When you do want to cash out to real fiat, you have to sell to USD.
USDT allows a large number of exchanges to allow you to sell BTC and hold in something that looks like USD. Without USDT a number of exchanges won't see anywhere near the volume they get. By enabling a larger volume, USDT is indirectly helping inflate BTC (and other currencies) price.
Why not just sell BTC for USD, and keep the USD balance that you get in the exchange? You can buy-back once the price drops. You don't have to wire transfer the money out, the exchange will happily keep it on their books for you.
If your exchange can't keep USD on their books, there's something seriously wrong with the exchange, and you should probably look into taking your business somewhere else.
Yes, I get that. But as you mentioned this is "short term". How does it explain that Tether is printing more and more Tethers? Do you think more and more people are selling BTC for USDT for a "short term"? We are talking about billions here.
The demand for Tethers is high because the demand to be able to trade is high.
> Do you think more and more people are selling BTC for USDT for a "short term"?
More and more people have been getting involved in trading as the price of Bitcoin and other cryptos was spiking. Now those people are in the market, but Bitcoin has been dropping. It makes sense that a lot of them would want to hold a USD proxy under these circumstances.
Of course, that's the optimistic scenario. It's also possible that There's are being used fraudulently to pump BTC. Without proper transparency, it's impossible to be sure.
My point is: How can you pump BTC with USDT? You need somebody to buy your USDT if you want to sell USDT. In fact, you need somebody to buy an enormous amout of USDT if you want to pump BTC.
Pumping BTC is not a one sided thing, and I fail to understand the other side. What I get from this thread is that that nobody really knows who is buying the 100 million USDT per week.
Get people to believe it's backed 1:1 by USD when it's not, so that it is viewed as equivalent to USD but less problematic in regulatory terms, and then print a bunch of unbacked USDT and use them to buy BTC. To the market, the effect is as if a whole lot more actual USD were chasing BTC, effectively looking like higher demand.
But who is buying and HOLDING the USDT? Sorry that I repeat myself but this is the whole point I want to understand.
Yes, somebody is selling USDT for BTC, I get that. It is nice but I want to understand the other side. Who is buying USDT for BTC? Why? Somewhere there is a billion of USDT lying around. Somebody bought it. Somebody is keeping it. WHY is somebody keeping it? Why is somebody buying more and more of it?
I think it is a very crucial point to understand. Yes, maybe you can convice some fools to sell their BTC for USDT. But they will notice, because there is nothing that you can do with USDT except buying BTC. So they will BTC again and try to cash out somewhere else. So who is holding the one billion of USDT?
Total Tether issued as of the end of January 2018 is about 2.3 billion.
I think you may not realize how large the market has become. The top 6 biggest exchanges are currently trading more than $10 billion worth of cryptocurrencies daily, and there are many more that trade $100s of millions daily.
If that volume is sustained (it reached a peak recently with the price spike), it would put the annual trading volume well into the trillions, perhaps around $5 trillion.
100 million USDT per week seems pretty reasonable (if not small) to support that kind of activity.
Could very well be. BTC is on a general downward trend, almost as low now as it was in November. If people think that seeing 18k again in the next couple of months is likely, then why not?
But what we are seeing does not look like a temporary move. All the printed USDT are "somewhere", and I want to understand where and why.
I'm sorry, but I cannot follow.
Let's say you want to sell a BTC, current worth about 10k. So you go to a shady exchange, click sell and 10k of USDT appear in your account.
Good, but what is the next step? The next thing you will notice that there is nothing that you can buy for your USDT. You cannot buy a house, you cannot buy a car, you cannot even buy food. The only thing that you can buy for USDT is BTC (or some other cryptocurrency). This is the only thing you can do next.
And the BTC is even worth more than the USDT, because there are actually people willing to sell you stuff for BTC.
But let's assume for a moment that people are really hodling USDT. This would mean that there is an increasing amount of such people, because Tether is printing more and more and more of USDT. This means there needs to be an increasing demand of USDT, and I really cannot see where this is coming from.