In other words, I’ll be happy if bitcoin crashes from Tether (I believe it will, probably to well under $20,000) - that is nothing more than a huge buying opportunity.
This asymmetry in information alone should be reason to have them eliminated from the market as soon as possible.
But that has nothing to do with the long-term valuation of cryptocurrency. The part I object to, which is what many of the earlier comments are trying to say, is some version of “Tether & wash trading is bad, therefore bitcoin is nothing but hype / fake scams.”
Yeah, yeah, I get it. No one can really know the true price of BTC. It's all speculation. Nothing to back it up... what else do you have?
Understand this: there is a large number of people that will keep working with BTC (and crypto) regardless of price and current market conditions. There is a large number of people that don't care about the price. People will keep building things on crypto, regardless of price and it will become more and more of an alternative to existing financial/economical systems.
How can Tether have a daily trading volume of almost 100 bln on a supply of 'just' 24 bln? Seems rather obvious that the vast majority of crypto trades are done by HFT algos and not people (or worse, that the actual supply of Tether is much higher than the reported supply).
You can't deny that Tether is a very essential component in the crypto markets. It is also an unregulated, unaudited private entity operating outside western jurisdictions, with a long history of controversies: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/10/28/tether-and-bitfinex/
Hardly the group you'd want managing a global currency system.
Yes, I completely agree what Tether is doing is criminal and that they will likely be responsible for the next crash.
The question is: so what? The important thing about crypto is its anti-fragility. Every crash brought a correction that made the system more robust and less prone to be extinct.
It's not going to be crypto's first crash and it is certainly not going to be the last.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/UniSwap/comments/l43yka/what_happen...
