More like "Shorting Tether for Fun and Slow Bleeding"... 8 years of FUD and still here, it doesn't take 8 years to do a safe 2x in crypto, not even in trad-fi.
In which case I am happy to extend my time horizon. We could go back 15 years, where all of this stuff was worthless. We could go back 20 years where the online currencies Beenz and Flooz had just collapsed into worthlessness. We could go back 150 years to the wildcat banking area, the last time we let chumps just make up magic money, which was such a disaster that it was foundational to the modern regulatory regime. Or how about we go back 300 years and look at the South Seas Bubble and Isaac Netwon's time reforming British currency so it was less of an exploitable clusterfuck.
You're right, extending my time horizon really does help put cryptocurrency in perspective.
It feels very similar to the thought stopping techniques that destructive cults use. Trump's word for this is "fake news".
After all, big money tried: spreading cheap FUD at the worst moment (FTX), betting heavy against... It didn't work out for them, but they tried and relative to their size, it didn't even cost them that much, I'm sure and it was worth the shot (as despicable as it looks).
Couldn't the same have been said of FTX right up until the moment its insolvency became public knowledge?
I'm curious what you consider safer ways to double ones money in crypto.
For the majority of folks to be convinced, Tether both has to exist for a long while, and provide a basic level of introspection into how the reserves are handled.