When one side looses, other side wins. During normal times cash is a guarantied 2+% loss per year. During crisis this percentage may be much higher and those "winners" might see crypto as good investment considering its historical gains after crashes.
If market cap for all crypto is no more than 20B, then why this couldn't apply to USDT too? Can we know if all issued USDT are held by people/traders?
No I did not say market cap for crypto was $20B. I said that the amount that people and institutions have invested in crypto is $20B. Sorry if I did not make that clear. The money spent purchasing crypto coins is estimated at no more than $20B.
To illustrate...
Let's imagine that all of the bitcoins have been mined. There are 21 million.
Next imagine that first 20,999,999 were bought for 1 penny.
Next imagine that the last coin was sold for $20,000.
The market cap of bitcoin is now $20,000 * 21 million coins = $420B.
The money put into the market was $229,999 and 99 pennies.
The market cap is $420B.
Obviously this is an extreme and over-simplified example that I constructed in order to illustrate the point that market cap is not the same thing as the amount of money that people have actually spent.
Tether is a different case entirely. Each tether in existence is supposed to have been created by the exchange of exactly 1 US dollar. So tether is the only cryptocurrency that there is where the market cap also is the (supposed) amount of money that was paid for it.
Total crypto market cap = however many hundred billions
Total amount of money paid for crypto = no more than twenty billion
Total amount (supposedly) paid for all tether coins = two billion
I hope the makes sense?
In this case USDT makes for about 10% of total invested money into crypto and impact will be more significant than I imagined
Yes, it looks that way. Will have to see how things pan out...Also we have to remember that Bitfinex is basically the same company as Tether. We found this out from the Panama Papers. Bitfinex are the largest crypto exchange in the world. If Tether goes belly up then possibly Bitfinex do to. Who knows what that could do to the market.