> Tether is a fundamentally a risk free money making concept

To me it sounds like you don't really understand the risks of tethers business. It is light-years away from being risk free, because you are on the mercy of the banks where you store the fiat. The banks can freeze your money any time, as they now did (AFAIK).

If you are operating a business with unclear regulation at this level, you can't really rely on banks like normal businesses can. The banks will cause problems with pretty high probability.

They are probably using anything that there is available as a currency replacement. I would bet that mostly physical USD, but also gold, bitcoin, cigarettes etc. I don't think gold is the main replacement when national currency starts hyperinflating, just a tool among others.

The point of money, currency or any financial asset is to produce value to your life. If you think bitcoin will develop in value, it makes sense to spend less-valuable assets before those bitcoins, but at some point you probably want to use your bitcoins as well for living. Money should be a tool to enable nice life, you shouldn't live for money.

Of course they might also enable bitcoin withdrawals/deposits but I somewhat doubt it. There are similar offerings on other traditional platforms and usually they work this way.

Banks can fuck up and go bust. It doesn't happen often but it happens.

Most of the banks assets are not liquid, such as the loans they have lent out. Banks quite often have problems that they give credit out too easily, which leads to the situation where their assets aren't worth much. They often also give loans to the stakeholders of the bank which makes it a bit sketchy.

In my opinion having assets like house loans is pretty far away from being "backed". If enough customers want their money out, bank can go bust. If they have lent the money to wrong people, they also can go bust. Banks go bust now and then.

I wouldn't see the risk of being an employee and founder as similar. Typically often founders are for time periods without salary etc. Early employee should just consider it as a job with more risk of the company going down under (that risk also exists in more established company). You can request more salary for the job or some additional perks (such as options).

I think for the employee the risks of joining to startup are quite easy to manage compared to a founder.

Generally there seems to be lots of people who don't use cryptocurrencies and think that they don't solve any problems - OK whatever, don't use them, but there are loads of people using cryptocurrencies for whatever and your opinions are not objective measure on their value.

Hurting might be the wrong term. Analogy would be something like having some bonus card which gives you 2% off for every purchase. Some people obsess about having that kind of card, but most people wouldn't care, because it is only 2%. Obviously the 2% difference isn't "hurting" most people, more like very small tax.

Btw there are cashback credit cards which give back something like 0,5% to 1%, I wonder how popular those are...