>The exchange with those Tethers? I am not sure hedging on an exchange with this kind of counterparty exposure is a good idea. Agree. I don't use Bitfinex and

>The exchange with those Tethers? I am not sure hedging on an exchange with this kind of counterparty exposure is a good idea. Agree. I don't use Bitfinex and I don't short. But many people do and for certain risks/fluctuations it provides them some hedge. >It will be interesting to see which tokens/coins are those because I am sure all of them have positive correlation with BTC. Watching the recent lead-up to the 2X fork (and subsequent last minute cancellation) was quite instructive. There was a lot of correlation between BTC and most Alts (initially everyone selling alts so they could boost their BTC holdings prior to the fork date and then everyone selling BTC to get back in to Alts as soon as the fork cancelled). XRP on the other hand stayed relatively stable throughout the worst of it. It's still early days but if the overall crypto market becomes big enough, has sufficiently diverse investors (with differing long-term/short-term goals) and some form of regulation appears to remove the worst excesses of scammers/manipulators, I think a handful of coins/tokens will float and exist independently of BTC's fortunes.