[hansonkd13]

No they are not. That rationale is a coping strategy at best and deliberately misleading at worst.

Tether is NOT a bank. They are not regulated and have no guarantee that depositors will be paid back. They promise a 1-1 backing and instead of people holding them to their promise their supporters desperately try to compare it to moderns banks.

No. Tether is not a bank. It is not doing fractional reserve banking. It is committing fraud. It’s that simple.

[rglullis]

This, a million times this. Speaking as HN's resident web3 apologist, it's amazing how people keep trying to defend cryptocurrencies based on some anti-finance-system ideology, but throw it all out of the window when it comes to Tether.

Tether is not a bank. Not in the US, not in the Cayman Islands, not anywhere. Everyone holding or trading Tether could be using a test network, and the monetary value of the token should be the same.