Thinking about the conceptual realm of Cryptoexchangea in relation to the history of poker it seems there is analogy to Full Tilt Poker. Full Tilt was a favorite among online poker players for providing well run, fun, profitable, and secure games. The main reason Full Tilt is believed to have been favored by the general player pool is because it was run by professional players itself. But Full Tilt was eventually shut down by the US FBI/DOJ and accused of running a ponzi scheme.
One of the problems with their inner workings was they that were allegedly loaning large amounts money to its staff of poker players for the purpose of gambling on the site.
I have always compared online poker sites to banks or exchanges as they essentially function the same way.
There is a comparable game here to observe if we think of Full Tilt poker as a bank, which could offer good or bad loans to professional players that could use the poker tables to make “deals”, involving chips and probabilities, with other players.
Exchanges have different levels of security and have a healthy level of liquidity is often important. When Jimmy Song and Tone Vays interviewed Bitfinex’d they were admittedly confused by the in rush of “knights” that seemed to want to emphatically support the Tether program even though it is admittedly ultimately (or effectively) true that the Tether reserves cannot be proven to exist.
This phenomenon of knights is simply a product of the relationship between exchanges need for market liquidity security and the knight’s (traders) profiting from the benefits of Tether and a deeper more decentralized Cryptoexchangea that Tether has helped foster.
These knights have a solemn duty towards their specific “castle” but they each swear oath (recognize) sthat they must also tend towards the existence of a free market Cryptoexchangea otherwise their specific castle couldn’t exist anyways.
The result is, in our view, that Full Tilt does not appear to have been a Ponzi scheme, as defined. ~http://www.kordamentha.com/docs/for-publications/issue-12-02-online-poker.pdf?Status=Master