[shiado]

The mechanics of manipulating price are just too easy not to do it. The wash trading is clearly so bad on many exchanges that I bet there are agreements with the miners to recuperate losses to trading fees. It is in all parties interest to prop the price up this way so why wouldn't they do it. So many sketchy things get ignored because they prop the price up.

The USDT situation will get interesting eventually. Somebody made a spreadsheet of non-fiat volume of cryptocurrencies.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pIrTYpJZrGbeI9QTIWGw...

Basically the fate of many shitcoins are tied together. My thought is that when USDT finally gets revealed as totally fraudulent the whole crypto house of cards crashes.

[chrisco255]

Tether will just be replaced by other stable coins if it turns out that Bitfinex can't back them if there were a run on Tethers (the only scenario we would find if this were actually true). There are alternative stable coins which will rise to compete with Tether and balance out the market, including Circle's USDC (https://blog.circle.com/2018/05/15/circle-announces-usd-coin...) and the ETH/Gold-backed MakerDAI: (https://makerdao.com/).

[owenversteeg]

Huh, that's interesting. So when it says "USD Volume 700mm" does that mean 700MM was actually exchanged from BTC to USD or vice versa? Does a pair of trades USD-BTC-USD count double?