Tether is certainly not a hedge, Tether isn't actually anything at all. Tether is simply a notion that something, somewhere has that amount in fiat, and that notion is kind of laughable or they would already have allowed an independent audit and continued to allow US customers to use it.
Yes, user activity is good, but not all new users are necessarily interested in being a price support for those who want to sell, nor are they fully capable of absorbing the volume of sell-side pressure (or we would have seen them do so at previous price levels).
I honestly think that, because of the exchanges steem and sbd are traded on, and the price action I've seen on other coins that have been pumped, that it's highly likely we'll see a return to the price before certain entities took an interest in boosting the price. That won't mean the end of steemit, but steemit's reputation is on the line and they're going to have to do a lot more than what they're planning with hard fork 20 to save it and the value of a steem coin.
Tether can be used as a hedge, if you are able to exit your position fast enough. However, I agree that its total BS, and I personally wouldn't risk using them to try and buy the dips.
I hold 95% of my crypto in BTC, and don't bother moving in and out of trades since this requires a lapse of security, and moving a lot through exchanges that I cannot trust.
If SMT's roll out successfully, I don't think we will have to worry about Steem price correcting this low again. I read the whitepaper, but am not sure if our SP here translates to much on other sites that will issue their own coin on the Steem blockchain.
_Rob
Smart move in not moving.
I guess the same general notion can be applied to users on steemit. At least with the internal market structure they can just play around with sbd and steem locally and not have to risk exposure to external exchanges, even though they might miss out on profit-taking, they'd also avoid the situation of getting their money completely trapped or stolen.
Yeah, some good SMTs might add some baseline value and demand for steem, but it might become an issue like other coins have where parallel economies don't elicit strong demand for the root one.