Bitcoins price is primary moved by the cash settled futures market (CME) - like most other commodities. Its barely correlated to tether printing and anyone who actually follows crypto markets knows that.

I don’t follow crypto at all so this isn’t about Bitcoin futures but for most cash settled commodities on the CME the exchange traded futures aren’t the main driver of prices, real commodity impacts are.

The futures market are an input into the commodity prices but rarely the biggest.

cme volume is tiny, can you cite your claim? I have not heard anyone claim that before, given the majority of option volume is on cryptocurrency exchanges which are operating using usdt.

edit: here's the source I'm using to understand cme volume vs binance etc. https://www.theblockcrypto.com/data/crypto-markets/futures/v... which shows binance is the highest volume, which is usdt as seen here: https://www.binance.com/en/futures

Pretty sure that most “whales” are net short like every other trader.

What makes you so sure about that? This could all be the result of whales cashing out of crypto and into fiat.

In other words, this could simply be the "dump" phase of the recurring "pump and dump" scam.

That’s exactly what I said. Most traders currently sit on cash to meet the margin requirements for short selling crypto assets.

Huh, but stablecoins are basically banks with a funny system for tracking account balances. Who's investing in a stablecoin they expect to go to the moon?

people don't "invest in" stable coins, but stable coins are used as a fiat equivalent on an exchange: people buy and sell into stable coins (or, more accurately, buy and sell into USDT because Tether is >90% of stable coin volume). As such, if Tether (the organisation) want to pump up the price, they can print lots of tether and use it to buy assets.

Something can be a security and not an investment. I would consider tether a security, but not an investment.

That's not what the Howie test says. In US law a security requires the expectation of earning a profit.

'Security' is an English word that exists outside US law, and refers to contracts in a more general sense than strictly 'investment'. I don't think OP was using the word that way, hence my response.

The comment I was responding too seemed to add meaning that I didn't read in the OPs comment. I may be wrong, but it was my intent to clarify based on my own reading.

Which one? I hope Tether nukes so we can all switch to synthetic stable coins.

Can you explain this?

synthetic (or alghoritmic) stable coins achieve stability without a third party