I thought that what people call a "currency peg" is normally the same as what you are calling "maintained purely by supply manipulation". So I suspect you may be using words in a nonstandard way.
Not here, not the way tether is set up. Its claim is that its peg is concrete and reliable in the way a floating peg is not, because every tether is backed by a real dollar in a bank account, and in theory is redeemable.
I'm saying that I have the impression that some countries have a currency that is pegged to the dollar, and they maintain dollar reserves, but not one for one. And people do not say that is "floating", but that it is not floating. So it becomes misleading if you start defining a peg as requiring one for one reserves and being "floating" otherwise. There's no downside to using terminology that is clear to other people, unless you are trying to be deceptive.
I'm not making these claims you seem to think I am.
I am 100%, absolutely, positively not saying 1:1 backing is required for a currency peg.
I am saying that in the case of tether, that is the explicit claim they are making about their cryptocurrency. They are claiming that each and every one is backed by a dollar in their account. This is their value proposition, this is what you are buying when you buy tether. An open, audited, 1:1 backed US dollar token * .
Please go and read their homepage if you have some sort of issue with this, it's right there at https://tether.to/
The idea is very much that you can park money in tether and it's not vulnerable to a run on the currency and it cannot drop below a dollar, because each one has a corresponding dollar in an account.
(* unfortunately they are not very open and have never been audited)
