Tether actually has one of the better business models out of all of it. They take real dollars, print fake dollars, then buy bonds/treasuries (and gold) with the real dollars.
… and keep the interest from those and their “high value commercial paper.” Now, why this is better than a money market fund, and regulated similarly… no idea.
There are at least two scenarios in which “just a dollar” is a great outcome for someone purchasing a stable coin (assuming that it’s actually stable):
1. You want the convenience of digital coin transfers/payments without the variance of price swings (e.g., recent Bitcoin). This can be especially useful when you have access to a phone but limited or no direct access to modern banking facilities.
2. It’s easy to get your local currency onto an exchange, but it’s not easy or advisable to have a dollar bank account or keep large amounts of dollars in cash in your locale.
3. (I guess for completeness) You want to engage in activities that are of questionable legality (e.g., drug sales in certain places, online poker in most of the US, etc.).
It doesn't make sense for Americans, or anyone with access to a dollar denominated bank account.
For the other 80% of the planet though, it's a game changer. Rough estimate, but feels fair, as outside the US most people can't have one without substantial access to capital.
At the end of the day, it's just another IOU, much like a bank deposit, except instead of getting the 0.1% yield and FDIC (IF you're in the US), you get the ability to transact 24/7 across borders in a much faster manner than even bank wires, let alone ACH payments.
I might flip that given how hard it's been for Claude to deal with longer context tasks like a coding session with iterations vs a single top down diff review.
I have a `codex-review` skill with a shell script that uses the Codex CLI with a prompt. It tells Claude to use Codex as a review partner and to push back if it disagrees. They will go through 3 or 4 back-and-forth iterations some times before they find consensus. It's not perfect, but it does help because Claude will point out the things Codex found and give it credit.
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