Tether price manipulation

Tether however isn't balanced. There is no risk. There is no offsetting liability in the market for the Tether they create (unlike with a short future, which has an offsetting long side).

There's a gradual process to go from hypothesis to theory to fact, and to get there, you need several types of independent evidence. Correlational evidence is okay as one of those.

A correct statement is that correlation is not proof of causation (no matter how strong).

Types of evidence:

* Correlation

* Theoretical basis / strong hypothesis

* Extrapolation

* Interpolation

* Small-scale well-controlled experiments (lab setting)

* Large-scale less controlled experiments (real-world setting)

* Anecdotes

* ... and so on

You want several of those before you start to believe anything, and some are stronger than others. Correlation isn't fundamentally weaker than most of those, though; all of those carry their own methodological issues. The number of times you can have a large-scale perfectly-controlled preregistered randomized control trial with no confounding effects is exceptionally rare (some medical trials, and a few other settings).

However three years on, crypto still does not have a "killer app" and is 99.99% used for speculation. Bitcoin's narrative has had to morph from "digital currency" to "digital gold".

But in the depths of the March panic, Tether jumped the shark in order to backstop the entire crypto ecosystem, and they can never put that genie back in the bottle. Much like the Fed who cannot stop monetizing US deficits for fear of letting yields explode, the Tetheral Reserve must continue to print USDT in order to support prices. Exchanges cannot let this fail since the vast majority do not have access to the bonafide banking system and thus scrappy users must devise "fiat onramps".

There are many theories about why, the predominant one being that iFinex know they are screwed, and are making one last cash grab before presumably disappearing. This sounds fairly reasonable if the entire operation is indeed a sham, but it means there is effectively no upper bound to BTC prices because the denominator in 90% of the market (USDT) is effectively zero.

Tether has become too big to fail. Bitcoin now finds itself a high tech manifestation of the very thing that Satoshi sought to address.

The price of a USDT is 1 dollar. They give out new USDT for $1 a piece.

Sure, they may be spending these dollars elsewhere, thus holding a fractional reserve. Sure this may illegal and get them in trouble.

But this doesn't effect the dollar value for which these USDT's and thus Bitcoins are traded.

As long as a USDT is $1, nobody is manipulating the price.