Given this all-caps disclaimer, I wouldn't exactly be reassured that USDC would be worth anything in the event Coinbase went out of business:

"USDC IS NOT LEGAL TENDER. USDC IS A DIGITAL CURRENCY AND COINBASE HAS NO RIGHT TO USE ANY USDC YOU HOLD ON COINBASE. COINBASE IS NOT A DEPOSITORY INSTITUTION, AND YOUR USDC WALLET IS NOT A DEPOSIT ACCOUNT. YOUR USDC WALLET IS NOT INSURED BY THE FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION (FDIC) OR THE SECURITIES INVESTOR PROTECTION CORPORATION (SIPC)."

(https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/getting-started/genera...)

Chuck-E-Cheese tokens are US regulated so... my point being of course that just because something is under US jurisdiction doesn't make it "good as gold" so to speak. The structure of the underlying implement is what matters.

Because regulation worked SO WELL in numerous cases anyone could name (Enron, Worldcom, Authur Anderson, Lehman Brothers...)

No it's not. That's a common misconception, but the studies show that USD is used about 100x more than cryptocurrencies for crime. This is because:

1. Criminals don't want their activities to be tracked on a public ledger. Cash is anonymous. Bitcoin is not.

2. Criminals already have money laundering systems in-place, and relationships with corrupt bankers.

3. Cash is accepted at more places. So it's more useful to have.

We're talking trillions of dollars in USD crime here. It's not even close.

> but they all trade extremely close to parity with one another. Which means that they are all considered relatively safe by the people actually holding them.

trading rather than holding. The people doing the trades are the ones determining the pricing. The people holding are reducing the supply of the asset in the market, but they're not actively participating in pricing of trades.

Bitcoin is a monetary asset with no underlying fundamental value. Transaction volume is meaningless. The only thing that matters is what someone is willing to pay for it.

There are at least three reasons why USDC could become unstable:

1. Pegged value currencies are subject to Soros-breaking-the-Pound style attacks.

2. USDC is based on Ethereum, a first-generation cryptocurrency with numerous design flaws, at both the protocol and scripting language level. On top of that is an increasingly complex network of DeFi apps which can be exploited in sophisticated ways, as we saw with recent multi-part hack across several DeFi apps.

3. The US Dollar itself may be heading into a period of instability, given the massive US Govt debt and Federal Reserve operations.

You can stick your head in the sand and pretend stablecoins are stable, or you can acknowledge they’re more likely one more in a long history of financial folly.

I'll believe that when I see an audit.

"stable" currency isn't "stable" because it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Populations grow, economies expand, efficiency increases. If I have $1 in 1919 when the GDP was $500B (and there were only 100M people) vs $16T (nominal), and I sock it in a drawer, I now own a much, much larger share of the US money economy than I did. I didn't earn it, I just held onto it. I accumulated value by virtue of "I got there first, sucks to be you."

There's no good reason to encourage value generation through inaction. That's one of the many good reasons to have abandoned deflationary currencies.