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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 14 2018, @07:35PM
What sacred cow? Everyone knows tether is shady stuff and would even watch it be created and trade on that public info. Tether could have been 100% backed by people funding the creation of tethers just to get others to have certain expectations and then trading on that, would that still be "manipulation"? This paper doesn't clarify anything about what was going on. Why not answer a real question like "How was the peg maintained"?
Attaching the messenger would be looking at the authors credentials, public statements, etc. I have no idea who the author(s) even is/are and do not care, so never mentioned or referred to them. Questioning the methods is not attacking the messenger...