Good morning.
Wallet holders endured another sleepless night after prices plunged across the board in response to seemingly angry noises coming from the finance minister of India, and the ongoing concern that tether has been manipulated after the Bitfinex exchange was subpoenaed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Bitcoin dropped to $8,394 this morning, with Ethereum down at $917, and Ripple down at $.78.
Express.co.uk have spoken to a number of those watching the tether controversy with great interest.
Twitter user @SiamKidd said last night during a conversation on twitter that the tether controversy was, "definitely Mt. Gox bad".
He said: "About 30 percent of the bitcoin rally was due to Bitfinex doing it's (sic) own Tether QE and driving up the price of BTC."
Aleksei Antonov, Crypto companies evaluation expert at Tokenomics and Blockchain assets portfolio manager described the recent claims of price manipulation as, 'a whole new level of bad", and, "100 per cent a crime".
He said: “As a crypto company evaluation expert I read the tether report with interest and I believe that it is quite accurate in terms of its general logic of research. However, the conclusions of the report are open to question.
"In terms of the Bitfinex issue and Tether, these price manipulation claims are a whole new level of bad."
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A long story, short - a month ago Bitfinex was subpoenaed by US regulatory agency, The Commodity Futures Trading Commission but news did not reach investors until Tuesday this week.
Tether is controversial because its price is “tethered” to the Dollar - $1 buys one tether token.
The alleged and entirely hypothetical risk here is that if the market became spooked that tether had been printed and released on an exchange like Bitfinex without US dollars propping it up then prices would crash, possibly to zero.
What's even more worrying is that the printed - and potentially entirely imaginary - tether tokens have risen in value and then been used to buy more stable currencies like bitcoin.
The recent TetherReport claimed that this could lead to an 80 percent drop in bitcoin's value.
Mr Antonov adds: "Who is responsible? That is now in the hands of the regulator and the law enforcement agencies who will decide who will take the blame for the incident.
"If any of these claims are proved to be true, then this is 100 per cent a crime."
"However, Bitcoin will survive and will become stronger for it, as it has proved to be a cunning currency.
"Bitcoin will soon become a truly popular and accepted currency and sooner rather than later we will see a crypto scheme which will be no worse than the US Federal Reserve System.”
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