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Comment by cvsh | Hacker News Reader

Is it wrong that, as a non-Bitfinex customer, I'm kind of rooting for an exit scam so that the price of BTC tanks and offers a perfect buying opportunity?

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Not wrong. Smart as an investor to consider all the scenarios.

But be careful on that "tanks" part. If it really tanks, there might be a whole lot of people trying to catch knives.. And that could be real bad indeed.

How would that be bad? People catching knives would stabilize the price.

Honestly - I think a sharp enough correction in Bitcoin would be a bloodbath.

It's a plausible scenario anyway - although strongly differing views on the probability.

Just remember that it took about 3 years for the pre-Mt. Gox failure price to return.

Those 3 years were really, really painful.

How so?

A token only redeemable for bitcoin collapses and you think that will hurt the price of bitcoin? It will hurt the price of tether certainly, the other side of the trade will boom.

Always amazed that some fail to grasp this, tether disintegrating is a solid buy for bitcoin, apart from the bad media coverage, which going by current standards has no effect on price. So that's $600m desperately trying to get into bitcoin all at once, this likely happening within a space of ~72 hours, think about it for a moment.

It's not a zero-sum game: value can and will be created and destroyed. If a crash of tether causes a distrust in the whole crypto space (which is not a given at all, granted), and people rush out of the whole space, all of it will crash.

Would a crash of tether be a source of concern for the value of Bitcoin? If bitfinexed hypothesis is correct, that is to say that Tether is printed out of thin air and used to buy Bitcoin thus artificially inflating its value, then yes, absolutely: a crash of Tether would cause massive distrust in the entire crypto space...

in such a scenario, tether collapsing in value, the demand for Bitcoin (or other coins) would be from those who held the collapsed token. So the price of Bitcoin in tethers might skyrocket, but since the one to one peg to the US Dollar will be broken, I don't see why the effect of the dollar price of Bitcoin would rise? Maybe if even those who held actual dollars on the very few exchanges who allow them panicked as well, it might. The overall panic could cause the bitcoin price to go down too. A lot of uncertaint mass psychology at play here.

Good luck with that strategy but how should you you place your buy orders though? to another exchange :)

Also remember this saying: "Don't catch a falling turd."

That's probably why the price goes up.

Timing the market doesn't really work.

Problem is that strategy is not as solid anymore since you have bitcoin cash on bitcoin's heels. If BTC doesn't innovate then BCH will eventually over take it. BCH is more user friendly for people who want to do daily transactions while BTC is not. If legitimate users switch to BCH then the only thing that will hold up BTC is the long-term people. All the speculators are just going to follow where they can get quick profits.

There is plenty of innovation going on in bitcoin space. Schnorr signatures, MAST, lightning, client efficiency improvements.

Yup. Also Confidential transactions, mimblewimble, sidechains, drivechains,... even bigger blocks. People forget that bigger blocks could come to BTC too, but devs are making the safe choice to try scaling with ways they know won’t compromise security or decentralization first.

People have had cheaper alternatives to Bitcoin for a while now (ETH? LTC?) and yet BTC is still valued significantly higher. There’s more to this game than a cheap digital payment.

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