The biggest tell IMO is that you still can't buy many things with Bitcoin.

The transactions are extremely slow, and Steam etc. have even stopped accepting Bitcoin payments.

Then where does the value come from? Sure there's a base layer of narcotics trading, etc. but that could switch to other cryptocurrencies too (like Monero). It just feels like a massive pump and dump built over some base layer of illegal transactions (drugs and money laundering).

The false data from exchanges likely is key to the belief that these coins have value, and thus affects the data even from exchanges that aren't noticeably faking data.

The basis itself of the article is invalid and it is in "bad faith". I'm not attacking their credibility, I am attacking the thesis in itself. But since the author attacks the author of the original article and the WSJ in their rebuttal, I apply the same here and note that they have a large piece of cake in the play they are talking about and are thus also not objective.

So to go to the arguments:

1. Total crypto market isn't just US, on which this rebuttal seems to focus.

2. Is bitcoin price determined only by fiat inflow via "whitelisted" exchanges? Are they the only part of the whole crypto community that matters? The answer is no, and thus we gotta count the whole market.

3. And again, the article completely avoids the problem by saying "there are problematic exchanges but we will ignore them". The problematic exchanges are exactly the problem. They are creating fiat-tied coins with no backing and putting that money into market - which is valued by the amount of money in it. So the "whitehat" exchanges, even tho not directly involved in dirty money, are involved and profit off of the same ecosystem the dirty money is in. Thus, they are not an isolated system and cannot be observed as such and the market cannot be judged on the behaviour of these isolated systems alone.

Imagine if this was about gambling and illegal casinos (which in a way, it is). So this article would be written by someone working in Vegas saying "Well, yeah if we're looking at all casinos there is illegal stuff going on and people are printing their own chips and trading them for real Vegas chips, but as a company that counts chips, we only count chips sold in Vegas casinos and we haven't found such problems in Vegas casinos". Would you say "hey but there is a bunch of illegal casinos you are not looking at that print chips which are exchanged at your place for money" or "oh okay this makes sense"?

> They haven't burned a single token in the last year.

They burned 1 billion tokens 6 months ago, back in August.

Besides, why do people act like not burning tokens is evidence of wrong-doing? That just shows ignorance for how tether have setup their accounts.

They have a "treasury account" where tether tokens go when people redeem them, and where they can quickly issue tokens when people deposit cash. They only need to issue more tokens when the treasury account gets low, and they only need to burn tokens when they have an excess in treasury.

It makes total sense that in the current bull market that they haven't had the need to burn many tokens. The burn in August only happened because they now have multiple tokens on multiple networks and their TRON treasury account had too much.

------------

All your remaining criticism about banking is 100% valid. And other peoples criticism about auditing and legal troubles.

I don't want to write comments on hackernews rebutting claims about Teather. I want the crypto market to go bust again so I can afford a new GPU. But so many people just parrot invalid criticism without understanding it.