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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @03:08PM (#692948)

    The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 30 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top.
    For the median transaction size of 225 bytes, this results in a fee of 6,750 satoshis

    https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ [earn.com]

    The current median fee is 0.00000001*6750*6400 = .432 usd. Looking at the distribution I see many transactions going through for 1 - 6 satoshis/byte (~1-10 cents) if you are willing to wait an hour or so for a confirmation (which is fine for most transactions, credit/debit card and ACH transactions can be reversed at least 6 months later and its possible there really is no final confirmation).