Bitcoin goes up when bad news about Tether is forthcoming. I wonder if bitcoin makes a new all time high the day before Tether executives are charged with bank fraud! Or, maybe instead of pumping the market they run away with the money and fake their deaths?

What kills a Ponzi scheme is a run on the pot of assets being held by the schemers. As long as people continue to believe the numbers in their phones represent real money they can extract at any time the scheme will continue indefinitely, unless the gov't starts arresting people.

A de-centralized database with public write access will not go away. It's use cases are limited to people who value censorship resistance over efficiency, which is a small number of people, but it isn't 0 people. Blockchain will not go away completely.

In light of all the power shortages in China, where did all those Bitcoiners arguing that mining operations were using exclusively excess energy that would otherwise be wasted go? Are we all just going to ignore how dishonest they were?