I haven't yet read the study which claims a link between tether and bitcoin. My initial impressions are its a BS claim. Tether lacks the market cap to significantly affect bitcoin's price. The amount of purchasing volume necessary to manipulate the price of bitcoin up near $20k is far in excess of bitfinex or tether's net worth. If the price of bitcoin was manipulated there are far better ways of explaining it. Crypto exchanges which lack trade commissions are probably a better explanation for market manipulation as it could allow traders to buy and sell to themselves on multiple accounts on an exchange without incurring significant losses.
The last line of this article seems to contradict itself:
Quote
In the University of Texas studys conclusion, researchers say, Our findings provide substantial support for the view that price manipulation may be behind substantial distortive effects in cryptocurrencies. And they say that more regulation is needed: These findings suggest that external capital market surveillance and monitoring may be necessary to obtain a market that is truly free.
This is what comes to mind, reading the last part.
The idea of a crypto market being "enslaved" under surveillance and monitoring, in order to achieve "freedom" could be a form of "freedom is slavery" political posturing.
If the context is correct.
The research about Tether being used to manipulate the price of bitcoin is not something new as I have read several times on the forum on the possibility of that and with compelling argument difficult to ignore but there is still some gaps in such conclusions. If Tether is being used, I believe Tether itself is still in existence then why do we still have a downward trend in price. Another thought is that, while not ignoring the possibility of Tether in price manipulation, I think its wrong to totally ascribe the increase to that only factor because during that time, we have not had any issue concerning Facebook planning to ban crypto or Google or Twitter and these are powerful major platforms in which the message are spread to the mass populace. In addition to that, we also have not had the aggressive KYCs that we have now which has made a lot of people lose interest because their anonymity is no longer guaranteed. These and many other reasons are factors that played a great role in the all time high price period.