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I am largely just responding to the parathesis portion of your post.. Otherwise I largely agree with what seems to be your points.  Hahahahaha..

Tether hating seems to be in your username.

You maybe are coming off as one of those Tether haters, and aren't they labelled as "Tether denialists?" I am not claiming to be a Tether lover, but from my perspective Tether has always seem to defer to bitcoin and recognize bitcoin as the basis for their ability to exist, and surely the Tether deniers have been around since soon after Tether's entrance onto the scene (in 2014-ish). .

...and it seems to me that Tether has beat the pants off of so many of the denialists and the naysayers, including the time in 2016 or so?  I cannot recall exactly when they had something like $800 million stolen from them in some Panamanian financial institutions, likely with winks and nods from branches of the US government trying to figure out how to take Tether down in terms of considering that they were sufficiently vulnerable to financial fuckery...and yeah, US government attacks on USDT while at the same time seeming to reach some agreements with them in terms of some allowance of back doors into tether and getting Tether to lock funds, cooperate with governments, which might even relate to surveillance arrangements, which seems to have had been the arrangement since some of the NY District cases were dropped in the past 4-5 years.

 I am not claiming to having had studied these Tether matters in detail beyond just coming across these various dynamics within the bitcoin related space from time to time in which USDT has become a behemoth and not really seeming to pull some of the shady cozying up to government like the maneuvers that the Circle managers/leaders have been seeming to be inclined to practice.

I also get the impression that the USDT guys are really recognizing and appreciating bitcoin as the superior play, while the Circle guys consider appeals to government authority to be the superior play, and the Circle guys do not seem to hesitate to try to throw bitcoin under the bus when they consider that it might be to their advantage.. maybe partially evidenced by which side of the 2017 blocksize wars that each of these players fell.