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Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

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Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#41

Explains a lot. A casual review of many coin price histories gives you the sense that something might be "off," although that is just my subjective view. Another one: coins in general would have been far better off without this current pricing bubble.

It’s similar to 1999 dotcom run up, there will be a crash to remove all the bad actors (like the former pets.com), but it won’t kill cryptocoins just like the dotcom crash didn’t kill ecommerce.

everyone keeps saying that to the point where i start questioning it. there’s no actual proof that this is anything like the dot com bubble.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#42
post #4

Bitcoin topped out as soon as the futures went live. Massive contango on a regulated futures market may have been a factor in "reeling in" price. The spot market is so thin that it didn't seem to take much open interest in the futs to whip the underlying. It's conceivable that some spot exchanges are or were still from 2017 to now, either malicious and/or incompetent, which would facilitate the continuation of such b…

I would be skeptical of strong claims about how Bitcoin futures have affected its price significantly so quickly, mainly because their volume is very low when compared to Bitcoin exchanges and even other unregulated futures (such as Bitmex's future contracts, which have been around for much longer than CME and others have).

It makes sense the price has stabilized recently due to how strong the recent bull market was, it will likely need some time to relax and consolidate before it decides what direction to push next.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#43

Wow, this paper's conclusion is delayed by 3 years. Willy and Markus bots are old news for anyone who has been following bitcoin closely. The source of all these allegations was this blog appearing in 2014: https://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-repor...

Any recent manipulations ? especially in 2017 end ?

Tether claims to be backed by USD but could easily be a money printing press injecting fake value into the crypto markets. According to their own data, they have created $1.6B worth of tethers:

https://wallet.tether.to/transparency

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#44

Wow, this paper's conclusion is delayed by 3 years. Willy and Markus bots are old news for anyone who has been following bitcoin closely. The source of all these allegations was this blog appearing in 2014: https://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-repor...

Any recent manipulations ? especially in 2017 end ?

Most recently, there's the tape-painting bot Picasso: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/meet-picasso-the-painter-on-g...

If you were paying attention in the week that followed this post, the spread between GDAX and the other major US exchanges narrowed from $1000+ per coin to just about $11 right now, and trade volumes on GDAX plummeted. Maybe theres's some other reason, though there's some crazy correlation there at least. I'm surprised more people aren't talking about that.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#45

As an interesting thought experiment, consider that VC is a tiny asset class. Now consider that if the amount invested in crypto were the same as is invested in VC, the market cap of crypto would be over 100 trillion dollars. At least if you assume a fixed ratio of dollars invested to market cap.

The market will react, though, by launching new coins. And soon that 100 trillion dollars will be spread out over 101 trillion currencies or tokens.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#46

Explains a lot. A casual review of many coin price histories gives you the sense that something might be "off," although that is just my subjective view. Another one: coins in general would have been far better off without this current pricing bubble.

I invest long-term into a couple of interesting projects and you're absolutely right. Most popular alt coins suffer from near daily pump and dumps and and a casual look at hourly charts will easily reveal this. I can't even imagine what a nightmare it is trying to do technical analysis and make sense of the market for those who day-trade cryptocurrencies.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#47

Wow, this paper's conclusion is delayed by 3 years. Willy and Markus bots are old news for anyone who has been following bitcoin closely. The source of all these allegations was this blog appearing in 2014: https://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-repor...

prev. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7796748

[EDIT]

>Further proof that the absurd run-up in November when bitcoin reached $1,200 was illegitimate.

That's 4 years ago.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#48
post #36
post #4

Bitcoin topped out as soon as the futures went live. Massive contango on a regulated futures market may have been a factor in "reeling in" price. The spot market is so thin that it didn't seem to take much open interest in the futs to whip the underlying. It's conceivable that some spot exchanges are or were still from 2017 to now, either malicious and/or incompetent, which would facilitate the continuation of such b…

On contango: I would not call what the futures market is experiencing "massive" contango. There is a very slight premium to further dated futures ($35/btc Feb over Jan, and $5 Mar over Feb contracts on CME), but this is very normal for a commodity and logically in place for exchange/spot holding risk. I would call the average settlements over the past month of futures being listed very normal contango. And I don't th…

No, just suggesting the arb opportunity existing at all helped reel in price. I believe this was the intention.

Sounds reasonable, thanks for clarifying and correcting.

Re: Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s similar to 1999 dotcom run up, there will be a crash to remove all the bad actors (like the former pets.com), but it won’t kill cryptocoins just like the dotcom crash didn’t kill ecommerce.

everyone keeps saying that to the point where i start questioning it. there’s no actual proof that this is anything like the dot com bubble.

The dot com bubble analogy is fashionable right now because it serves to push the desired narrative without having to deny or provide evidence against what is clearly a bubble. I'd imagine many of the people you see perpetuating this are the same that were denying the bubble a few months ago. However that doesn't necessarily make it wrong -- I'm very skeptical but I'd have a tough time arguing that nothing useful at all will come of crypto after a bubble pop. Wether it's worth it or not is another question.
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