no because these coins which are auctioned are never going to reach the "market". they never have and probably never will, directly. i am surprised that this time there are 5 winners. usually there is only one. and someone who buys millions of dollars worth of bitcoin is not buying it to dump on the market....

every theory about relationship between Tether and Bitcoin price has always been full of holes. none of them make any sense.

USDT has been around for a very long time and it has ALWAYS been a shitcoin but a convenient one because it has always also been supposed to be worth 1 USD. if you check the website, they don't even guarantee exchange of USDT with USD.

the thing is, somebody wanted to make some new FUD up so they chose the thing that was already shit. and the FUD caught on because it was easily believable.

is Tether shady? yes
is Tether shit? yes
is Tether scam? maybe. it could run away but the risk is the same as always.
did Tether increase the price of bitcoin? maybe contributed to it but i'd say the contribution was less than 5%
will bitcoin fall if Tether collapses? yes because of two things: 1. this FUD got too big. 2. Tether fall equals bitfinex fall and being a big exchange can cause a big drop in bitcoin price like when it got hacked and price fell 30%. but i don't expect more than 1 month of downtime.

one of the biggest problems with bitcoin has always been the fact that a lot of people invest in it without bothering to understand what it is. they only care about the fact that price is going up so they jump in and keep jumping in until they create a big bubble (ie. $20k) then when it naturally burst and starts falling a little they see they are holding something that is losing value and they don't even understand what it is they are holding. they might as well be holding fistful of diamonds and not realize it.
then they start panic selling because now they believe all the crap that has been said about bitcoin.

you can even see members around here who still believe nobody ever uses bitcoin as a currency. and that is while millions of merchants are accepting it!

i feel like the more they spread the negativity, the more they spread the FUD and the wider they spread it so that a larger number of people hear it, the more resilient people are going to become to all this negative bullshit.

at some point it will be like the boy who cried wolf kind of situation. you can only call the death of bitcoin so many times before people catch on and ignore you.

so i say let them spread it more and more because we can't really stop them. and lets see who is the winner in a couple of years. those who believed the FUDsters or those who laughed at them?

only wise investors invest in bitcoin when price has dropped and is in a big dip. others usually stay on the sidelines and wait until it is too late. when you see a 70% drop you buy your ass off


you should never spend more money just because price is lower. the amount of money you invest should always be fixed and equal to how much you can afford to lose.

i kind of hoped more countries would have really banned bitcoin not just false news or like this one be in favor of it. specially if a big country like US banned it.

we will see a big hit to the price for sure but so what? people will finally realize that bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralized and censorship resistance currency if the news about some country banning bitcoin can affect it this much it means somewhere along the line we did something wrong which needs fixing.

it may be because people are cashing out from all those altcoins to come back to bitcoin market.

but the important thing to remember is that IT HAPPENS!
knowing that you can simply prepare accordingly and by acting faster because of anticipation you can become a lot more successful in this market and make more profit.

i never buy or sell based on news. i do it based on the reaction of the market to that news because the news whether it is positive or negative is always out there and is always the same, there is always someone banning bitcoin and someone adopting it! but if the time is right people will see the ban news more than the rest and if it is not then they see the other and ignore the ban.

right now it is time for all kinds of crappy negative news about bitcoin. they don't have to even be right half the time

this is probably one of the most asked questions. people keep asking if X is better altcoin investment or Y. and there is never a good answer for it because different times demand different answers.

for example last year Litecoin was worth less than $4 and it got pumped a lot. it even reached $200 if i am not mistaken. but it was not always a good choice of investment. there was a time when it had the first pump and went up then there was a big crash and it stayed down. then another pump and another crash and so on with a lot of wasted time in between.

so what is the best investment when a coin is like this?
my strategy is to only invest during those rises aka pumps. and never after they ended. this means during the dumps or during the downtimes when there is not much happening i don't like to entrap my money in these coins.
since this is trading discussion board, as a trader you should want your money always active. and if you looked back and saw you were earning profit 25 days out of past 30 days then you were successful. but if you looked back and saw 5 days were profitable, 10 days nothing happened and 15 days you lost money then you are not a good trader.

to answer your question, neither of these two are good investments at this point. there will come a time in near future where these will be pumped. invest then.

altcoins are useless so they get dumped each time there is either a rise or fall in bitcoin price because everyone rushes to bitcoin market as soon as there is a small movement there.

and right now there is a drop going on in bitcoin which means altcoins should get dumped hard and the money is escaping the market in general going back to fiat for time being until it comes back to bitcoin.

it is a good thing though because all these altcoins have been having huge bubbles that needed to burst.

this is the first time that i see someone reporting price and volume from cryptopia and speculating about bitcoin price based on them!!!
this is really strange because cryptopia is one of the smallest exchanges out there which is mainly altcoin exchange and the link in OP is USDT market which is the smallest market of all. they probably have the least effect on anything in the whole market!

p.s. volume going up is not a sign of reaching $20k by the way as the 3rd comment thinks...

i can't really advise liquidating other assets to investing in bitcoin, specially if those assets have lower risks and do give profit.
all i can tell you is that at times like this where price is dropping and there is no sign of recovery, i prefer doing nothing and waiting for the bottom. which is practically that "sign of rise" to come. it may take sometime but i am patient and i also like taking less risks in general.

there are a lot of newcomers who don't even know these stuff yet because they got in thinking they are going to get rich, so their main reason for buying bitcoin was monetary gain.
there are others who have chosen to forget these things in order to focus on making more profit. that is why we are seeing the market like this with huge rises and sudden drops because people panic buy and panic sell.

we already know there is a tight relationship between bitcoin price and altcoin prices that whenever bitcoin has a drop altcoins get dumped harder.

but what about the opposite?
meaning as altcoins bubbles are bursting hard and people want an exit back to fiat they go through bitcoin and that (at the very least) increases the sell pressure on bitcoin and drops the price more.

many of the altcoins don't have the fiat markets for people to cash out and also others may even choose bitcoin as a way to exit. i saw this topic which made me think of this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2883297.0

all i know at this point is that there is a good chance that we see the price stay below the previous main buy support which was $10000 for a very long time.
we can see prices like this with small drops and rises for a couple of more months even. unless some really good news comes out which can wake the market up and help the rise. otherwise i don't see a bounce off.

i have a new idea which came to me just now!

maybe it is the altcoin bubble bursting that is also making it worse for bitcoin. you see all the altcoins were pumped and were in huge bubbles which have been bursting for the past week. and many of them have no way of going directly back to fiat so the way to choose is bitcoin.

people dump their shitcoins for bitcoin then sell bitcoin for fiat >>> bitcoin drops is intensified.

stop using third parties for holding your bitcoin and you will never again lose any of it. and for trading start using decentralized exchanges and take other security measures to prevent scams.
exchange getting hacked or running away is like saying the stock broker you used scammed you!

and none of these have anything to do with India!

i am worried about your "students" who are influenced by comments on a forum!

tether will bite us in the ass at some point, but so far the effects of it has been exaggerated a lot bigger than it really can be.

all i can say is $2900 is so random and that if it happens the recovery won't be easy or fast at all. it will be years of downtime and the amount of money that is going to exit the crypto market is going to be gigantic. not to mention all the altcoins that are currently flirting with $1000 will go back down to $1 to $10

^^ we actually have a somewhat similar example for this. not exactly a whale closing position but a sudden drop in price. on 2017-4-15 bitcoin price was $1170 but it fell down to $0.06 on coinbase. there was a big freak out but the amount of buy orders which were placed was so big that it filled the orderbook right up to $1170 again.

i think it is another weird thing that blockchain.info has done or maybe that link is blocks found in past 100-144 blocks(?) it says recent but not by how long!
here is an alternative link: https://www.smartbit.com.au/pool/Bitcoin.com (with 1.2% hashrate finding 1-2 blocks per day is normal)

as for size it is not strange to see blocks like this that are empty or near empty. there are a lot of reasons for it.

edit:
good to watch.
Game Theory and Network Attacks: How to Destroy Bitcoin - Max Fang
BPASE '18, January 24-26th 2018, Stanford University
Stanford Cyber Initiative
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujz3sXpNgtc