Tether is a love-hate story for me. On one hand, I absolutely LOVE the altcoin "token's" concept: rather than secure your gains in fiat (ie. trackable) currencies, you can instead secure them with cryptocurrency assets.
In other words, Tether provides a hedging opportunity.
On the other hand, Tether is incredibly, unbelievably risky.
Last year, a story broke that Tether could be "fake news," that the entire cryptocurrency was vapor.
Essentially, that would translate to this crypto hedge having an asymptotically infinite market valuation.
Of course, the folks behind Tether have denied this charge, and have also denied similar rumors that sprouted several weeks ago.
But when will Tether collapse, or will it?
Here's the quandary for me. Tether represents conservation of energy: if I take some STEEM coin, for instance, and convert them to Tether, I don't have to worry about price fluctuations.
Say I converted STEEM to Tether at $3. Tomorrow, the price falls to $2. At $2, I can still of course sell STEEM and convert them to other cryptocurrency or altcoin assets.
However, why do that if I can sell Tether at $3, and buy more of those same blockchain tokens?
Naturally, this all goes to shit if Tether does collapse!
This is a tough one.
It can be an incredibly shrewd maneuver, or you can end up looking like a dumbass.