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Bitcoin is not in a stable state. Price rises every time Tether decides to fabricate 20-30 million dollars they don't have, which coincidentally happens every time bitcoin starts to lose steam and the price drops a little.

> no major exchange going under

Not yet, but every exchange trading Tether will probably sink, along with the price of bitcoin, when Tether (aka Bitfinix) can no longer keep up their fraud.

I thought I saw some threads a while back saying that tethers had been audited, and the speculation that they were not actually backed wasn't true. Am I imagining that?

Can $20m really push up the price that much, when talking about a $125bn market cap? Seems like a pittance.

The market cap isn't the right benchmark, there are too many friction points in trading bitcoin for any holder to respond to any buy offer.

Ideally you'd measure the liquidity of individual markets and between them.

It's 20m every couple of days now. over 200m printed in the past month.

Which exchanges does one use if you want to avoid Tether? Gemini? Gdax?

The "FOMO" bit is the same kind of thing these finance articles always use: "market moves, and here's why." For the most part, nobody truly knows exactly why the market moves the way it does from day to day, but these journalists always try to provide a narrative- even if it's not true it's usually not provable.

> the mempool is back to a reasonable size

This mempool? https://blockchain.info/charts/mempool-size?timespan=1year&d...

Looking at this (7-day average over the last year), it is currently at 100 MB. It was higher than this for about two weeks in late May/early June this year and has never since reached 100 MB. The last maximum was a brief peak at 80 MB in late August. For much of the year it was below 20 MB.

I would not attempt a transaction before it's back down below 40 MB or so.

Not all transactions are equal.

If you look at this[0] representation, you'll see that the vast majority of transactions (like over 90% by size) are extremely small fee transactions (most under 10 sat/byte, 90%+ under 20 sat/byte)

Ignore those low fee transactions, and the mempool is under 8MB (and you can ignore them as long as you pay over 20 sat/byte, since miners will take the highest fee transactions first)

[0] https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

Excellent points, thanks! That looks like a really useful tool for getting a better look at what's going on.

It's my go-to site for looking at what the mempool state is!

Most of the time if you just use the estimation from your wallet software you should be fine, but if you like to craft crazy transactions to clean up a bunch of dust or like to save money, it's a great resource.

    ... There are no (serious) forks coming up, no massive scandals like a major exchange going under, the mempool is back to a reasonable size, and there are some really cool things on the horizon like lightning network, and even further out possibly schnorr signatures

Bitcoin just survived possibly one of the largest market manipulations ever by it's rival Bitcoin Cash. I would NOT call Bitcoin stable at this point.