so there's no reason to lump the bitfinex hack in there. if tether printing (as in, non-backed USD liabilities) really affected the market, it would have had to be several orders of magnitude bigger. of note: when the market topped in december 2017, the tether market cap was ~$1.1 billion. the tether market cap continued rising until october 2018 when it peaked around $2.8 billion. so the market crashed in spite of the continued tether printing
I don't think it should have been much bigger
After all, the market had already been rising, so they were not going against it (which would be downright stupid) but rather added a little more fuel to the furnace. How much a little more remains to be seen. In this way, there are two questions to be asked and answered. First, was Bitfinex printing non-backed tethers since if they did, that pretty much means the market growth was fake (at least, to a certain degree)? And, second, if they hadn't, where's the money then which fueled all this party?