> It's crazy that they messed this up, Tether is basically a money printing machine, all they had to do was be solvent.
> Tether is a fundamentally a risk free money making concept
To me it sounds like you don't really understand the risks of tethers business. It is light-years away from being risk free, because you are on the mercy of the banks where you store the fiat. The banks can freeze your money any time, as they now did (AFAIK).
If you are operating a business with unclear regulation at this level, you can't really rely on banks like normal businesses can. The banks will cause problems with pretty high probability.
Well ok, maybe I should have said "theoretically risk free", I meant more in the economic sense. You are right of course, I guess in practice there's no 100% safe way to store billions worth of assets anywhere.
Though.. I can imagine there's a lot safer options than some small polish bank.
Maybe they could become a bank themselves to contain some of the external risks.
To become a bank you need an account at the central bank. Getting a banking license is difficult. And even after you get it, central bank can freeze your assets any time.
Full-blown government collapse is quite far-fetched scenario. Infrastructure in venezuela still works at some level, however poorly. Bitcoin works in places pretty well where goverment is crappy but still not that crappy, that you have electricity, internet, etc.
> They are selling gold to afford these necessities.
They are probably using anything that there is available as a currency replacement. I would bet that mostly physical USD, but also gold, bitcoin, cigarettes etc. I don't think gold is the main replacement when national currency starts hyperinflating, just a tool among others.
Well, if you follow that logic your whole life, you will have lots of bitcoins when you die. Happy life I guess?
The point of money, currency or any financial asset is to produce value to your life. If you think bitcoin will develop in value, it makes sense to spend less-valuable assets before those bitcoins, but at some point you probably want to use your bitcoins as well for living. Money should be a tool to enable nice life, you shouldn't live for money.
Quite often this kind of instruments might be "tradable debt instruments" which can't be converted to actual bitcoins, but can be traded back and forth on the platform to traditional currencies. The issuing company maintains the peg to the bitcoin market value, probably using futures or similar instruments.
Of course they might also enable bitcoin withdrawals/deposits but I somewhat doubt it. There are similar offerings on other traditional platforms and usually they work this way.
Most of the banks assets are not liquid, such as the loans they have lent out. Banks quite often have problems that they give credit out too easily, which leads to the situation where their assets aren't worth much. They often also give loans to the stakeholders of the bank which makes it a bit sketchy.
Usually by insolvency is meant that the bank doesn't have enough liquid, hard assets to cover up the withdrawals from the bank. Bank can have varying assets such as bonds that it has lent out, but if the bank has lent out a lot of money to some people who can't pay the loans or other banks are unwilling to buy, it can be insolvent even if on paper it has "assets".
On the other hand people have been saying the same about tether for many years, and it still has kept the peg at pretty good levels. And it is still the most liquid and biggest "stablecoin". Many seem to need this kind of thing so they keep using it even when there are risks involved.
> Tether is a fundamentally a risk free money making concept
To me it sounds like you don't really understand the risks of tethers business. It is light-years away from being risk free, because you are on the mercy of the banks where you store the fiat. The banks can freeze your money any time, as they now did (AFAIK).
If you are operating a business with unclear regulation at this level, you can't really rely on banks like normal businesses can. The banks will cause problems with pretty high probability.