a bank mispredicted, and then the price has to move a little further or a little back to correct the value it had "priced in". Sometimes announcements come in as predicted, and the markets barely react at all, even to a huge profit announcement. It's because they already knew. They predicted it.

As people "share" the information they have about the assets in the market by buying and selling, the price walks about as it discovers its value. On short timescales, this fluctuation is largely made up of people fretting about really tiny predictions in a capricious and flighty way. The most valuable information, i.e. the stuff that will let you buy in lowest and sell highest, is information the market doesn't know yet. Only some of the information is revealed by buying/selling, as it's a weaker signal than the prediction actually coming true & being reported as news. The creation of newsworthy events happens slowly, much slower than people can trade. People can make a lot of money doing insider trading, because they can predict the future value very accurately & without trades sending a huge signal as they're anonymous! But everyone agrees it's unfair to everyone else, so it's not allowed.

All the people playing this game are trying to predict, because predictions are more lucrative than current information that the market already knows. But they can also be wrong. Fortunately the price of an asset is the aggregate of everyone making predictions, and this averages out to a more useful summary of "what do these 300,000 people think" rather than "one dude at one trading desk". The "invisible hand of the free market" is the emergent wisdom of a whole lot of people trying to guess what's going to happen in the future. And it is pretty wise -- capitalism is actually pretty good at resource allocation to projects that are going to be most useful in the future. It performs better than a Politburo at this task. The main criticism of it is not that it's bad at this job, but that it is too good at it -- and too ruthless at exploiting the information it has to the detriment of the poor humans without much capital at the bottom.

Sure thing! You won't be able to redeem unless you deposited fiat directly with the Stasis affiliated platform. And even then, users have been saying it's currently disabled.

Going by my experience, 100% of the people saying "do your own research" are either shills or they are getting into a project without having no idea of how things work. If people can explain easily and if it is a legit opportunity, they wouldn't be saying "do your research", this will just be accumulating as much as they could without making too much of a fuss about it.

Corollary: any coin that is on the up-and-up and you can not easily explain the tokenomics is worthless.

Dyor means that they know it's a scam, but they want to avoid responsibility.

Yes, IMO you should treat a crypto investment as requiring much more DD than a typical investment. You should have a thesis about why a given project is more likely than baseline to succeed, and you should have done enough research in the actual community of users (not just investor shills) to convince yourself that real people are actually using this thing reliably. There is just too much vaporware and outright scams to do otherwise.

But Terra did have collateral. Luna equal to 1 USD was burnt (more like locked) once a UST was minted.

The whole conceit of DAI is that instead of burning luna at a rate of $1 they would burn it at a rate of $1.5 , The mechanism is exactly the same! And it will fail in exactly the same way.