The evidence makes no sense. We're supposed to believe that Bitfinex printed Tethers and used them to buy Bitcoins on their exchange - whose on-exchange USD res

The evidence makes no sense. We're supposed to believe that Bitfinex printed Tethers and used them to buy Bitcoins on their exchange - whose on-exchange USD reserves aren't even backed by USDT and aren't meant to be[1] - and this somehow caused a price bubble that mainly seemed to be driven by GDAX/Coinbase judging from the price differences between the exchanges and trading volumes, even though they don't deal in Tether at all. Not only that, it's just too small - for comparison, the total amount of Tether printed as of the end of 2017 was about $1 billion, roughly the same as Coinbase's revenue from fees in 2017. (Another billion or so has been printed since, but that was all after the Bitcoin price peaked.) There's some circumstantial evidence that they may or may not have been printing unbacked Tether to keep the price at parity, but that's a far cry from powering the Bitcoin bubble. [1] They were sort of a Tether exchange in the sense that for a while it was the only way for most people to withdraw USD balances, but they only kept a relatively small amount of USDT on hand to cover withdrawals.