If This Is The Cryptocurrency Lehman Moment, I Want To Know Who’s Going To Jail
Boy, oh boy. It's really getting ugly now.
Earlier this morning, we noted that according to an online purveyor of gold coins (always a reliable source), folks were scrambling around on Tuesday to figure out how to convert their rapidly depreciating make-believe internet money into carefully-polished, shiny paperweights.
While we're no fans of gold (which has value only because there's a finite supply of it and because humanity has a childlike fascination with shiny yellow things), but it's obv
It is worth going over some tether related things if we’re talking about the price going to 0 anytime soon. Its clear that unless exchanges who route their liquidity through tether are forced to stop using tether, the price will not go to zero. If new tethers can continue to be printed, tether and therefore bitfinex will have significant enough price control that they can continue to seed bull trends like in the past. In the case this continues, it is only a question of how much tether they can continue to print. Currently there are roughly 1.75 billion tethers in circulation: https://wallet.tether.to/transparency.
You can see which accounts hold the most tether on tether’s own site: https://wallet.tether.to/richlist. Note the exchanges.
If you believe tethers are fake, an interesting theory re: bitfinex is that they covered their tether-based liquidity with short positions on btc futures during this uhhhh downturn.
A paper recently theorized one individual likely drove the price of BTC from $150 to $1,000 in earlier days. Neil Gandal, JT Hamrick, Tyler Moore, and Tali Oberman have written a “Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem” and appeared in the recent issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics.