[exelius]

The vast majority of novice speculators are using Coinbase. They at least attempt to maintain the appearance of compliance; but I suspect a large market run would wipe them out of USD fairly quickly.

The fact that “experienced” Bitcoin speculators are getting nervous is a sign the bubble is about to pop. Tether volumes are hockey-sticking up as a result. There has been enough technical analysis to show that USDT volume drives BTC price and not the other way around. USDT volume is hockey-sticking over the last few weeks. Feels like a Ponzi scheme and the whales are cashing out.

[smokeyj]

The price of one bitcoin is arbitrary. $1 is no more crazy than $1 million. It's all crazy. But the question is, what's the supply and what's the demand.

At some point there will be a correction. This velocity can't be maintained forever. But this is also a technology that heavily relies on going viral to become functional (payments/contracts) - and based on real world interactions I think crypto is heading towards an adoption curve that justifies its price.

[umanwizard]

Bitcoin can never achieve mainstream adoption since the transaction throughput is capped at 3 per second.

Maybe other technologies will, but Bitcoin cannot.

[aggieben]

This is incorrect. Firstly, it's 10 per second. Secondly, it shouldn't be all that hard to imagine "side chains" or even "local-party networks" being built to handle transactions and use the underlying blockchain as a settlement mechanism. This is, as I understand it, how the lightning network works/will work, and I see no reason to think it wouldn't improve Bitcoin's adoption, which is already orders of magnitude better than other cryptos.

[melq]

>Croman, Kyle; Eyal, Ittay (2016). "On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains" (PDF). doi:10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_8. Retrieved December 10, 2017. The maximum throughput is the maximum rate at which the blockchain can confirm transactions. Today, Bitcoin’s maximum throughput is 3.3–7 transactions/sec [1].

1. http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~prateeks/papers/Bitcoin-scaling....

[thinkmassive]

I’d be interested in seeing evidence that USDT “drives” the USD-BTC exchange rate. I do think it’s a good indicator of sentiment about the exchange rate. Typically it’s within $0.02 of its supposed $1.00 value, but today it reached at least $1.08 and is still at $1.06. That means people are willing to pay a 6% premium just to be able to cash out of BTC today.

[mortehu]

Maybe USDT is used in cross exchange arbitrage, where USD would be a lot slower and thus not worth as much.