We've seen a rush of new alt coins in the past weeks. As we all know it's like money being made out of thin air. Once they hit an exchange early miners and insiders rush to cash in into BTC. Perhaps half of those BTC are sold and the other half is kept in the miner wallets. What effect does it have on the BTC USD price, if any? I would expect a high percentage of newly minted BTC never make it to the USD market, contributing to the rise of BTC/USD.
Any opinions?
I suspect that some of the buying of those newly mined altcoins are speculators hoping to nudge the price up. So unless they already hold bitcoins they would have needed to buy bitcoins in order to trade them for the altcoins. That is new transaction volume for bitcoin that might not have otherwise occurred -- so in that sense, markets for other altcoins benefits the bitcoin exchange rate.
Now the amount of funds these altcoins represents though is a relative tiny fraction of the total dollar valuation of bitcoins -- so the impact on the bitcoin exchange rate is minimal.
