Tether is basically the government, so they do what they're told.
If they were told to stack gold, it indicates that the Controllers want to direct capital away from Bitcoin and toward gold right now.
Central banks + Tether + various sovereigns = strong revealed preference.
The other buyer in size of BTC (MSTR) also got disciplined very heavily (from margin increases to unrealized capital gains tax fud to index removal fud, to S&P 500 rejection, etc.) at a time when MSTR had an mNAV of about 2 (meaning they could issue shares to stack lots of Bitcoin in an accretive way).
So they basically implicitly told institutions: "stay away from Bitcoin, buy gold".
Bitcoin's current value proposition is a store of value with regulatory overhang and a Great Taking hedge.
Unless Bitcoin is private by default (no special mode), I don't see a scenario in which Bitcoin's value proposition becomes mass, non-custodial Medium-of-Exchange.
Which basically means that we have to hope that the Controllers allow for Bitcoin to go up in fiat terms and remains a store-of-value, so that they don't alienate the masses into Monero, physical alternatives, etc.
So far it hasn't worked in the post-ETF era and I have a feeling that we have a wave of Quantum FUD on the horizon, but what can you do.
If you get this cucked, you kinda have to wait for your turn or take a stand and there are too many simultaneous attacks for the community to coordinate a coherent response (coordination tax).
When governments capture "error assets" such as Bitcoin, they use the "Honeymoon → Normalization → Harvest" playbook because the plebs always fall for it.
New financial tech follows the same arc: big sweeteners at launch, normalization once everyone is on board, and then the quiet fee/tax/regulation harvest.
In other words, you pay people with higher fiat prieces whilst you paperize and capture so that they associate regulation with "winning".
The incentives flip as soon as enough users are corralled.
Bitcoin's honeymoon phase was very short (mostly pre-ETF) which indicates to me that they already know they have us by the balls, so they didn't have to pull out the big sweeteners.
The deeper into the Paperization game Bitcoin gets, the more they'll fuck with us.
Most Bitcoiners still don't understand that the 21M cap doesn't mean much if most people don't self custody.
The protocol can cap issuance at 21,000,000 BTC.
Markets can create claims on far more than 21,000,000 BTC.
Bitcoin's 21M cap is a protocol invariant, not a shield against synthetic supply created by ETFs, funds, wrappers, futures, structured notes, and rehypothecation.
