A result proving that the capacity conjecture of Ben-Sasson, Carmon, Ishai, Kopparty and Saraf (J. ACM '23) is false. This conjecture is being used by quite a few zkVM projects, to reduce their proof size and verifier time.
That isn't a vague strawman, that's a great point. Economists work from assumptions, which can be flawed in two ways: they can be blatantly wrong (see the work Kahneman and Tversky did on the rational individual hypothesis) and they can be unfalsifiable (you can't always gather data about the assumption itself). There is a good essay on this from Tirole (yet a very mainstream economist) here: https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...
Not only tether is a "thing", its actually in the top 10 US bonds buyer. So this "thing" isn't a business anymore, but an actual, proper, geopolitical actor.