According to the official Tether "transparency" website the total amount of issued USDT has reached a
staggering 364 million $.

https://wallet.tether.to/transparency

How long can this behavior continue? What would be the level of Bitcoin price without these
fake money being funneled into the market at critical times? Is there a remote possibility that these
newly issued USDT are actually backed by real money by institutional investors?

Once again, you seem to be more knowledgeable than me @Carlton Banks 
Thank you for the detailed reply.

I have a question regarding the statement above. What other 2nd layer networks are you talking about? Rootstock? Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees?
Something entirely different?

Besides, I was under the impression that Lightning was basically still in an early stage of development as well (i.e. they have not
even a beta on the mainnet right now).

Please show me a recently mined Bitcoin block that is bigger than 1.1 MB  

I think the 4MB calculation is too optimistic. This would require that blocks are basically full of Segwit
transactions, which is cleary a ridiculous proposition, because a big part of users still wants to use
the "traditional transaction" type and some users still use outdated wallet software, which will never support Segwit.

Nevertheless, I think that Segwit adoption will increase in the long-term and therefore in the future blocks will be bigger than they are now,
but still I expect an average blocksize that doesn´t even get close to 4MB.

I highly doubt that you will find a provider that offers any kind of debit card (even virtual cards) without
customer verification. AML regulation is simply too common in all parts of the world nowadays due
to the crackdown on tax evaders and terrorism financing.

The only thing that you could theoretically find is a virtual card with tiny limits. I think a provider may be
able to offer cards with a less than 250 € lifetime upload limit (lifetime!), but everything
higher than that requires verification (this is based on the newest EU regulation, it might be different
in other jurisdictions).

The supply is simply too big to afford this kind of price rise. You can see exactly the same
phenomenon with other high-supply coins like Ripple (XRP), which have a hard time rising to a value
of more than 0.50 $.

Besides, Dogecoin is based on a meme and has a certain "fun vibe" to it, which
probably deters institutional money or other serious investors.

What is the "bull case" for Waves in your opinion?

In my opinion Waves suffers from the same problems as
similar platforms like Ethereum or Stratis. By that I want to express my concern that the use of the
Waves platform for projects like Burger King´s Whoppercoin may make for a good headline, but doesn´t
really effect the price of Waves. Even if other projects would emerge that utilize the Waves platform
this wouldn´t really affect the exchange rate of Waves.

Is there any way to check, if the Tether already ended up on the Bitfinex lending market or the Bitfinex order book?
Additionally, I´m surprised that USD/BTC at Bitfinex is trading more than 80 $ lower than USD/BTC at Bitstamp.
Could this be an indication that most of the selling today has taken place at Bitfinex? Or what has caused
this difference and why hasn´t it been "corrected" due to people taking advantage of the arbitrage opportunity?

Something seems very off to me and the Tether issuance today only intensifies my doubts!

Have you already decided, which gametypes you are going to offer?
Many people, who have been playing poker for years have lost interest
in Holdem, but happily play more exciting poker variants from time to time
(Crazy Hold´em, 5-Card or 6-Card Omaha, Floppomania, Telesina...).

Besides, you have to take game integrity seriously. The anonymous
nature of BTC facilitates things like collusion (compared to real money poker)
and multi-acounting. Therefore it is paramount in my opinion that you
crackdown really hard on this kind of behavior when your site actually launches.

The reason for your observation is that most altcoins are heavily correlated to the development
of the BTC price. If BTC crashes, most altcoins drop too - and vice versa.

This is the case, because nearly all altcoins are not traded directly against fiat currencies and
instead only have a BTC trading pair.
You will find fiat markets only for the biggest and most popular coins like BTC, Litecoin,
Ethereum, Ripple, Monero and Dash. All of the remaining altcoins are traded only
against other cryptocurrencies.

Ich würde von den 3 Börsen mit Volume jenseits von 10 % eigentlich nur Bittrex empfehlen.
Dort musst du dich aber verifizieren, wenn du ein halbwegs anständiges Auszahlungslimit
haben willst (das war vor dem Bitcoin Cash Chainsplit angeblich anders?).

Bezüglich Bter:
https://www.coindesk.com/bter-unable-to-repay-customers-following-alleged-exchange-heist/

Angeblich wurden/werden die betroffenen User aber entschädigt. Ob du das als positiv wertest oder
dich die ganze Hackgeschichte eher abschreckt, musst du wohl selbst entscheiden.

I really don´t think that there is any exchange or trading site that offers 100:1 leverage with assets that are as
volatile as cryptocurrencies.
E.g. at Bitfinex maximum leverage is 3.3:1 , which is a far cry from 100:1 leverage.

Why would you need 100:1 leverage in the first place? There is serious money to be made with 3:1 or 5:1 leverage (which is possible
at Kraken).

 

1 USD bought you roughly 16 BTC in 2010
1 USD nowadays buys you roughly 0.0002 BTC

If you compare these numbers you see that the purchasing power of the USD compared to Bitcoin
has eroded by more than 99.5 % (!) in the last 7 years.
Therefore I really think that it is absolutely appropriate to call out the crippling of the dollar against Bitcoin.

I hope you don´t own too many XBB. Usually, it is kind of a death sentence for the altcoin, if Bittrex delists it. This is either
an indication of
a) serious technical problems, which causes Bittrex to delist the coin
b) lack of trading volume and user interest (this would be also bad for you, because you need a buyer to get rid of your XBB)

You could still try to sell the XBB in the Bitcointalk altcoin marketplace
(make sure to use an trustworthy escrow in order to not get scammed).

The BTC address with the biggest balance fits exactly your description.
https://bitinfocharts.com/de/bitcoin/address/3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmcMDDHYoqkyNVsFk9r

It is the coldwallet of Bitfinex and therefore contains the balances
of thousands of users. I´d argue that some of the other really "loaded" addresses are also exchange coldwallets (Coinbase,
Gemini, Bitstamp...).

However, there are probably also some individuals, who own a ton of Bitcoins. The Winklevoss twins and guys like
Roger Ver come immediately to mind. According to several reddit posts Ver alone is owning more than 100000 BTC (if
these reddit posts are considered a reliable source of information).

Most exchanges offer the option to open a company account. However, they have extensive verification requirements in order to
comply with AML regulations. Therefore you have to be prepared to provide a lot of documents until you are allowed to make
any transactions with your company account.

E.g. at Bitstamp you have to provide the following stuff:
(i) Certificate of incorporation and Memorandum & Articles of Association
(ii) Annual return which details who the directors and the beneficial shareholders of your company are as of the last fiscal year
(iii) Resolution of the Board of Directors to open an account with Bitstamp and identification of those who have authority to operate the account
(iv) Authorization for other persons to manage your account (if applicable)
(v) Copy of a company telephone bill or a recent corporate bank account statement
We would then kindly ask you to please provide us with a high resolution image of international passport and one recent utility bill (electrics bill, land phone bill, ..) of at least two members of the board of directors, and any owners with a share of 25% or more. These documents must be provided as high resolution images.

As you see, the requirements are quite the obstacle 
Besides, you still may be subject to taxes on any profits, if your company is subject to taxation in the Seychelles.

You can set a custom fee in Electrum and get away with much lower transaction fees, if you are fine with waiting 12-48 hours for the first confirmation.
It is absolutely unnecessary to spend 0.003 BTC as transaction fee, unless you make a transaction with a lot of inputs.

If you have only 1-2 inputs to your transaction you could get the transaction confirmed with even a fraction of your proposed fee size.
I sent a transaction a few days ago with a 0.00005 BTC fee and it confirmed within a day!

I see three big reasons why Bitcoin Cash hasn´t gained the #1 spot in terms of market cap:
- hashrate shenanigans by the miners... if no blocks are found for hours sometimes this erodes confidence in a cryptocurrency
- Bitcoin Cash doesn´t operate under the BTC ticker symbol, which is a huge source of legitimacy (if Segwit2x gets the ticker symbol
in November, this could really change the future of Bitcoin)
- lack of merchant adoption (major exchanges still don´t support it, nearly all gambling sites don´t support it, no dark markets support it)

It will be really interesting to see how the November hard fork will play out, because it seems to have more
industry backing!

The Tether trading volume at Kraken is completely dismal. You will have a really hard time selling
any non-miniscule amount of USDT. You are better of buying a liquid cryptocurrency with your Tether
(e.g. BTC, LTC, ETH) and sell it at an exchange afterwards.

Can you post more information regarding the version of Litecoin Core that you are using?
Which operating system? Have you tried importing your private keys into another Litecoin
wallet and tried to make a transaction? Have you tried to use a Litecoin Web Wallet (make sure
to use only a trustworthy web wallet)?

There are many options to try out in your situation.
You could also consider trying to pay someone to help you using teamviewer or a comparable software.

If that even was his own account! It is very possible that he was using a hacked account and therefore doesn´t care at all about the account freeze by Pokerstars.
The only shot at getting back your coins is tracing them on the blockchain and contacting the exchange or the gaming site where
the BTC ended up (if they have been already moved).
E.g. if he decides to send his coins to Bitfinex or another exchange, you can try to contact the exchange to freeze the account and
maybe recover your BTC in this way.