Nice article. On one hand I worry a great deal about Tether and that they either can't or don't want to get an audit done. On the flip side I think that even if it collapsed at its current size it is smaller than MtGox was when it happened and the whole Bitconnect fiasco lost essentially that much in market cap and still we chug along.

My bigger concern is that I feel like we really need something like Tether but with real transparency run by a company willing to be regulated. Note that the regulation doesn't have to be government. It could be a consortium of all of the major exchanges and possibly some other large businesses that can keep each other in check.

It is interesting to think about the current state as far as exchanges go. If there is no way to change USDT to USD on an exchange then it probably doesn't matter much to the exchange. For instance on bittrex you can wire a minimum of 100k to have them purchase tether for you. Assuming they wire the money to tether and then receive and credit you with 100k USDT they lose nothing if the value of USDT goes to .01 the next day. If someone sends in 100k tether and then buys BTC it isn't as if bittrex sold them the BTC. It is another customer that now holds that tether and again if they become worthless it really isn't the exchanges concern since they never told you you had dollars in your account.