> Tether provides a means for people and exchanges to transfer units of accounting, pegged to the US dollar, between each other without a hard AML or KYC wall;

> Tether provides a means for people and exchanges to transfer units of accounting, pegged to the US dollar, between each other without a hard AML or KYC wall; as Tether is a crypto token. That is probably why Tether was initially created but what Tether is now is a mechanism for insiders to cash out real money while leaving lots of "liquidity" in the market to keep the tasty scam going. Retail investors (AKA suckers) buy coins from exchanges with real money. The exchanges have a net influx of real money because investors (AKA hodling rubes) will typically not want real money back when they are conducting trades, so the exchanges buy Tethers - I assume at a significant insider discount. Why not? Tethers are free to create, who cares? Now the exchanges have some of the investors' (AKA marks) money, Tether has some money, the miners (who are actually doing real work) get some money for the relatively rare blockchain transactions. Everyone wins. All the exchanges have to do is carry enough cash so that the relatively rare customer requests for real money can be satisfied. As a quick trip to reddit will confirm, they can't even manage to do that reliably. Luckily for them nobody seems to care so long as the price remains high, which it will because the trades are mostly conducted with very cheap Tethers. But the end result is that Bitcoin, etc are ultimately priced in Tethers - as I write, Bitcoin is currently priced at 37145 Tethers not $37145. To put it another way, the market is so distorted that bitcoin has become just a complex way for people to turn USD into Tethers. They may hodl the bitcoin for a while but that is the end result. The situation is more complex than what I describe because there are multiple stable coins and multiple parties involved, but the end result is that real money flows from retail (AKA fools with more money than sense) to a relatively small number of groups while worthless Tethers flow the other way. And nobody seems to mind as long a numbers go up. The next economic downturn will wipe out the whole exercise.