Can you, or maybe someone else, please, explain in more detail how the disappearance of Tether can affect the current Bitcoin price in a negative way? I mean, traders can use other stable coins if they like them so much, right?
Tether is by far the most dominant stablecoin in the market. The few other stablecoins don't have the economical mass and adoption needed to support the market.
From the 2.8 billion tokens it has in circulation, more than half of that is being used to rotate through Bitcoin exchanges providing a lot of buy support. It's also money that will not be cashed out because of how distributed it is amongst traders world wide. The only way to cash out is to suck off Bitfinex, and who's going to do that nowadays? They probably don't even have the fiat left to actually allow you to withdraw fiat.
In other words, people just sit on their USDT hoping for a dump to buy Bitcoin, and this is basically a never ending cycle.
Also, considering the current total market cap, $170 billion, how disappearance of $3 billion worth of tokens can affect the market significantly?
What am I missing here?
The total crypto market cap is fake and extremely leveraged. Fake as in the far majority of the altcoins having huge market caps due to their billions of circulating units, and leveraged because of how a little amount of money can pump this market to the moon, because it's super illiquid.
Bitfinex in the past has shown that a 50-100 million USDT injection is enough to pump the price with 10% and that was when the price hovered above $6000. What it meant for Bitcoin was that 50-100 million USDT was enough to increase its market cap with +$10 billion. And as you know, Bitcoin up = altcoins up, so that inflates the global market cap even further.