Despite all the bad press, shady exchanges, bubbles and busts, a large amount of BTC owners don't sell, and that alone will drive it's price up. Other cryptos, I can't speak for.
It's not the asking price that determines market rates, nor is it the price that people who aren't currently selling believe their assets are worth. It's the price at which active buyers are willing to buy.
One of the challenges with price discovery in the BTC market, though, is that there's not really an effective mechanism to prevent wash trades in place. That means that all you need to do to create a bunch of fraudulent liquidity at a higher price is create a sock puppet account and start trading with yourself. Anyone sitting on a hoard of BTC is highly incentivized to do this to try and prevent their on-paper losses in the hope that it will mitigate their becoming real losses. And that can concievably become the bulk of BTC trading volume if there isn't a steady supply of new people who are willing to buy in to Bitcoin at any price.
if you trade with yourself you still have to pay transaction fees to the cluster. Every transaction would incur a loss.
>And that can concievably become the bulk of BTC trading volume if there isn't a steady supply of new people who are willing to buy in to Bitcoin at any price.
that would end up just slowly transferring all of the BTC to miners as transaction fees... what a scam!
>Even US regulators looked into that and found nothing - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/23/tether-bitfinex-reach-settle...
This feels extremely dishonest. They paid a fine/settlement, and are literally no longer allowed to do business in NY lol. Same as trump's businesses. I wouldn't call that finding nothing. You don't pay a 20m fine to regulators and get banned from doing business in the state, if they found nothing lol.
> USDT / Tether came out recently with the proof of reserves.
Do you have a link for this? All I could find is an "attestation" of reserves from a few months ago but could not find any evidence of an audit by a third party that might constitute "proof".
Key stats: "Cash & Cash Equivalent & Other Short-Term Deposits" are $73,567,577,334 (out of total assets of $86,499,251,218). Remaining assets are precious metals ($3,270,216,824), bitcoin ($1,676,229,360), corporate bonds ($115,496,758) etc.
It is no rocket science to see why USDT is in black now - with 83B USDT, they have that much cash available to park in T-bills and earn 5+% interest just like that. Even if they were in a hole a few years back, they would have recovered over the last 12-18 months when interest rates started rising.
One of the challenges with price discovery in the BTC market, though, is that there's not really an effective mechanism to prevent wash trades in place. That means that all you need to do to create a bunch of fraudulent liquidity at a higher price is create a sock puppet account and start trading with yourself. Anyone sitting on a hoard of BTC is highly incentivized to do this to try and prevent their on-paper losses in the hope that it will mitigate their becoming real losses. And that can concievably become the bulk of BTC trading volume if there isn't a steady supply of new people who are willing to buy in to Bitcoin at any price.