The US Treasury Department recently froze $344 million held by Iran’s central bank, in two digital wallets that contained Tether (USDT) Stablecoins.
Tether cooperated with Treasury in these actions, intended to shut off Iranian sales of oil.
Stablecoins were promoted as alternatives to traditional banks, and are in wide use outside the United States.
Tether is the largest stablecoin, with transaction volumes higher than Visa and MasterCard, and assets of hundreds of billions of dollars in US Treasury bonds, gold, and other investments.
Stablecoins were also perceived as decentralized, and outside the reach of regulators and governments, except in cases of egregious criminal violations.
Crypto market players reacted violently to the news of the freeze, and (truly decentralized) Bitcoin has traded sharply higher since.
Hey, you know why Tether is called a stablecoin?
spoiler
'Cause it’s full of horseshit
imagine becoming the exact thing you swore you were there to counteract.
In other words, today is a Monday.
Stablecoins were also perceived as […] outside the reach of regulators and governments, except in cases of egregious criminal violations.
So not outside the reach of regulators or governments.
Mo. Ne. Ro.
this article he links is pretty good
https://no01.substack.com/p/the-cbdc-we-already-have
Nine months. That’s the gap between signing the GENIUS Act and demonstrating to every sovereign on earth that USDT is freezable on demand. The first cycle of this pattern, SWIFT becoming a strategic asset and then a sanctions weapon, took about thirty years. The dollar reserve system, eighty. Western gold custody, considerably longer. Each iteration runs faster than the last.
[…]
The pattern is hard to miss at this point. SWIFT was sold as neutral plumbing. They weaponised it anyway. Dollar reserves were sold as the global safe asset. They froze Russian reserves anyway. Western custody of foreign gold was sold as inviolable. They blocked Venezuelan repatriation anyway (link). And now stablecoins were sold as the workaround, the alternative built specifically to recover the foreign demand the previous weaponisations destroyed - and they’ve been used the same way before the cement on the GENIUS Act has dried.
This is good for Bitcoin
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
