if you ask me this is a very good thing that is happening with Bitfinex and their Tether recently.
we have all known that Bitfinex and Tether are shady and should not be trusted but somewhere along the line people started forgetting that and instead trusted more and more in USDT to the point where some of them even hold Tether whenever their favorite altcoin is getting dumped pretty hard. incidents like this can help wake everyone up to see what Tether is and stop risking their money in it and only use it for very special cases like transferring fiat between exchanges.
It is not forgetting, it is stupidity.
With MtGox we had days in advance, with Bitconnect we had days in advance, with Bitfinex we have years in advance.
If that happens then it will only be thanks to their stupidity!
i honestly wouldn't call it "stupidity" (apart from the bitconnect thing which wasn't an exchange). i call it lack of other better options. and that is the case for everyone who trades on these exchanges. they don't have anywhere else to go, others are just as bad if not worse so they remain where they are even when there is red flags since there are red flags there most of the times.
The thing that most people seem to miss about the "hacks" that happen with exchanges is that most of the time people are there to actively trade their cryptos, not people just storing it on the exchange as a replacement for a wallet. I know I was guilty of thinking that people used exchanges as wallets in the past, and I know better than that now. Regardless of that, it always comes down to the fact that almost no-one is expecting something to happen when it does. Then a bunch of people go "I told you so" despite the fact that it's always spontaneous and rarely predictable.
Either way, you should always be able to control your private keys, and it prevents anything bad from happening to you, at least most of the time, but you can't always have access to them. Just don't put what you can't afford to lose into exchanges I guess.
