"As I thought more about the giant volcano of crypto bullshit erupting at Crypto Bahamas, I realized that Tether was its molten core. Each scheme depended on exchanges like FTX to enable investors to buy and sell their tokens. And those exchanges in turn counted on Tether as a crucial connection to real US dollars. Without Tether, it was possible this entire economy would never have developed." Zeke Faux, NUMBER GO UP, p. 135. Well, perhaps that is an overstatement. Someone else would have come up with something similar had the founders of Tether -- Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins, and Craig Sellars -- all been busy on quite different paths. Somebody would have created coins that stayed close in value to the US dollar, while otherwise bearing the technological features of the cryptos, otherwise very volatile against the dollar. Still: Faux's book is largely a tale of how the Tether coin was built on a lie -- that there was a one-to-one relationship between ev...