If they go then the magic beans are worth $0. In which case - what are the damages? They've ran away with magic beans worth $0.
To quote Monty Python: "I mean, what have you got to lose? You know, you come from nothing. You're going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing."
As long as it happens slowly enough and with enough steps, that's 1 USDT converted to 1 USD.
The damages are everyone with money in a USDT denominated exchange who believes that the actual USD still exists somewhere in the system. It left months / years ago, the people still playing are the ones holding the empty bag.
Imagine if somebody stole a piece of art worth hundreds of millions of dollars...
But then again, everyone knows that if Tether blows up, every single crypto entity collapses. If Tether had a hole of a few billion, other entities might have stepped in.
Will they do so again? Hard to tell.
Regardless, Tether is a ticking time bomb.
It would be a fantastic business if they did indeed have all that money. 70B in depsoits. Even in safe short-term t-bills, that's a crap load of risk-free interest income for basically doing nothing.
> Imagine if somebody stole a piece of art worth hundreds of millions of dollars...
Buy some bs art for peanuts, get bs appraisal that it's worth millions, donate it to some bs gallery and reap tax deductions. Art was turned into a tax evasion scheme, and it compromised any value it ever had.
It’s a game of musical chairs where people holding the magic beans are dancing around and the dollars are the chairs. There’s only so many dollars to go around when the music stops, and they will go to the exchanges and the ones who “cashed out”.