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posted by mrpg on Thursday June 14 2018, @04:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the fake-money-fake-news dept.

The price of Bitcoin went on a tremendous bull run that peaked in late 2017. The New York Times is reporting that an academic paper suggests that the price of Bitcoin was being manipulated. They argue that the sudden gain in value in Bitcoin and other virtual currencies in the last year was caused by a small group of participants, particularly the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex.

Mr. Griffin looked at the flow of digital tokens going in and out of Bitfinex and identified several distinct patterns that suggest that someone or some people at the exchange successfully worked to push up prices when they sagged at other exchanges. To do that, the person or people used a secondary virtual currency, known as Tether, which was created and sold by the owners of Bitfinex, to buy up those other cryptocurrencies.

This paper follows another paper published in 2017 that tied the sudden and large increases in Bitcoin value seen in late 2013 to manipulation by the currency exchange M. Gox.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:01AM (3 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:01AM (#692710) Journal

    Who would publish such an analysis if it was worth anything?

    Scientists.

    You can just go on reddit/forums and see people knew to watch what was going on with tether to decide how to trade the entire time.

    But that doesn't give you a longer publication list. Face it, not everyone has making lots of money as their highest goal. In particular, if your primary goal is to get rich, you'll probably not choose to go into science.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:21AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:21AM (#692720)

    I dont buy it, theres so much more interesting stuff for a scientist to look at than "the flow of digital tokens in and out of bitfinex". Also, the analysis seems to (quote that part if I missed it) just ignore that many, many other people were watching these same flows in real time and responding to them. Its all public data. I dont think someone with scientific motivations would leave out the most interesting and unique aspect.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Mykl on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:34AM (1 child)

      by Mykl (1112) on Thursday June 14 2018, @05:34AM (#692726)

      If I were a Bitcoin rube who ended up losing big on the bubble, but still had a bit of daddy's money lying around, I might possibly throw a few thousand at a researcher to come up with a study that I could later use in a court case...