So you all should know this already, but let us review. A couple of finance professors who specialize in detecting market manipulation in the real stock market published a study that concluded half the increase in bitcoin price during its run to $20,000 was due to artificial pumping by Bitfinex using tether. Various regulatory and criminal justice agencies appear to have taken it seriously. The Justice Department opened a broad criminal probe into Bitfinex, once the largest bitcoin exchange by volume, for price manipulation and fraud.
bloomberg.com
Bitfinex owns tether, a "full reserve" altcoin that was supposed to be backed 1:1 with US dollars. A widely held belief is that Bitfinex does not in fact possess three billion dollars to back the three billion coins they've printed and subsequently purchased bitcoins with. The auditing firm they hired quit back in January when the massive printing was ongoing, no other auditor would touch them with a ten foot pole, and the tiny Puerto Rican bank Bitfinex supposedly move their three billion dollars to has filed for bankruptcy. Keep in mind this never a legitimate bank, it had no real clients or business beyond holding a PR banking license. All of their funds came from crypto entities with Bitfinex being by far the largest client and as a result their fortunes were directly tied to Bitfinex/cryptocurrencies' fortunes.
It's over, cryptofags are finished
Other urls found in this thread:
blockchainreporter.net
btcmanager.com
coingape.com
bloomberg.com
cryptoglobe.com
twitter.com
A few days ago there was a large bitcoin sell order that caused prices to fall below 6000, likely from someone cashing out. Since then bitcoin prices have been in free fall and is currently nearing $3400. All other crytos are down more. Ethereum prices have fallen to almost $100, down nearly 95% from its $1400 highs. As a result of this, multiple large miners are discontinuing operations as they could no longer afford the electricity bill. Miners have pulled out of Sweden entirely and left the local utility with $1.5 million in unpaid electricity bills.
It appears that even with dirt cheap Scandinavian hydropower, miners could no longer operate at a profit. As a result of this the hash rate of the entire bitcoin network is dropping at a precipitous rate. This combined with bankrupt miners selling off their equipment at massive discounts is extremely bad for the survival of cryptocurrencies, since it decreases the cost for bad actors who may attempt to take over the network.
In brighter news, the collapse of all cryptos means a fire sale on used GPUs and a glut of previous generation chips. Not so great if you owned NVDA or AMD stock. But a buying opportunity otherwise.
blockchainreporter.net
btcmanager.com
Its really over isnt it. 0
Anything is possible in this market
Is it?
No, bitcoin hitting 4000 again is not possible. We are in the death spiral.
But can it recover?
No.
What really surprises me is how people really thought that the whole Tether thing was something the US govt. would be okay with.
There's a reason why Finex was allowed to do what it did when the Dems were in power. Read between the lines.
Remember, when you look for someone to place the blame on for what is happening right now, you only have to look towards Finex. No one else.
crypto falling is good for the environment tho :D
Everyone pay your respects.
S for spit.
>Btc $50k eoy was laughed at in January..
What a ride..
coingape.com
hoo boy, this trainwreck is about to go nuclear
>A couple of finance professors
So a couple of boomers have a theory and somehow because they're professors it makes it true?
>bitcoin price during its run to $20,000 was due to artificial pumping by Bitfinex using tether
Lmao. The ridiculous run was due to normies fomoing in like never before, simple as that.
Bitcoin is being linked to funding ISIS and there are news outlets running this story.
If people didn't sell at this point, well, there's no real hope for them..
This shit is gonna tank like nothing you've seen before. This is no ordinary 'market correction'.
wow clearly this shitpost is an academic peer to 100-page PhD studies by UT-A professors.
Yes
It's almost like cryptofags are awful, horrible parasites that sweep in, take all the free power they can get, then disappear without a trace when you send the bill.
Common stocks crash 99.99% or go to zero. Crypto is no different as far as speculation goes. Still too much optimism here saying it will stop at a 95% or something loss.
All it would take now to sink this to 2k is a letter from someone about the progress of that investigation.
A simple negative, fake news puece would have us tumbling anither 50%
So... Much easier to short and make money than expect and bet on bull relief
They actually got audited by a law firm top kek
Reading this was ultimately what convinced me to sell off the last of my crypto a few months ago. I even sent Belfort an email thanking him. I'd shake his hand if I ever met him.
Pretty sure they have never been audited ever, and the closest thing to one they have gotten was a simple memorandum that explicitly stated that it wasnt an audit.
What's crazy is if you follow Belfort, you'd know that he timed the popping of the BTC bubble perfectly.
He basically said 'look I know a scam when I see one, and this has all the signs of a scam'. No one listened, but he was on the ball with ltierally everything he's said about crypto.
It'll take a steep hit in 8 days when difficulty adjusts, but will likely keep on bleeding until then. They must have lost close to a quarter of the chinese miners, and a majority of the ones operating in scandinavia.
A 2k price wouldn't be that unreasonable for another week. Once the difficulty adjusts, it'll tank another 10-25% of whatever it has at the time.
I wish I had, back in January I had never even heard of him. But I posted that link because, yeah, he called it all. He is making up for his past crimes in a real way.
AAAAAAAAAAAH! Why would you trust the words of a scammer? He's the one who crashed the market!
no lol he called it a scam in september last year, which was way too early
.
Not at all.
There were things happening leading up to the ATH that screamed scam. He was on the ball. He even called when the bubble would pop.
The best advice you can get with regards to identifying a scam is from someone who was a great scammer to begin with. That's his argument as well.
Bro... you're losing your mind, lmao. Read the article I linked, he is basically talking about today, back in August.
I don't see where the problem is, he was right about it then, too. Just because the scam was on the way up instead of the way down doesn't make it any less of a scam. This is low IQ even for Jow Forums.
>"There's no utility. It is an energy disaster... You are on a sinking ship... If you think $6100 is anywhere close to the bottom, you are f****ing crazy."
lol
the guys who held on to their bitcoin should have listened to the guy who got rich off pump and dump scams.
Why haven't they fucking sold yet?
>what it did when the Dems were in power
Well the dems are about to be in power pretty soon again anyway so
BIZ falling for the weak FUD.
If Tether was used to manipulate the price, how is that not bullish? If three billion was enough to take Bitcoin from 1k to 20k, imagine what real money will do.
Yeah no, look at what's ACTUALLY happening and you'll realize that Trump has pretty much sealed the deal for two terms already.
Why do you think there was a need for fake money to pump the price in the first place? Because there was no real money doing it.
That's not bullish, that's just illegal and a shitstorm waiting to happen as you can see with what's happening right now.
Speaking of low IQ, hi. You get a lot of this, too, these dumbass people who think the manipulation is good for their investment. Hello retard, helloooooooo, is anybody home? The market is crashing right now because all the deception and manipulation is catching up with it.
All I can do is laugh at this point though. Thank you, based Jordan Belfort, you saved my ass.
Jordan Belfort is Based.
I do like him, and I do believe that he's unironically come around to being a genuinely good and thoughtful dude.
What I take issue with in his statement, as far as it's applied to fear porn, is that he places so much emphasis on regulatory involvement (aside from tether) that it really could NOT go down the way he said. Governments are actually pretty braindead, and you shouldn't underestimate their greed. The whole idea of bakkt or whatever gets people going because they see the greed of the big boys as outweighing regulatory incentive, at least in the near term.
This is precisely what made me bullish a few years ago despite initially having the views he expressed here.
autism. they spent to much time listening to ron paul in 08' 'end the fed' ect. lost in a world of bad economics and technobabble.
who is using bitcoin and others as a currency? nobody.
In ten years time most people on biz will deny they ever held crypto
>Governments are actually pretty braindead
Assuming other people are idiots is a sure-fire way to fuck yourself over. Governments aren't retarded. There's a reason why they do the things they do.
Same boomers who exposed vix manipulation. Stay uninformed user, that's good for you.
>Texas almost went blue
>Florida almost went blue
>Michigan had an unironic "based black man" but even with everything Kanye did he couldnt even get close
>Gen Z is too non white to matter even if a good chunk of the white ones are based
>democrats can steal elections right in front of people and they are such low IQ braindead goys now nobody even cares
My friend I'm a hugely massive Trump supporter but you might want to face that it's gonna be difficult from here on out. He might(probably will) get re-elected from democrat stupidity but they will likely maintain the house for many years and quite possibly in 2020 regain the senate. And what then after he leaves in 2024? The brown commie horde is going to engulf this country after that. This election proved no matter how well you do for things the nonwhites have a civic duty to try to fuck over whitey even if it fucks over them in the long run. Not much can be done about this. His presidency will be 8 years and then get ready for Ms Presidente Cortez to ruin our lives and turn us into Venezuela after that.
With any luck I'll be long gone, one way or the other.
What? How is bitcoin a scam? He's literally wrong about that. He was also wrong about the government banning bitcoin, didn't happen. All he did was say the bubble would pop eventually, everyone knew that lol.
It doesn't matter what 'almost' happened. What matters is the actual outcome. A victory is a victory regardless of the margin by which it was won.
Life becomes a lot simpler when you look at what is actually in front of you rather than what COULD happen.
If you like Trump, now is the least worrying time to be alive.
He never said Bitcoin is a scam, he said that there was massive illegal manipulation happening that was so obvious it was literally out there for everyone to see and he said that this is what was a scam.
He never said anything bad about blockchain tech.
Yeah but governments aren't people buddy. They're just made of people.
I agree with you. That's why I'm not usually one to call folks here smoothbrain and take the time to express my takes when I have one.
I also KNOW firsthand how inefficient regulatory processes are, particularly in something we all know the boomers don't have the best grasp of intellectually.
That's the crux of my sentiment.
Crypto evades the understanding of the ones best positioned to regulate and destroy.
Same kind of mentality that enabled Theranos. I took a long time for those Silicon Valley autists to realize what they've done.
I think we're in agreement for the most part.
Governments are made of people, assuming people are stupid = counterproductive is my argument in essence.
>Why
Too greedy, they just thought it would get bigger and bigger, and too little market awareness, couldn't figure out that crypto was a bubble and hijacked into a Ponzi scheme. Now, I didn't realize it was a bubble or a Ponzi until recently either, but at least I wasn't greedy. Gordon Gecko was full of shit, greed is not good, the people who were greedy in this market fucked themselves over big time. The people who took profits in December/January were the second smartest, and the smartest were people like Charlie Lee, who knew 100% it was a bubble and even figured out where the top was and sold there.
said it well, I think.
Source to all your shit about Europe?
The price of Eth was less than this early last year and people still mined it.
Governments dont have to be retarded to lose to crypto in the long run, we only need to assume they will be SLOW. And governments are always too slow. By the time they get done figuring out how they're gonna deal with the crypto space its gonna be on to some whole new shit.
If the government was gonna kill crypto once and for all they needed to do it at around the time of Mt Gox. I remember saying this same shit about the gubermint stopping all this back then and not getting in and I regret it. The governments have already lost the script to this thing entirely and very soon governments are going to lose the script on themselves when these debt bubbles and automation/AI job replacement bubbles start going nuts. With how socially divided everyone is there will be no one with the social capital necessary to both sides to hold it all together.
Everyone will shitpost me for saying this at a time like now but we are headed to an ancap cyberpunk world one day where various corporations run everything through automation and everything is for sale on an AI driven cyberspace future because traditional government died with the rest of everyone's traditions.
I am literally laughing at loud at how dumb some of you are, it's hilarious. My day has gotten so much better
You're probably right.
>He never said anything bad about blockchain tech.
He literally doesn't even understand how it works though, it's painfully obvious.
Look, the government isn't out to 'kill crypto' and isn't out to compete with crypto. If the governments wanted crypto banned, do you really think it would be difficult for them to do it?
No that's not it. The governments would have no issue with crypto replacing fiat if it was actually beneficial economically, and perhaps it will be so, but you can't have something that might end up being used as day to day currency being manipulated the way it has been.
In this case, the government is actually your friend. Whether you see this or not is a different story.
Again, I think you're giving people way less credit than they deserve.
However, even if we were to assume that you're right and he has zero understanding of blockchain tech, it doesn't take an expert in the field to see market manipulation when it happens in the most obvious of ways. Very basic financial knowledge, or barring that, common sense, is all you really need.
I'm not some autist with a major in shitcoins analysis and technobabble, but even me could see Tether was artificially pumping the market way over its real level, using fake money to keep the exchange rates high, lulling NEET losers into believing there was little risk involved, getting them to waste their parents' saving. I wrote about that on reddit one year ago, but nobody believed an exit scam was possible.
Deregulation sure worked well.
>It doesn't matter what 'almost' happened. What matters is the actual outcome. A victory is a victory regardless of the margin by which it was won.
You need to look at trends user, those states have been getting bluer and bluer because the racial divide is widening in this country and those states are very Hispanic. When they are majority Hispanic and they continue to vote the way they did this time guaranteeing democrat victory, what will you say then?
>If you like Trump, now is the least worrying time to be alive.
The IRS is already rolling back the tax cuts and there's no way we'll get a follow up or finalization of them for 2 years at least (if ever).
Trump is great, I havent soured on him personally at all and I'm glad to have a fighter to buy me time to figure out what to do about it all but this country is dying whether you can accept it or not. Look at California where it's a one party state and understand that is your future. They're already invading places like Texas and they wont stop.
Trump is only the president and the president can only do so much, if everything else is fucked beyond repair it's still gonna be fucked if nobody can come together to help him unfuck it
oh god my sides
Like I said user, I look at actual outcomes rather than possible outcomes of which there are an infinite number for any given scenario.
Let's just wait and see what happens. Not to say you're wrong, you might be completely accurate in your predictions.
Dude, you're literally taking financial advice from a literal scammer and I'm the dumb one? LOL
> it doesn't take an expert in the field to see market manipulation when it happens in the most obvious of ways. Very basic financial knowledge, or barring that, common sense, is all you really need.
Exactly. He didn't provide any new information. That's was my whole point.
Bitfinex needs to be gassed.
I agree, but the question here is about his judgment and moral integrity. He could have just as easily aligned himself with the opposing side and profited by shilling the ridiculous price predictions, but he didn't, therefore a case can be made that in this particular instance, his judgment and morals were in the right place.
You're exactly the kind of person who he scammed when he was younger. Oh well, some people can't be saved I guess.
Yeah! And it literally saved me multiple six-digits. And you probably still have money in crypto, so yes, you're the dumb one.
I've never played the stock market, and have never had any desire to. I'd guess I've made more money than you, though. Do you really want to know what I made? The first investment I made in BTC and LTC was in 2014, and I did another round of buying in late 2016.
Well I deal in facts, and the fact is that this country is getting worse. My old hometown was red only as fuck for 30+ years, more than my whole life, and just went to a Bisexual communist roastie. Victories in deep red areas are getting more and more narrow while blue areas are turning into one party communist apparatuses like California
You are vastly underestimating how bad brown people are and how fucked us millenials are as people
But this is why I'm all in on crypto in the long run because anyone who thinks millenials and gen z will know how to give a fuck about literal physical gold if the world collapses and the boomers are gone is a moron. This generation will at worst just accept an IMF backed crypto to rule their lives forever. The important part is going to be getting in and out at the right time (admittedly I probably didnt and wont).