Sure, and I'm free to value my home at 1 gigadollar. Sellers are free to decide what prices they will not sell below, but they do not determine price. It takes

Sure, and I'm free to value my home at 1 gigadollar. Sellers are free to decide what prices they will not sell below, but they do not determine price. It takes buyers and sellers to do that. I'd have a better argument that my home was worth $1 billion if inside the guest bedroom there was USD 1 billion. That'd be a pretty good way to convince buyers that my home's price was pegged to the value of one giga dollar. If it was $900 million in cash and $100 million in IOUs, that'd still convince some people too, so on and so forth. I gather the issues with Tether are a) we don't know just what they have because of a lack of transparency, b) from what we DO know, in chasing yield, they've picked up some higher risk assets that they say are baaaaasically the same as cash (Commercial paper from Chinese real estate developers iirc?) that could be susceptible to losing value in a financial contagion scenario, and therefore be worth less than the dollar put in when Joe Q Crypto wants to take his dollar back out.