Crypto Market: it will get worse before it's getting better

The immutability of the blockchain is a great way to engrave some predictions and this is what I'm going to do now.

The last week has been great in terms of crypto prices, we haven't seen this much gains since more than a year. In fact, the last time that Bitcoin was over $8000 was back in last July. But unfortunately those gains weren't really sustainable. Easy come, easy go. But well, that's (crypto) live.

People were happy, or at least getting quite optimistic again. But the enthusiasm lasted only for a couple of days: earlier today the price of Bitcoin dropped $500 in ~30 minutes and over 9% in the last 24 hours (at the time of writing this post). If you are asking yourself where this sudden and rapid dip came from, I think it is because of the latest developments surrounding Tether.

There is still the sword of Damocles aka Tether hanging above all crypto markets, waiting to fall down. If (or better when) it will come down, it will cause some serious damage. I really can't say how much, but I assume that the consequences will be devastating. The bottom of the current bear market was around $3200 back in last December, I'm afraid that Bitcoin (and thus the whole market) will go even lower than that. I would be happy if I'm wrong, but I'm afraid that we haven't seen how low it could go yet. Check out Chico Crypto, a crypto YouTube I can highly recommend, because he points out shady practices and bad actors in the space (while being very entertaining to watch). The part about Tether starts at 7:54.

Tether being shady shouldn't be much of a surprise for anyone who is following crypto for a while. There are a lot of things wrong with Tether and I don't even know where to start. Tether embodies so many things, that are against the core values of crypocurrencies: it is basically some kind of very non-transparent, centralised bank that never got a proper audit. They claimed that Tether is 1:1 backed by Dollars, but since this March we know, that this is not true and it might be backed by something else (meaning that they can't really keep their original claim). Tether was founded by Brock Pierce, a very shady individual, to say the least. Check out this interview with him, where he talks about Tether. The interesting part starts at 3:20, where he talks about suing people who talk bad about Tether ("spreading FUD"), saying that Tether "hasn't done anything wrong", only to correct himself in the same sentence into "provably wrong yet":

If you want to learn more about the history of Tether, I can also recommend this video, again by Chico Crypto, from last November, where he also especially points out everything that is wrong with it:

While I think that stable coins in general are a good thing, Tether for sure is not. If you want a good (and decentralised) stable coin, check out MakerDAO. Even though I know, that Tether collapsing would be a catastrophe for crypto as whole, I think that it might not be the worst thing to happen, since it means that there is one less bad (and powerful) actor in the crypto space.