The beauty of all of this is Bitfinex, and most other exchanges for that matter, are all black boxes. No audits, no regulations, nothing. To my knowledge all the trading on their platform happens off-chain, only going "on chain" when somebody deposits or withdraws their crypto coins. The only visibility we have is what goes into and out of any known wallet.

These exchanges could be pulling all kinds of shenanigans including outright making shit up. What is stopping them from buying / selling more bitcoin then they actually have? If an exchange wanted to pocket some real cash, just sell some bitcoin they don't have. How about just creating fake buy / sell orders to drum up some excitement? Or better, just do real trades back and forth between yourself. Once you add Tether into the mix and abstract away real cash inputs and outputs things get even more exciting. An exchange could start buying bitcoin with unbacked USDT to jack up / stabilize the BTC price--works great so long as everybody doesn't all try to convert their USDT to real cash dollars.

Since they are all completely unaudited, exchanges could be pulling this stuff all the time.

Tether makes this 10x more exciting though.