I read through the Tether manipulation paper. IMO it made two convincing points:
#1 Someone has a habit of doing this:
- Issuing new USDT
- Within days, moving that USDT to BitFinex, Bittrex, and/or Poloniex
- Using that USDT to buy crypto (seemingly a portfolio of BTC & others). They especially like to buy crypto when the price is just below whole numbers.
- Moving the resulting crypto back to BitFinex
- Rarely or never selling the crypto for USDT again
The authors argue that this is Tether/BitFinex themselves, and I think that this is in fact the most likely explanation. But the authors didn't address the alternative possibility of this being a particularly ham-fisted whale who is a close partner of Tether.
#2 Due to end-of-month trading, Tether has probably always been trading with USD deposited with them (fractional-reserve), though at least until March 2017, USDT was probably not complete monopoly money, since they did go to the effort of achieving an end-of-month USD balance.
The authors also tried to argue some other points which I didn't find convincing.
Meh, theymos I know you've been around this block before.
Notice when these so-called "in-depth analysis" FUD studies come out... never during a bull run, but always
after a confirmed downtrend and usually near the bottom (e.g. Willybot report, anyone? I also distinctly remember another example in mid 2014 where some well known financial institution did some "in-depth analysis" to determine the true fair market price of bitcoin forever : $1100
).
It's not the content that is suspect. It's the
timing. These "studies" are designed to do one thing, and that is to keep Average Joe sidelined at the precise time he should be accumulating.
