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U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

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21–30 of 228 posts

Re: U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

#21
This is so strange to me because I was unaware bitcoin was a real financial instrument any country would care about. I've had three financial advisors, from Edward Jones, Stifel Nicolas and a little guy around the corner, all tell me to stay away from bitcoins. One even told me that, in two years, bitcoin would be dead.

So this is all strange to me.

Re: U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

#22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Central banks are in the business of market manipulation via interest rates, and money supply. This is to control growth and inflation so that business cycles are smoothed out to a degree.

The problem with that approach is that market cycles serve important purpose: they faciliate best allocation of our resources by ensuring that inefficient companies will go bankrupt. Smoothing those cycles out enables poorly managed companies to stay in business for way too long. Then, since there's a limit to a market manipulation that central banks can do we end up with one huge crisis, like Great Depression, or 20…

This austrian-style economic thinking about market cycles lines up with bitcoin ideology but is far from being accepted in mainstream economcs. It is flimsy pseudoscience.

Re: U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

#23

This going to be interesting. They will ask all the US based exchanges - Coinbase, Circle etc for their trade and order data for analysis. Coinbase has already fought and lost a case when it came to sharing the data for tax purposes. And one of the touted features of cryptocurrency has always been anonymity.

Bitcoin is traceable by nature. Anyone who makes claims of anonymity either doesn't understand how it works or has a system in place that provides uncertainty (ie tumbling).

Re: U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

#25
post #5

For anyone who hasn't been following, the prevailing theory is that the largest Cryptocoin exchange "Bitfinex" also runs an altcoin called "Teather" which was marketed as being backed 1:1 by USD. So far they've created 2.8 BILLION USDT and coincidently the times they create millions of these happens to be in the middle of extreme market crashes. See this chart: https://i.imgur.com/Uo07d1d.jpg More details here: https…

So, BTC created 16 million coins from air and nobody complained. Ripple created 100 billion coins from air and nobody complained. Tron, Stellar, Cardano, Iota, all in the billions. The top 1000 coins were created from air and nobody complained (most are scams). Why creating Tethers from thin air is now a cause of concern? That's a coin just like every coin out there, like Tron, Verge, EOS, they're created from nothin…

> Why creating Tethers from thin air is now a cause of concern?

If you are claiming they are backed by USD, and you are creating them out of thin air, then that's a scam.

Other coins are only valued based on how the market values them. There is no fraud there; you are not claiming that you will redeem them for something else, they just represent themselves and are valued based on how useful people find that particular kind of cryptocurrency, plus hype.

MtGox was also a scam by the end, since they were trading on their exchange bitcoins and USD that they didn't actually have for people to cash out.

Re: U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

#26
post #5

For anyone who hasn't been following, the prevailing theory is that the largest Cryptocoin exchange "Bitfinex" also runs an altcoin called "Teather" which was marketed as being backed 1:1 by USD. So far they've created 2.8 BILLION USDT and coincidently the times they create millions of these happens to be in the middle of extreme market crashes. See this chart: https://i.imgur.com/Uo07d1d.jpg More details here: https…

So, BTC created 16 million coins from air and nobody complained. Ripple created 100 billion coins from air and nobody complained. Tron, Stellar, Cardano, Iota, all in the billions. The top 1000 coins were created from air and nobody complained (most are scams). Why creating Tethers from thin air is now a cause of concern? That's a coin just like every coin out there, like Tron, Verge, EOS, they're created from nothin…

Tether posits that it is worth ~$1/Tether, backed by some mechanism that the exchange hasn't revealed. If you create Tether like any other coin, you probably aren't also creating $1 to correlate.

Re: U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

#27
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralization does not mean owned by everybody, it means owned by nobody. For instance imagine we had a mine that was effectively infinitely large (for the sake of the analogy). If we allowed absolutely anybody with a pickaxe to to come in and mine it, we might call it decentralized. Nobody would own the mine. That one group sent a million miners to go mine it would not suddenly make them owners, even if they happ…

Due to centralization of hardware the Chinese government can trivially do a 51% attack. That's a form of centralization your ignoring due to an overly specific definition. The tiny block size is arguably an ongoing 51% attack from an oligarchy that is in collusion. Again, depending on what you consider centralization having a tiny group that's in direct communication easily qualifies. Pas: In your example if the only…

Besides double spending attack they can also censor certain transactions not allowing them to be confirmed.

Re: U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, BTC created 16 million coins from air and nobody complained. Ripple created 100 billion coins from air and nobody complained. Tron, Stellar, Cardano, Iota, all in the billions. The top 1000 coins were created from air and nobody complained (most are scams). Why creating Tethers from thin air is now a cause of concern? That's a coin just like every coin out there, like Tron, Verge, EOS, they're created from nothin…

Tether posits that it is worth ~$1/Tether, backed by some mechanism that the exchange hasn't revealed. If you create Tether like any other coin, you probably aren't also creating $1 to correlate.

the idea being that you create new tether when someone deposits the same amount of USD and when USD is withdrawn from the loop then so should the same amount of tethers. What I dont see happening is the removal of tethers when the USD flows out of the crypto space. Enough people have taken profits at this stage that surely some of those USD should have been used to pay out early investors in BTC, thus some tethers would need to be destroyed to maintain parity. Bitfinex should not even be keeping tethers where they have paid out the USD as they can easily create more when new USD is deposited. if it is a scam I am impressed by how long they have managed to keep it going.

Re: U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

#29
post #5

For anyone who hasn't been following, the prevailing theory is that the largest Cryptocoin exchange "Bitfinex" also runs an altcoin called "Teather" which was marketed as being backed 1:1 by USD. So far they've created 2.8 BILLION USDT and coincidently the times they create millions of these happens to be in the middle of extreme market crashes. See this chart: https://i.imgur.com/Uo07d1d.jpg More details here: https…

So, BTC created 16 million coins from air and nobody complained. Ripple created 100 billion coins from air and nobody complained. Tron, Stellar, Cardano, Iota, all in the billions. The top 1000 coins were created from air and nobody complained (most are scams). Why creating Tethers from thin air is now a cause of concern? That's a coin just like every coin out there, like Tron, Verge, EOS, they're created from nothin…

Its not the same thing because exchanges often trade only Tether/Bitcoin pairs, and don't allow people to withdraw into actual USD. If you can print as many tethers as you like, then you can massively pump the bitcoin price buying it with worthless tether.

This only works as long as people selling Bitcoin have been happy to accept Tether instead of USD, which (inexplicably to me) they have been doing. If Tether is proven to be backed by nothing at all, then there could be a serious crash as people try to get real money out and dump Tether. Your bitcoin being worth 7350 USDT isn't very exciting if your USDT are worth 0 USD.

Re: U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation

#30

This is so strange to me because I was unaware bitcoin was a real financial instrument any country would care about. I've had three financial advisors, from Edward Jones, Stifel Nicolas and a little guy around the corner, all tell me to stay away from bitcoins. One even told me that, in two years, bitcoin would be dead. So this is all strange to me.

To be fair almost every financial advisor ever would have told you to stay away from bitcoin because it was an unknown quantity and very high risk. In hindsight everyone of them was wrong if you bought in at any point between 2009 and mid - 2017 and sold in the last 6 - 8 months.

Also they have been calling bitcoins death since about 2009 when it was created so I would not put too much faith in those predictions. If anything this sort of thing could help bitcoin, either price manipulation is identified, the culprits prosecuted and bitcoin goes on as it is. Or no manipulation (or not significant manipulation) is identified and bitcoin carries on as it is but with a govt. seal of approval (up to that point).

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