$BTC & $Tether, A Partnership Made In Hell

In the absence of Bitcoiners creating an honest & open economy on BTC, iFinex Corporation (parent company to Bitfinex, Tether & all of their subsidiaries) colluded with their partners to conjure up limitless liquidity out of thin air 1/

While BTC advocates and maximalists criticise the money-printers of the Federal Reserve out of one side of their mouth, they insulate Tether ( $USDT ) from criticism, & defend it violently out of the other! 2/

Tether has been under investigation for over 5 years due to their inability to SECURE banking partners, REGISTERED custodians or SUBMIT to third party audit. As such, rumors of their fractional reserve holdings made their way to various offices of financial regulation 3/

enforcement, & ultimately to the NY Attorney General’s Office. In 2019, Tether was forced to admit that the USDT coin is only backed 74% by cash “& short term securities,” calling into question the reserves from which any of BTC’s liquidity & price action is derived. 4/

In 2020, the supply of Tether has gone up over 400% & the rate of inflation of the supply of Tether is increasing. In late Nov/early Dec, Tether added nearly 1B dollars to the circulating supply amid increasing pressure from the NYAG’s office to come clean about the nature of 5/

their reserves especially since both retail & institutional investors have fiat rails on which to buy BTC if they choose. Why spend USD to buy USDT to buy BTC, if you could simply buy BTC directly from USD with registered custodians, OTC desks or directly from mining pools? 6/

Research has shown that Tether isn’t being used to make purchases at all, but rather Tether exists specifically for wash trading on & between VC-owned exchanges to stabilize & pump the price of BTC artificially in order to cash out real fiat currency from the private ledgers 7/

of those exchanges by connected insiders. Around 95% of BTC trading volume is faked, according to the Wall Street Journal, which begs the question: how much of BTC’s price is truly stored value at all? 8/