26
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The US Securities and Exchange Commission authorized financial firms to offer ETFs tied to Bitcoin
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Regulators Approve New Type of Bitcoin Fund, in Boon for Crypto Industry
- Published
- Jan 10 2024
- Word count
- 274 words
Yet another series of financial institutions appearing to legitimize BTC, to the ultimate detriment of retail investors who don’t understand the repeated boom-bust cycles it continues to go through.
With an ETF abstracting away the technical aspects of maintaining your own wallet, this is surely going to be another avenue for abuse of the tech-illiterate by lowering the bar for entry.
The fact that this was preceded by a Twitter “hack” of the SEC’s account stating the news prematurely reeks of market manipulation…which is par for the course with crypto these days.
I was once a philosophical believer in BTC and now I just see “a new sucker is born every day” with how many people get sucked into the obvious scams surrounding it. I had hoped we saturated the market of suckers a bust-cycle or two ago but I guess there’s yet more boomers who are looking to gamble their retirements and naive college grads buying into the hype.
I guess a more optimistic view is that an ETF has actual regulations to follow, and they can’t actually “steal” your money any more than the stock market already does.
Well, weird things can happen. Like some dumb boomer (me) throwing some petty cash into dogecoin because he liked what he read about it and a few weeks later pulling it out with $1000 profit. If I would've followed my hunch that BTC was going to rise four weeks ago, I'd be up about 10% on that now too, but more pressing things held me back. As long as you're playing with money you can afford to lose it's a heck of lot better than Vegas. At least with BTC you know the house doesn't hold ALL the advantages.
edit: I just went back to my online crypto broker, and was going to buy some BTC for fun. But now, in addition to requiring 2 factor verification, they now require face and voice scan. Nope. I don't need it that bad. Definitely gonna lose some of us boomers over that privacy intrusion.
Well, sounds like you might be able to buy some of these tomorrow:
VanEck is 69 years old and manages $76.4B.
Definitely not a century old for sure, but not really new kid on the block either.
Still, those are really juvenile symbols to have chosen. I’m surprised YOLO isn’t on there.
That's because YOLO already exists. And of course it's a cannabis ETF.
Sure, but I think that’s more of a reflection of the audience than the investment firm. They named it HODL because they no doubt hired a firm to do marketing research, and the firm said that having a name like HODL would make you more appealing to the audience of crypto investors, and the probably geriatrics running the fund went “ok” and that’s the end of it.
It’s like saying Wendy’s is an immature company because of their twitter account.
And the fact that so many of them have really gone out of their way to try to have “BTC” somewhere in their name really sounds like a case of deliberately trying to mislead…
Could. But won't. I'm sticking to that ol' boomer staple: real estate.
Sadly, desperation can make the most savvy investor make poor decisions. As services like Robinhood have gamified investing and arguably made it too easy, combined with everyone getting poor and having no safety net, it has never been easier to look at your phone and say "what if I 10x my money?"
My favorite thing to come out of it is this SEC Commissioner's statement; a scathing review of how the SEC handled BTC ETF requests over the last decade.
https://www.sec.gov/news/statement/peirce-statement-spot-bitcoin-011023
😬
Frustrating to watch central banks try to capitalize on the system designed to combat centralized banks. "Not your keys, not your coins" needs to be repeated ad nauseum.
For clarity, cryptocurrency isn't going away. Too many people are dedicated to it (myself included) for the market to collapse, but it is very important to consider who is holding it. Whoever holds it has the power, and Bitcoin becomes less effective to do what it is built for when more of it is held by centralized banks.
Isn’t that always how it was going to be though?
Powerful financial institutions are not powerful because of the specific type of capital that they own, but because of how much of it they own. If crypto ever truly takes off as a concept, large banks were always going to own a significant percentage of it, just like they own a significant percentage of any fiat currency.
It’s not like crypto was ever going to somehow flip the entire paradigm of capitalism on its head. The best it was ever going to do was teach a painful crash course on why we came up with financial regulations in the first place.
Strong disagree. The majority of Bitcoin is held by people that were mining it in the 2009-2014 era, before it was even on the radar of any large bank. These are people that don't believe in the banking system, moving past fractional-reserve banking is the entire point of it all.
Crypto has the capacity and the means to flip the entire paradigm of capitalism on its head. That said, I'm not going to convince you (or anyone here) of that over a text conversation - especially if you're already heavily invested in fiat currency.
True believers who are holding don’t affect the price, though. The question is who is buying, and in particular, who would buy in a market panic.
(Active Bitcoin miners put downward pressure on the price as they sell Bitcoin to buy computers, electricity, and anything else they need.)
I think /u/zenen's main point is that ~12,000,000 of the currently circulating ~20,000,000 Bitcoin was mined prior to 2014. You used to be able to mine a handful of BTC on your home PC in a matter of days, now you would be lucky to mine a fraction of a BTC in a month on a personal computer.
The people who made millions on BTC were mining it in the early '00s and held on to some of it until it randomly took off.
I’m confused by your post because a “circulating” coin isn’t owned by the miner anymore. How does it matter when it was minted?
It’s of course true that some people became very wealthy by selling Bitcoin. They got the money from other people buying in. (Or perhaps loans using Bitcoin as collateral, but then the money comes from the lender.)
To the extent that early miners didn’t sell, it’s not circulating and there will be downward pressure on prices when they sell.
A circulating coin can be held by the miner. If I ran the software on my computer in 2010 and minted even a single block, that's 50 BTC in my wallet. I would not need to sell any of that Bitcoin to become wealthy, because it is an asset with intrinsic value. In fact, the last thing you want to do as a crypto whale (if you understand basic economics) is to sell it. Over time, fiat deflates in value and Bitcoin appreciates in value.
For the record, I am not one of these legendary crypto whales. I got in around 2017, and even then I've only managed to save up a fraction of a Bitcoin. When it comes down to it, though, I would rather cast my vote to shift the balance of power away from the Military Industrial Complex and towards some tech nerds. I'll cast that vote every day of the week, honestly.
You seem to have a different definition of circulating than I do? By what I think is the common definition, if you hold onto an asset and don't sell it, it's not circulating. Holding and circulating are opposites.
A gold coin buried in your backyard wouldn't be circulating either. It doesn't mean it doesn't have value, but it's not doing anything for the economy, and doesn't affect the prices seen by people who trade gold either. Prices are based on offers and transactions.
Yea, difference in definition. I meant "circulating" in the sense that most Bitcoin has been instantiated at this point, rather than existing as a potential mining reward. But you're right, people are incentivized against spending it because of the transaction fees (a problem solved by the Lightning network).
The value of the gold coin buried in the backyard has less to do with its effect on the economy and more to do with the person. Someone who knows they have capital to fall back on is going to be less stressed about money on the day to day, even if they never end up touching it. Based on my understanding of the world we live in, Bitcoin is the most stable and reliable financial safety net I have access to.
Sure, but how people privately value things is different from prices in the marketplace. When you look up the price of Bitcoin or of gold, where does it come from? Activity on exchanges. That's the closest thing we have to consensus on the value of a thing.
You can disagree with the market. Sometimes the market is crazy. You don't need to trade (or maybe you can profit from the craziness), but there's no other source of price information that better reflects consensus.
I agree with this, and I think that the point of distinction is that I see the "value" of Bitcoin as different from the "price" of Bitcoin.
Regardless of what the market looks like, I divert my available currency towards Bitcoin. I might be more cautious if it looked like it was in the midst of a bubble, but current day I believe that it's 100% worth being able to 'put my money where my mouth is', so to speak.
I believe that holding a reliable cryptocurrency as an asset has a value that goes beyond its price in the marketplace. I also understand that other people don't get that a currency can have a value beyond what it can be traded for, but I can't really prove or demonstrate that outside of the way that I conduct myself in my day-to-day life.
My advice is to get a Bitcoin wallet, learn how to use an anonymous, KYC-free exchange like Bisq and start collecting. That, and do your own research.
Ahh yes, there it is. The calling card of extremists/cults/demagogues that can’t back their claims by facts. In fact, doing your own research typically leads people to wrong conclusions and provides an entry point for those easily manipulated by SEO’d results.
KYC exists for a very good reason. If you want to avoid it, I’m curious why? I don’t accept “cuz the gub’mint gets my data”. At this point you cannot legitimately access BTC without going through a KYC process, and you regularly share far more sensitive data with the government on a regular basis.
I work in data privacy and even then I don’t see a practical future without some sort of trust/authentication mechanisms in place. As someone else on Tildes said, “society is built on trust”.
To those who think they can keep making free money off of a highly speculated asset: there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I can’t prove it will have no value, but I highly doubt in an apocalyptic scenario people will be trading BTC’s “offline”.
Buying Bitcoin (as you say you sometimes do) does tend to increase the price, a little bit. I didn't think there were that many true believers anymore after all the scams, but apparently there are a few.
I read all of this comment thread and you are spouting many crypto-bro talking points, which prior experience has trained me to become highly skeptical of the “future” you’re predicting.
I was involved in crypto back when BTC was just $10 (and even that felt like a lot at the time). I’ve seen my philosophical darling devolve into a cash-grab scheme ran by vultures. Simultaneously, I’ve seen very few practical applications emerge in the past 13+ years in this space. When high school bullies get into something you thought was cool, it’s a sure sign it’s now mainstream, which we now know leads to enshittification.
Your point that >50% of the value is held by whales who could never spend it lest they disrupt the crypto economy is exactly why crypto in its current state can never work. A single transaction from the genesis blocks could crash the entire market…and that’s not a good thing. The idea that those who gained the most value should never actualize it is bonkers. At best it sounds like buried treasure, which is largely a literary device and popular myth that holds no historical significance.
As someone who actually used crypto in its early days, I can say that the use of crypto today has shifted to a largely speculative asset that buckles under its own weight as a financial instrument for providing liquid funds. In my naïveté post-college I dreamed of tearing down the greedy financial institutions by using pure crypto as a primary currency…but I was forced to deal with the real world that transacts in dollars to operate in modern society (despite how “real” that fiat may be).
I see no current practical application for crypto aside from the following (very real) use cases:
Sure, crypto-bros love touting the first pizza bought with BTC being worth millions+, but that was an era when it was actually treated as a currency for physical goods and services (aka a currency). @skybrian adeptly pointed out that a currency that’s not physically used in a marketplace is not actually a currency, and I don’t see how the virtualization of BTC makes it immune to fundamental concepts of money/value.
I’d love to get proven wrong, but 10+ years of scams, Ponzi schemes, and illicit activity have made me think twice about my crypto darling. At some point you have to think if you’re surrounded by bad people…”Are We the Baddies?”.
And before someone brings up remittance, it was estimated as $589B in 2021, the current BTC market cap is over $900B. That means that ~50% of the current BTC value is equal to the currently measured remittance that occurs outside of BTC to begin with. Where this extra money comes from is in the minds of crypto-bros that desperately seek to defend a failed ideology from critique.
I think some cryptocurrencies also see use in places where the country's currency is seeing high inflation and people turn to black markets (cuevas in Argentina for example). Or at least, I read an article about that once.
I wonder how things are going there with the new president? I think I'd prefer stablecoins to the peso if those were the only choices, but at the consumer level, apparently people there prefer US $100 bills.
There's little reason to do it in countries with stable banks and many better payment options, but not everyone is so fortunate.
Prior to Argentina’s recent foray, the other preeminent crypto-economy was Venezuela…not known for its financial stability.
Sure. If I am coming across as a crypto-bro, then I've failed to articulate myself effectively.
For the record, research I'm referencing includes: Debt: The First 5000 Years, Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus, collected readings on the gold standard and its effect on the global economy, and the first-hand experience of losing all of my belongings in a foreign country and being able to withdraw money from a Bitcoin ATM. Here's some other cool stuff people are doing with bitcoin, since you asked.
I cannot prove you wrong, because it seems that we're both certain we're right. Objectively, I can't say that one of us is 'more' correct than the other - chances are neither of us is. I just choose my beliefs over yours because I'm a radicalized idealist and the idea of the plutocratic world we live in being beyond our collective capacity to fix... makes me want to die - not exaggerating. We're in a situation where I'm arguing that you should believe in the only thing I know of that holds the capacity to tear down greedy financial institutions (which is the thing that you're telling me that you actually want to believe in), and you are arguing that I should stop believing in it.
This feels like a waste of my time. I want to be right because it helps me feel optimistic about the future of the world I live in. Why do you want to be right?
I would gently suggest that this is mislocating the fundamental problem. The world is not controlled by the wealthy because of anything having to do with the money supply. Even if Bitcoin (or some other cryptocurrency) were to somehow replace the current monetary system, it would not create a better world---just a world run by a different set of people. (And, in fact, not an entirely different set of people, since there is substantial overlap between "traditional" finance bros and crypto bros.)
I agree that Bitcoin is not a magic panacea for economic issues, but (citing one of Douglas Rushkoff's ideas), it provides the basis on which a new economic operating system can be built.
The current economic system is designed (intentionally or unintentionally) to maintain and exaggerate the status quo. Someone with lots of money can invest in, say, real estate and make money off of the majority of the population that lives paycheque to paycheque - people that do not have the capacity to invest because they are busy trying to survive. The spare change of rich people can make a living wage off of the dividends earned by taking rent from people who are never given the opportunity to buy a house.
Now, this in itself is a problem. The problem is exacerbated significantly when the biggest companies are allowed to sit directly in front of the money printer.. Bitcoin, at the very least, offers a basis of value that does not allow for inflation. It's a system that is designed to ensure that things trend towards equilibrium. The reason why the media is inundated with fearmongering and negativity regarding Bitcoin is because it is a threat to the status quo and the people who own the media.
The fundamental problem is not just the money supply, the problem is that the world is controlled and held in check by violence - we are steeped in it to the point where people are scared of what life might look like if we didn't have this system of violence. The US Dollar is dominant because the US Military is dominant, and the US military-industrial complex is dominant because they are the world's biggest bullies. If people can adopt a globally decentralized system of value that actually works, then we stand a chance of actually being able to destabilize the status quo. We're actually making pretty good progress - come check out the cult.
The link you shared to "the cult" certainly has a lot of crypto-bros typing in all caps, but I'm going to go off of Tildes' philosophy of assuming good faith when you say you're not one of them.
I'm happy you have personally been able to find BTC useful, but my own experience with it has been fraught with issues. The Bitcoin ATM next to my barber shop had to be removed because it was involved in so many energy company scams that became the ATM's primary use case. A cursory google search shows that scams have been on the rise, likely aided by generative AI, and BTC's energy consumption rivals that of Ukraine, a country actually fighting against authoritarianism to preserve democracy.
I guess I'm frustrated that the ideals that launched BTC seem have gotten misguided somewhere along the way. You could once mine BTC at home on a potato, which then grew into mining pools, which again grew into to mining farms and ridiculous GPU prices. The Lightning Network was created as a workaround for BTC's unwillingness to improve itself, and in turn has led to a re-centralization of transactions. Transaction fees are so prohibitively expensive that to conduct petty commerce in BTC you would be reliant on the centralized platforms that BTC purports to disrupt.
I'm not saying all of this as an endorsement of centralized financial institutions, in fact I abhor them. I say it because I think there's enough evidence that BTC is a net-negative for society at this point. While there are certainly situations where people like yourself have seen benefits, I believe on the whole BTC largely gains its value from greed and exploitation, and that turns me off to it. While you could certainly make the argument that the petrodollar is also based off of greed and exploitation, our current financial systems serve as a necessary evil to keep the global economy humming along. BTC appears to me more of an "unnecessary evil" in this regard, and I view the recent ETF approval much in the same way I look at the rampant sportsbetting that's being legalized in the US.
As stated in another comment, I'm not entirely out on the idea of crypto, but I'm not currently sold on it either. While I don't see BTC liberating us from the shackles of the plutocracy, if there ever were a revolution then crypto may indeed have a role to play. I'm still waiting on the seemingly inevitable demise of Tether to reconfigure the crypto ecosystem all over again, and I'll be curious to see what comes out of it.
To be honest, I really don't want to be right, just in the same way that I want to be wrong on climate change. I wish my 2011 dreams of crypto's future were a reality today, but the evidence I've seen since then has led me to believe otherwise.
I'd rather not keep discussing BTC here because Tildes has surprisingly been a relatively crypto-free space despite its alternative userbase, and I don't want to cause more strife via debate when maybe we should just agree to disagree. It's also exhausting to collect and reassess all my thoughts on crypto over the years just to reaffirm the same conclusions I've already drawn.
I'll leave you with the solace that I think both our stances are rooted in a desire for humanity to improve itself, and it's that mutual care for the world that will be necessary for society to progress if/when the revolution comes. It's in that sense that I still have some hope for the future.
Cool, thanks for the detailed and conscientious response. I understand that your thoughts and beliefs are well-informed and, while there are some aspects to what you're saying that I don't agree with, I'm happy to agree to disagree at this point.
I suppose the last word that I'd like to end this on is that I believe that the core ideals that launched Bitcoin are still in place and proceeding as intended, but I also don't blame anyone for not holding the same belief as me on that front - especially in the face of all the negative press that surrounds the industry. If you can sustain the space for believing in the possibility of the project following through and succeeding on its intended purpose, that's all I would ask.
That, and always hold on to hope for a better future - wherever you can find it.
I'm curious if your focal point is more on BTC as asset, or on crypto as a technology stack. As Morgan Stanley points out in a recent post, Visa and Paypal are integrating with crypto, and these are fairly large financial infrastructure providers rather than the run-of-the-mill cryptography brother on twitter, but they are talking about the crypto infrastructure and not Bitcoin:
Even the CEO of BlackRock seems to now want to tokenize securities:
Now, I'm not saying that the big banks are who we should be in praise of, as they are regularly caught doing many of the crimes people associate with crypto (at magnitudes higher volumes as well.)
However, I think that society is slowly understanding that crypto is effectively just different ways of disintermediated message passing (and assigning value to those messages.) The positive/negative media narratives, government bans (or encouragements), complicated laws, etc. muddy the waters a bit (imagine how far iOS would be today if publishing an app was legally uncertain for past 15 years), but it seems like every few years there is a new meta forming, a new way in people think and talk about the tech.
A historian specializing in the French Renaissance era recently offered an interesting perspective on the role of generative technologies in new types of capital formation:
He mentions how the printing press can be attributed to the increase in literacy rates, but what surprised me after I looked it up was how slowly it took for literacy rates to increase after the printing press was invented: 400 years for the literacy rate to reach 62%!
In some way I see this in a similar light when crypto in measured in last 15 years. It's actually a blink of an eye in relative terms, and only now are the people most equipped to figure out how to distribute something with it into mainstream society giving it a serious look.
I'm conflicted on crypto as a technology stack, but I have not completely lost faith in it. Back in its earlier days there was so much exploration of interesting problem spaces. Sometimes it felt like throwing the blockchain at a wall to see what sticks, but there was a real spirit of innovation at the time. Altcoins were trying to solve real problems, like PrimeCoin discovering prime numbers, or NameCoin for a decentralized DNS registrar. There were discussions about using the blockchain as a permanent historical ledger, even using the original BTC protocol itself. Sure, there were memes like Dogecoin (whose creator and I share similar views towards today's crypto landscape) and "HODL", and BTC had shown early signs of faltering with Mt.Gox, but it didn't seem to take away from all the activity stretching the limits of the blockchain.
But then there started to become a shift in focus by the community, an organic enshittification perhaps, around 2017 or so. Crypto was finally being taken seriously by institutional investors (e.g. Ripple), mining farms became more centralized and power hungry, and there were very few earnest attempts at fixing the status quo to the benefit of entrenched players. The Lightning Network is a mere band-aid on a network limitation BTC has to processing only 7 transactions a second...which has yet to be resolved due to the inertia preventing a hard fork. Electricity is egregiously wasted mining coins because BTC has yet to transition to more efficient algorithms like proof-of-stake. While crypto was moving on, BTC was becoming ossified by greed and moneyed interests.
The altcoins/crypto forks haven't appeared to go in a positive direction since 2018 either, though. Colored Coins paved the way for NFTs, a self-parody of digital ownership used mostly for scams. Sam Altman, before profiting off unauthorized copyrighted material, was busy foisting one of the most privacy-invasive pieces of surveillance infrastructure onto unsuspecting (and likely economically desperate) Kenyans who eventually wizened up and banned it altogether last year. This echoes Internet.org and Zuckerberg's efforts to use technology to exert power and influence over entire nations. Sam Altman originally claimed to combat AI-generated fakes with WorldCoin, yet now he sits atop the largest AI fake generator in the world. It's these conflict of interest that seemingly made every new cryptocurrency a pump-and-dump scheme, which caused ICOs to be banned outright for such obvious fraud.
Despite all the fraud and negative externalities crypto continues to propagate, I do think there is some merit to continue exploring the ideas BTC introduced, as I don't think we've exhausted the problem/solution space yet. Ethereum has the most promise to fulfill crypto's true potential, and it even managed to undergo a hard fork for more efficient power consumption, showing that it can admit its flaws and evolve, whereas ostensibly BTC cannot. That being said, I think philosophically ETH should have never allowed itself to be priced on exchanges, and I've yet to see a good example of the blockchain in production that couldn't be solved more efficiently through a centralized database.
Which, I guess, leads me to the current quagmire society appears to be in with crypto. Perhaps it's as you said: just a problem of critical mass wherein once the "literacy rate" improves past a certain threshold, all the purported benefits of crypto can finally be realized. On the other hand, having all financial transactions within a single public/private ledger that can be retroactively traversed by an AI could enable the existing powers that be (governments, financial institutions) an unprecedented degree of control over our daily lives. Or yet maybe instead, crypto will struggle to take hold as a messaging protocol and join the club of Internet technologies that have either lost their luster and refuse to die (IRC, phpBB Forums), or have completely abandoned their original purpose and now subsist off of grey-market businesses keeping them alive (Usenet). My fear is the damage that can occur in the meantime, and that we should probably be pumping the breaks instead of "moving fast and breaking things" with people's retirements via the ETF.
Difference is you can an still hold your keys, and thus, your coins. They can fight that all they want, but the technology doesn't discriminate.
Really wondering if the crash of tether is going to kick off the next world wide recession when it nukes the crypto market and people find out just how much of their savings is on some house of cards situation
I don't think cryptocurrency is anywhere near big enough to do that kind of damage. Most people don't own any, or token amounts. It seems unlikely that it will happen now that all the buzz has worn off and people have decided that crypto is not interesting anymore?
But who knows, maybe there will be another hype cycle.
Most people didn't own multiple houses either, but their pensions were based on funds that were based on other things that still tanked when the housing market blew up.
I don't think it's 1 to 1 for a bunch of reasons, but I see something similar as a possibility, as there's a lot of speculation and fraud at all levels in the cypto market, and I doubt traditional markets are fully insulated from that
Again, the scale is different. The US housing market is trillions of dollars and the Tether is a bit less than $100 billion. That’s a lot of money, but by comparison, Silicon Valley Bank had about $200 billion in assets. Also, as a regional bank, it was much more interconnected with ordinary businesses than any cryptocurrency ever was.
A collapse of Tether would be very exciting for all cryptocurrencies as everyone rushes for the exits, but I don’t see traditional finance being affected much at all, because they actually are pretty well separated. That’s changing a bit, and maybe some pension funds would have a small loss if they invested a little in these ETF’s, but I doubt they’d be rushing to buy with the collapse of FTX happening not that long ago.
I think you're mostly making my point for me.
The failure of tether will not just be tether going away. It's going to take most of the crypto market with it, as if half of what has been said is true, a large % of bitcoins current price is almost certainly inflated by tether. The accusations are that they hold their "reserves" in bitcoin, so they can use newly minted tether, to buy more bitcoin, thus upping the value of their reserves, thus requiring they mint more tether, and so on. So you're really looking at the crypto market cap, which a quick no effort could be wrong google search gives me 1.92 trillion. Of that Bitcoin is almost 50% of the market, and this is even ignoring the largest stable coin going under and probably officially nuking the concept, which is a big part of why crypto has been so much easier to adopt (being able to stay in the ecosystem and play chicken with regulations).
SVB is extremely relevant to my point given that SVB going under (along with First republic, which is about the same size) forced people I know to move money from banks because they were worried about a cascade effect causing multiple regional banks to go under. We dodged that outcome but it was a distinct possibility.
I don't think I agree with this. I know they've tried to stay separated, but a lot of crypto use is global in less regulated markets. If your account is invested in "ProduceCo" that makes sprokets or whatever, but they're getting raw materials at a competitive rate from a company in "OtherCountry", and THEY'VE been investing their money in the crypto world, well when they go under suddenly ProduceCo isn't competing and so on. Obviously this is an extreme case and has a million little holes in it, but I don't think I've seen good evidence that if crypto exploded tomorrow the world market would just roll its eyes and move on. Especially when you consider that there are countries like Argentina who are going waaaaaaaaaay down the rabbit hole on it, and countries like india which have pretty massive adoption (not as a % of the total of course, just based on them having a massive population).
So to be clear, tether going under, i think, nukes crypto. Tether started in 2014, which was the bottom of the last crypto crash. There's concerning arguments that the ENTIRE price of current crypto is backed on this. Should that be even partially true, you're looking at a overnight/weekly drop for bitcoin from it's current 47k a coin, to sub $100, which is going to erase an OBSCENE amount of wealth.
Now i'm not laying good odds on any of this happening, but I do think it's more than possible.
I think it's pretty clear which part we disagree on, so I guess that's a conclusion of sorts? I can imagine a scenario where a cryptocurrency crash affects the broader economy, but I think it's unlikely. You seem to think it's more likely.
Let's hope it's combined with an extra-strong solar maximum for the ultimate "fun."
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/sml5d