Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say
I am fully prepared to receive negative points for this comment, but I do not believe there is anything new here. This narrative has been pushed by the media for almost a year now. The article even claims:<p>&gt; This method is not conclusive, but it has helped government authorities and academics spot suspicious activity in the past.<p>I haven’t read the entire 66 page report yet, but assume for a second that the relationship between Tether and US dollars is 1:1. This would mean that during a bull market, when the price started to decline, big players invested money to buy up the available supply. Nothing about that seems suspicious to me. They may have chosen to use Tether instead of US dollars for any reason. Perhaps because there are more exchanges that have USDT trading pairs than there are with USD pairs. Or perhaps because it made arbitrage easier (transferring USDT from one exchange to another is much simpler than USD where you would have to first move it to a bank account then wait days for a new transfer to take place).<p>There is a chart at the end of the report that shows that the Tether issuance continued to increase even as the BTC price was falling. Also it shows that less than 25% of BTC trading volume came from Tether while over 60% came from USD (page 38).<p>It is funny that claiming that the price decline in BTC since December is manipulation will lead to you getting flamed here and people will tell you that it is just going to its “natural value of zero”, but the idea that there was a conspiracy to pump up the price last year is greeted with open arms, and everyone latches onto it (The reality is probably somewhere in between). The math regarding Bitcoin’s price increase is actually pretty sound, and I encourage anyone who disagrees to read this article:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-crypto-times&#x2F;why-is-everyone-investing-in-bitcoin-1e8d88fe6b3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-crypto-times&#x2F;why-is-everyone-investin...</a><p>---<p>As a side note, I think if you said this exact same thing about the stock market, it would not be big news at all: “US dollars were used to pump up the stock market after it experienced big dips”. And meanwhile BTC is 0.3% the size of the stock market.