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Comment by jkhdigital | Hacker News Reader

Tether is Tether. Bitcoin is Bitcoin. The fact that exchanges exist which allow you to trade one for the other does not make them the same kind of thing.

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No one would care how many Bitcoin they had without an exchange rate.

Tether printing is a convenient way to inflate the exchange rate. Remove Tether printing and the exchange rate falls.

As long as people talk about Bitcoin in terms of the exchange rate, Tether and Bitcoin are deeply connected.

No it would not, plenty of stablecoins to take it's place, or just crypto/crypto ratios.

That assumes that Tether is being honest and not printing unbacked coins to drive the price up.

So, no, it would still tank the price, because the price is quite likely inflated through fraud.

Let's not ignore major funds and companies investing in BTC like crazy, that's what is propping up the price not the "Tether scam" that's being going on for 5 years unproven.

If I could buy tulips on cryptoexchanges with freshly printed Tether, I could bid the price of tulips up. If the majority of tulip trades took place on crypto exchanges and much of that was bidding the price up with newly printed Tether, tulips would be exactly as useful as before, but cost a lot more. As such, if Tether were to collapse, people's bulbs would be worth a lot less. Tulips would still be tulips, but they'd be part of a Tether bubble.

Remind me, what percentage of Bitcoin trades happens in Tether, again?

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