At one point in ~2017 the Bulgarian equivalent to the FBI was the single largest holder after Satoshi, from when they busted a money laundering operation. [1]
Heh, the Bulgarian government is so corrupt that they are all probably fighting and trying to find a way to launder the previously seized BTC used in money laundering.
According to a bivol.bg (reliable investigative news), the bitcoins were sold at a private auction with the help of Deloitte and the (real) FBI in December 2017, bringing 6 billion BGN (~3 billion EUR). Apparently at a cabinet meeting the money was earmarked for procuring new fighter aircraft (the current ones are obsolete and very poorly maintained).
There was an acquisition of F-16s in 2022 for $1.3 billion, which still leaves 1.5 billion EUR from the seized money.
You know, you people in comments, here were saying Bitcoin was scam years ago. Price made like 50x or more since then. So now that finance take it seriously, you come up with this? Thanks for reminding me this place has no important information.
Wow, it's 2023 and 1 (one) small country officially recognises it (and no one actually[1] uses it there, except for small tourist attractions), no companies accept it, and criminals don't even use it anymore.
[1] Number Go Up by Zeke Faux tries actually using BTC in El Salvdor. Many don't know how, some people tell him to leave, some try but it's strictly inferior to existing payment methods.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I remember John McAfee promising to eat his own dick if Bitcoin wasn't worth $500k in 3 years. He later said those hyperbolic statements were just to onboard new users (making them lies? fraud?) which makes sense as he was doing a daily coin/project shill for a while which pumped and dumped various coins he held.
A real world example of how Bitcoin didn't work, even though it could have worked is Steam[1]. They tried, and while gamers are more likely to be able to handle the intricacies of crypto than most of the rest of the population, there are just some really difficult issues to solve with using raw Bitcoin.
Virtualized networks on top of Bitcoin like Lightning[2] seek to solve some of those issues, but bring their own complexity and issues including finding enough VC money to bootstrap the network into even having money to function.
Bitcoin is the currency that nobody uses and a collectible that doesn't behave like a collectible.
He also questioned its role as a hedge, stating, "It's gone up as stocks have gone up, it goes down when stocks go down. This is not the way a collectible is supposed to behave."
I have actively tried to use bitcoin to pay for daily life stuff in 2022/2023 and its basically impossible without converting to fiat. The only 2 bills I can pay directly with it is my VPS host and AT&T. I can't buy groceries with it, pay my rent, fuel my car, or see a doctor. I was once able to buy steam games and Chinese food with it but both have since dropped it.
I would not call bitcoin a scam but I also would not say it is useful currency for Americans.
You may not know this, but there is no reserve asset on this planet any more. Central banks world wide use the dollar, which was backed by gold when this agreement started. But it isn't any more, and it is only backed by more debt creation/money printing.
Historically, money backed by weak reserves has always lost against money backed by stronger reserve assets. I find it funny that people believe that infinite debt creation is superior and will win against absolute digital scarcity.
Let's be real, fiat currencies are essentially backed by Uranium 235 and defense industry engineering capabilities. (both as it relates to turning the U235 into large amounts of energy in a small amount of time and producing other things like aircraft carriers)
funnily enough you CAN actually redeem the banknotes for these things but most people don't typically enjoy the experience
agree. the USD dollar is backed by the threat of violence which is how I understand what it means to be an empire; in contrast with a 'civilization' (though it seems as though empire is the early stage of civilization, it boots things up)
I don't think there's anyone who actually thinks that using the debt fueled dollar as reserve is the best position. And digital scarcity is not a thing unless you are talking about pokemon cards. Bitcoin is not backed by anything other than crime, money laundering & financial derivatives.
And even that's assuming whatever the storage medium was for the keys survives that long.
If you were going to store a series of words for up to centuries without being able to check the backup, and without being able to make any changes to protect it, what would you use?
A couple centuries isn't a terribly long time to preserve something if it's kept in an enclosure in a dry environment. It could be wood. I'm certain it wouldn't be, though.
leveraged means, investment which is done using borrowed money (debt). So the preoccupation is something like, the value of the dollar would exponentially plummet if the interest rates went up, as it would suddenly be not worth it to keep the investment in the currency
Yes, apologies if it were taken seriously. While the comment I was responding to is a good question, my intent was to highlight that values of all currencies are speculative based on their markets.
With regard to currencies they all have slight concerns, but the dollar is safer as people run to it in a crisis which keeps the value relatively high. This will change eventually, but could happen next year or decades hence. If I could predict it, I would be far wealthier.
With regard to Bitcoin, it is a relevant question despite my flippant response. The exchanges are well known to be corrupt and have a vested interest in keeping the price of Bitcoin high. Leveraging can happen there or off chain as was done with the relatively recent debacle with Terra/Luna.
I think we've been so far past 'destroy' Bitcoin, that the only question is 'manipulate'.
Still, manipulating is such a high risk thing, that most avoid doing it.
Bitcoin has had such a wild ride. Cool hipster currency to libertarian wet dream to silk road fueling to a hedge against multiple country's money printer(I particularly remember some South Korea event cause a huge jump) to the really boring of heavily paper-trail super scare asset we know today.
Given my perception of what I thought Bitcoin would do, I should probably sell what I have. However, this added legitimacy is good for my bags.
If two independent entitities are trying to sequentially wash trade to inflate the price it no longer looks like a wash trade, but like two entities suddenly finding asset more valuable and bidding for it with each other as it appreciates.
> How much of the movement in NYSE is wash trading?
Well by definition wash trading results in no change of price, so none of the movement in the NYSE is a result of wash trading.
Further more, wash trading is illegal and every order entered into the CLOB is recorded as to which trader sent it so its trivial it detect if a trader did wash trade.
Wash trading can absolutely be used to manipulate prices, that's one of its purposes -- to sell+buy at increasingly higher prices to attempt to make something temporarily appear more valuable than it otherwise would be.
I'm not going to comment on whether that's realistically achievable on the NYSE specifically, but it's definitely not true that wash trading doesn't change prices "by definition". To the contrary -- that's one of the reasons it was made illegal.
Wash trading by definition means nothing changes, the price remains constant as you buy and sell for the same price. Wash trading can not change the price of a stock.
It's use is to increase volume.
From teh SEC who over sees this.
If you aren't happy with their definition you can take it up with them but you don't get to redefine the term for your own use;)
> -[1]- Wash trades are purchases and sales of securities that match each other in price, volume and time of execution, and involve no change in beneficial ownership.
Because you're missing the part that in certain circumstances, when you are performing both the sale and the purchase, you can choose whatever sale price you want.
E.g. most recent genuine market trades were at $0.50, but you offer for sale at $0.60 and buy your offer at $0.60. Then do the same at $0.65 and $0.70.
Then it looks to outsiders like the price really is going up, and that can be used for all sorts of things.
You can look it up in Wikipedia if you want, which explicitly gives one of the motivations for wash trading as:
"- Falsely driving up asset prices by fabricating trade history with increasing prices" [1]
I'm not redefining anything at all. ;)
(It is also used for increasing volume, but that's not the only motivation.)
I mean, one thing i've learned about finance is that others will hijack common terms like front running and redefine them.
The SEC has the job of handling this in the US and I cited them. You cited Wikipedia. I'm happy with using the definition that the SEC uses.
Maybe someone somewhere now uses wash trading to mean raising the prices but if you actually think about the name its meant to mean nothing changes after the trade, meaning no price change.
Given we're talking about the NYSE and therefor the SEC, i'm happy using their definition vs the wikipedia definition but I understand why you came to your opinion. Thanks for sharing!!
I'm terribly sorry but you seem to be continuing to miss the point -- there are no different definitions here. Nobody is hijacking anything.
The SEC definition is obviously correct insofar as each individual wash trade is executed at the same price -- it is sold at price X and bought at price X.
But then multiple wash trades can create a sequence of seemingly rising prices. Even though each individual pair has a matching price. Nothing in the SEC definition from that case contradicts this. Nothing in the SEC definition requires that the offer (first) half of a wash trade be a legitimate market price -- it can be made at a price artificially higher than the market, which is sometimes the whole point.
It's easy to read up further on this, there's lots of material available online which explains this -- how each half of a wash trade uses the same price, but a sequence of them are used to raise the apparent market price.
Again, this is 100% in line with the SEC definition.
But if multiple entities are trying to wash trade at the same time trying to pump up the volume and move the price in the opposite direction don't they just trade with each other as in normal trading? And if they are trying to influencle the price in the same direction don't they just undetectably wash trade?
Yeah, but much of this is correlated. C Follows B which follows A. So lots of selling on "exchange A" will cause the rest (B,C,D,etc.) to move in tandem, so liquidity is far, far les than $24 billion, but rather the liquidity of only A or maybe some combination of A & B.
When they sold off the bitcoin from Silk Road, they didn’t have any trouble finding bidders, and the final price was a bit above the going rate on exchanges at the time.
That's only the volume on retail exchanges. Plenty of BTC also moves around every day in OTC transactions. The US govt won't be selling this on Coinbase, lol
Either way, you don’t just send a big 200.000 BTC market sell order, that would be idiotic even for the government. If they are looking to sell them they are going to do it slowly.
El Salvador, completely forgot about that. How did the volcano powered Bitcoin farm work out? Can I still buy a sandwich at the beach with Bitcoin? And do people do so?
This why BTC keeps falling when the stock market is open, a pattern that has been persistently reliable since March 2023.
A trading method that shorts BTC as soon as the stock market opens and goes long QQQ, closing both the BTC short and the QQQ long at the closing bell, would have posted a strong return despite BTC being up for the year, indicative of liquidations by a large entity to take advantage of increased liquidity when stock market is open--I would surmise the US government selling its 50k seized James Zhong Silk Road coins.
It all adds up. This selling puts constant pressure on BTC during the market hours and sometimes those sudden 100-200+ pt BTC dumps. Very profitable trading method..
> Why the U.S. Government Has $5 Billion in Bitcoin
Answer:
> … Uncle Sam’s stash of some 200,000 bitcoin was seized from cybercriminals and darknet markets. It is primarily offline in encrypted, password-protected storage devices known as hardware wallets that are controlled by the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service or another agency.
Just for comparison, the US budget deficit will rise by approximately that amount($5 billion) per day every day for the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates:
That is not what the article says. The article says the debt will rise each day. Think of the deficit as the 1st derivative of the debt, or the rate of change. If date is increasing at a constant rate, then the deficit is staying mostly flat.
So, the article is saying something like "John is running away from us, and will get 5 miles further away every hour", and you're saying "John is running away from us, and he gets 5mph faster every hour".
Interesting; I'm fascinated by the extent to which people HERE seem to want to stick their head in the ground on cryptocurrency. Which is to say, it's obvious that a lot of people here hate it -- which strikes me as reasonable -- but aren't willing much to think about about the fact that (like e.g. science) cryptocurrency doesn't much care whether you like it or not, it IS a thing, and it will continue to be a thing.
And if it is a thing, one has to be serious about understanding what one can and cannot do about it, love or hate.
A lot of us don't hate it. we think it's overrated and does not deserve all the hype it got, and a lot of ppl have lost $ chasing this hype or scammed. It is a thing and is not going away, but so what. Beanie Babies and pet rocks still exist too.
> And if it is a thing, one has to be serious about understanding what one can and cannot do about it
an understanding sharing much in common with the eye-sore casinos propped up slowly over time in towns and cities around me, especially: pity the denizens who participate, move on with my life.
Good, I hope they dump it suddenly and without warning.
The bitcoin trading market is much thinner than it looks -- wash trading is ubiquitous [0] and BTC's price is systematically propped up by a likely fraudulent stablecoin [1]. High prices benefit the organized crime orgs that transact with it [2], but none of the putatively legitimate web3 projects rely on high valuations to work, in theory. If blockchain solves a real problem, it should do it at BTC = $100 or whatever.
IMO, if the US government floods the market, it could do a lot of damage to organized crime groups, potentially lead to unbacked stablecoin's death spiral (as people attempt to redeem more cash than they actually have on hand), and perhaps lead to a healthier, less mania-prone crypto market.
I might get a graphics card if the crypto market collapses, but I wasn't planning to buy any BTC.
Also, I think that if BTC falls below, say, 10K, a lot of loans are going to get called in suddenly, and we're going to see that a lot of people were swimming without trunks [0], i.e. mismanaging customer funds and assuming that the crypto market would go up indefinitely. In other words, I think the story we're learning now about Alameda is going to turn out to be a lot of people's story.
You think that all the Bitcoin believers who buy relentlessly each week without question will suddenlly stop if they can now get 3x as much BTC for their fiat? Oh my sweet summer child...
Bitcoin isn't typically mined with graphics cards. Ethereum was, but is no more. I don't think the price of graphics cards is high due to cryptocurrency anymore
SBF is going to testify. His PR agent was asked "Will SBF testify" and replied "Does a bear shit in the woods". His lawyer is asking the court to allow him to take more Adderall so he will be approriately drugged up in the afternoon.
>Good, I hope they dump it suddenly and without warning.
Aww do you? :'(
A record amount of BTC not moved on chain for the long term has reached all time highs, "wash trading" or not, that can't be faked, it's being held as it's primary value proposition, a store of value.
I can't believe the Tether FUD is still widespread after all these years, all completely unproven and wrong time and time again.
If the USG stopped to think for just a second maybe they'd ask themselves why they'd sell absolute digital scarcity for something they can just print out of thin air for themselves.
Goats would be terrible money. A unit of account that is "goats" would be subject to birth- and death-rates.
Sports game tickets would be terrible money - they're significantly more valuable before the game, and after the game, they're far less valuable.
Mountains would be terrible money. How could you exchange them, unless you were able to keep track of who owned the mountain?
Dollars are actually pretty good at all three. They don't die. They're pretty stable in terms of value. It's pretty easy to give someone Dollars.
Bitcoin are... ok... at some of these. It's pretty good as a unit of account - if you can secure your wallet. It's... ok... at being a store of value - there have been some very high-profile sudden value fluctuations that left people holding a bag. It's pretty easy to give someone Bitcoin, but not trivial. It looks like it costs about $1 to make a bitcoin transaction happen, where I can transfer a few dollars for free.
I'm not a Bitcoin supporter, but I don't think it's fair to malign the tech for things it actually can do.
Regarding mountains as money. There has actually been a case in history where a group of people used hard to move large stones as money. The bigger the stone, the more value. While these would initially be transported, once on the island where they were used, they wouldn’t get moved around, while ownership would change.
1. Great source, great story. You're absolutely correct.
2. Yeah, I was trying to come up with a simple "can't be exchanged easily" things and I (pretty obviously) failed. Got any ideas of "can't be exchanged easily" stuff?
The Rai stones are just a curious example of how creative people can get with their ledgers. And by extension - what happens when people who can manufacture your unit of account out of thin air come along.
I generally don't reply to comments like this, but
> I can't believe the Tether FUD is still widespread after all these years, all completely unproven and wrong time and time again.
is false.
Tether knowingly falsified documents when applying for bank accounts [0], lied about its backing [1], and is the currency of choice for pig butchering scams [2] and Hamas [3].
Overall, a really bad, obviously criminal org, and someone who responds to that with "FUD!" is generally either on the payroll [4] or soon to be in for a very rude awakening [5].
> A record amount of BTC not moved on chain for the long term has reached all time highs, "wash trading" or not, that can't be faked, it's being held as it's primary value proposition, a store of value.
How much of this is due to people losing access to their wallets and the BTC being lost forever?
The number of BTC lost forever was already pretty high from what I remember. My suspicion is post-FTX there was a surge in self custody and many of these people likely lost access to their wallets from any number of the issues self-custody can bring. Or they just can’t figure out how to get it out.
Self-custody is completely impractical for 99.999% of the people walking around. The UX is horrible and the entire process overall has the most foot guns anyone will ever see.
It’s also worth pointing out that the “primary purpose” as a store of value now claimed today is only a result of bitcoin failing at the other claimed “purposes” over the years.
This one is especially entertaining to hear from crypto/BTC advocates as the title of the BTC paper is “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”.
>Self-custody is completely impractical for 99.999% of the people walking around. The UX is horrible and the entire process overall has the most foot guns anyone will ever see.
As usual on this site, the assumption that 99% of people are complete drooling idiots for anything remotely tech-related runs firm. Believe it or not, a surprisingly large percentage of the population can rather quickly learn to manage relatively non-complex things like holding their own crypto and so forth without having to be specialized devops or top-tier tech workers.
Not everyone outside a certain bubble is blindly stupid just because they do other things with their lives.
What I am saying is that everyone forgets things and makes mistakes. Have you ever had to do a password reset? I know I have. Have you ever messed up a backup or deleted something accidentally? I know I have. HNers are in many cases lifelong technology professionals and all of this and more still applies to us. Just like how even the best and most brilliant physicians in the world still carry malpractice insurance. People mess things up all of the time. This is basic and fundamental being human stuff.
Extrapolate this to large numbers and the general population with varying levels of technical proficiency. Bank of America has over 60 million customers. How many times a day do you think they click a password reset link? How many times a day do you think someone calls customer service because they can't get in their banking app or account online? How many times do you think someone ends up walking in a branch to get it figured out? How many times a day do you think someone does an "oops" transferring funds, etc?
The answer is almost certainly a staggering number of people, every single day. Even 100k is just 0.16% of those 60 million customers so I would put that on the low side. Banks like Bank of America don't operate call centers, branches, etc because they're running a jobs program and like to waste money on unnecessary payroll. They have these resources because they're necessary. In the real world people forget things, lose stuff, mess things up, and occasionally need help.
The crypto self-custody mantra combined with irreversible transactions essentially depends on never make a mistake, never forget, and never lose anything. Combine that with the poor UI and UX I mentioned and it's a recipe for disaster.
It fundamentally goes against everything we universally know about human beings.
Until crypto FINALLY realizes it needs to bend to the real world and not the other way around it will continue to have some of the poorest adoption numbers of any technology from the past 100 years.
I think rather than looking to theoretically arguments about this, we can just note how many putatively sophisticated actors have messed this up at some point and how costly it’s been for them. Mark Cuban, Prime Trust (we think) , and a whole lot of BAYC early adopters have all lost real money due to either forgetting, misplacing, or trusting the wrong party with their credentials. Each time, there’s been no recourse. My bank, by contrast, has mechanisms for returning money when things go wrong.
If the government seizes $5B in cash, do they have a responsibility to invest it in bonds or something safe?
And if the government seizes $5B in something perishable like pumpkins, does it have a responsibility to offload those seized items before they're worth nothing?
Bitcoin doesn't exactly suffer from the problem pumpkins do, but I'm curious where that divide is between, "we've put it in the evidence locker" and "it will decay to nothing so we need to act on it, even if the legal matters have yet to be resolved."
>> If the government seizes $5B in cash, do they have a responsibility to invest it in bonds or something safe?
IMHO Yes! The Government holding BTC indefinitely is equivalent to just taking it off the market and enriching all existing BTC owners by increasing scarcity.
> And if the government seizes $5B in something perishable like pumpkins, does it have a responsibility to offload those seized items before they're worth nothing?
I get government cheese from the food pantries every now and again. It makes my day because cheese is usually too expensive for me to buy. I get the one in the photo at the bottom of the page. It is kinda like Velveeta, I guess. It has a very low melting point and a very mild flavor. You can make grilled cheese with it, but it tends to all spill out of the sides.
Meanwhile their employees and "community leaders," i.e. redditors, continue their unending campaign to demonize civilians who would dare hold bitcoin without permission.
Form me, one of the significant criticisms of cryptocurrencies, particularly Bitcoin, is their environmental impact. The process of “mining” Bitcoin requires significant computational power, leading to a large carbon footprint. Recent estimates suggest that the power consumption of the global Bitcoin network is comparable to the energy consumption of entire countries, like Finland and Norway. This has led to concerns about the sustainability of cryptocurrencies in their current form. Even with Prove of Stake, this is still a very high price to pay for a system that is slow, and mostly used as a speculative resource. I can’t seem to find the “real” value of Crypto, other than the get rich schemes we see, and how they end…
Its energy usage is very good because it can provide people who want to invest in renewables a source of revenue in the market where energy prices already go negative at times of peak production.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] thread[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2017/12/07/the-bulgarian-go...
many such cases
There was an acquisition of F-16s in 2022 for $1.3 billion, which still leaves 1.5 billion EUR from the seized money.
https://bivol.bg/bg-bitcoin-deal.html
2011 - it's a scam, nobody uses it
2013 - it's a scam, only criminals use it
2015 - it's a scam, no companies accept it
2017 - it's a scam, only small companies accept it
2019 - it's a scam, no countries officially recognize it
2021 - it's a scam, only small countries officially recognize it
2023 - it's a scam, it's not the world reserve currency
With that logic.
Afaik that's still an unsolved mystery with several competing theories.
2023 - still nobody uses it
[1] Number Go Up by Zeke Faux tries actually using BTC in El Salvdor. Many don't know how, some people tell him to leave, some try but it's strictly inferior to existing payment methods.
They’re almost always rolled back in some number of months.
See Tesla as the most famous example:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/05/12/elon-musk-says-tesla-wil...
A real world example of how Bitcoin didn't work, even though it could have worked is Steam[1]. They tried, and while gamers are more likely to be able to handle the intricacies of crypto than most of the rest of the population, there are just some really difficult issues to solve with using raw Bitcoin.
Virtualized networks on top of Bitcoin like Lightning[2] seek to solve some of those issues, but bring their own complexity and issues including finding enough VC money to bootstrap the network into even having money to function.
1. https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail...
2. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network-sca...
Bitcoin is the currency that nobody uses and a collectible that doesn't behave like a collectible.
He also questioned its role as a hedge, stating, "It's gone up as stocks have gone up, it goes down when stocks go down. This is not the way a collectible is supposed to behave."
I have actively tried to use bitcoin to pay for daily life stuff in 2022/2023 and its basically impossible without converting to fiat. The only 2 bills I can pay directly with it is my VPS host and AT&T. I can't buy groceries with it, pay my rent, fuel my car, or see a doctor. I was once able to buy steam games and Chinese food with it but both have since dropped it.
I would not call bitcoin a scam but I also would not say it is useful currency for Americans.
Historically, money backed by weak reserves has always lost against money backed by stronger reserve assets. I find it funny that people believe that infinite debt creation is superior and will win against absolute digital scarcity.
Can you say more about where this has actually happened, and how it's applicable in this situation? (I'm actually curious)
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...
> Federal Reserve notes are not redeemable in gold, silver or any other commodity, and receive no backing by anything
that is not quite right. historically USD has been backed by the USA military
funnily enough you CAN actually redeem the banknotes for these things but most people don't typically enjoy the experience
Then short it.
I’m not particularly up to speed here, is there some substantial evidence that seems to indicate that in fact they were one and the same?
If you were going to store a series of words for up to centuries without being able to check the backup, and without being able to make any changes to protect it, what would you use?
if he kicked off a treasure hunt puzzle through some time-released clue in the future he'd basically be Ready Player One's James Halliday :D
Apparently, Hal Finney may have been Satoshi, and he was cryopreserved back in 2014:
https://www.wired.com/2014/08/hal-finney/
{Meta, I just noticed GP comment is from 'eli', lol.}
With regard to currencies they all have slight concerns, but the dollar is safer as people run to it in a crisis which keeps the value relatively high. This will change eventually, but could happen next year or decades hence. If I could predict it, I would be far wealthier.
With regard to Bitcoin, it is a relevant question despite my flippant response. The exchanges are well known to be corrupt and have a vested interest in keeping the price of Bitcoin high. Leveraging can happen there or off chain as was done with the relatively recent debacle with Terra/Luna.
[1] https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/bitcoin-l...
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2023/04/27/bitcoins-estimat...
Still, manipulating is such a high risk thing, that most avoid doing it.
Bitcoin has had such a wild ride. Cool hipster currency to libertarian wet dream to silk road fueling to a hedge against multiple country's money printer(I particularly remember some South Korea event cause a huge jump) to the really boring of heavily paper-trail super scare asset we know today.
Given my perception of what I thought Bitcoin would do, I should probably sell what I have. However, this added legitimacy is good for my bags.
It's obviously not 0.
So way more than 0.
Well by definition wash trading results in no change of price, so none of the movement in the NYSE is a result of wash trading.
Further more, wash trading is illegal and every order entered into the CLOB is recorded as to which trader sent it so its trivial it detect if a trader did wash trade.
I'm not going to comment on whether that's realistically achievable on the NYSE specifically, but it's definitely not true that wash trading doesn't change prices "by definition". To the contrary -- that's one of the reasons it was made illegal.
It's use is to increase volume.
From teh SEC who over sees this.
If you aren't happy with their definition you can take it up with them but you don't get to redefine the term for your own use;)
https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/aljdec/id78grl.txt
> -[1]- Wash trades are purchases and sales of securities that match each other in price, volume and time of execution, and involve no change in beneficial ownership.
Because you're missing the part that in certain circumstances, when you are performing both the sale and the purchase, you can choose whatever sale price you want.
E.g. most recent genuine market trades were at $0.50, but you offer for sale at $0.60 and buy your offer at $0.60. Then do the same at $0.65 and $0.70.
Then it looks to outsiders like the price really is going up, and that can be used for all sorts of things.
You can look it up in Wikipedia if you want, which explicitly gives one of the motivations for wash trading as:
"- Falsely driving up asset prices by fabricating trade history with increasing prices" [1]
I'm not redefining anything at all. ;)
(It is also used for increasing volume, but that's not the only motivation.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_trade
The SEC has the job of handling this in the US and I cited them. You cited Wikipedia. I'm happy with using the definition that the SEC uses.
Maybe someone somewhere now uses wash trading to mean raising the prices but if you actually think about the name its meant to mean nothing changes after the trade, meaning no price change.
Given we're talking about the NYSE and therefor the SEC, i'm happy using their definition vs the wikipedia definition but I understand why you came to your opinion. Thanks for sharing!!
The SEC definition is obviously correct insofar as each individual wash trade is executed at the same price -- it is sold at price X and bought at price X.
But then multiple wash trades can create a sequence of seemingly rising prices. Even though each individual pair has a matching price. Nothing in the SEC definition from that case contradicts this. Nothing in the SEC definition requires that the offer (first) half of a wash trade be a legitimate market price -- it can be made at a price artificially higher than the market, which is sometimes the whole point.
It's easy to read up further on this, there's lots of material available online which explains this -- how each half of a wash trade uses the same price, but a sequence of them are used to raise the apparent market price.
Again, this is 100% in line with the SEC definition.
* China 194,000
* Ukraine 46,351
* El Salvador
* Finland
* Georgia (the country, not the US state)
See: https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/treasuries/#countries
Bonus points if the NSA/CIA can steal it to fund black ops.
A trading method that shorts BTC as soon as the stock market opens and goes long QQQ, closing both the BTC short and the QQQ long at the closing bell, would have posted a strong return despite BTC being up for the year, indicative of liquidations by a large entity to take advantage of increased liquidity when stock market is open--I would surmise the US government selling its 50k seized James Zhong Silk Road coins.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/03/31/us-government-s...
It all adds up. This selling puts constant pressure on BTC during the market hours and sometimes those sudden 100-200+ pt BTC dumps. Very profitable trading method..
> Why the U.S. Government Has $5 Billion in Bitcoin
Answer:
> … Uncle Sam’s stash of some 200,000 bitcoin was seized from cybercriminals and darknet markets. It is primarily offline in encrypted, password-protected storage devices known as hardware wallets that are controlled by the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service or another agency.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-u-s-debt-will-rise-by-...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/congressional-budget-offic...
That is not what the article says. The article says the debt will rise each day. Think of the deficit as the 1st derivative of the debt, or the rate of change. If date is increasing at a constant rate, then the deficit is staying mostly flat.
So, the article is saying something like "John is running away from us, and will get 5 miles further away every hour", and you're saying "John is running away from us, and he gets 5mph faster every hour".
And if it is a thing, one has to be serious about understanding what one can and cannot do about it, love or hate.
an understanding sharing much in common with the eye-sore casinos propped up slowly over time in towns and cities around me, especially: pity the denizens who participate, move on with my life.
The bitcoin trading market is much thinner than it looks -- wash trading is ubiquitous [0] and BTC's price is systematically propped up by a likely fraudulent stablecoin [1]. High prices benefit the organized crime orgs that transact with it [2], but none of the putatively legitimate web3 projects rely on high valuations to work, in theory. If blockchain solves a real problem, it should do it at BTC = $100 or whatever.
IMO, if the US government floods the market, it could do a lot of damage to organized crime groups, potentially lead to unbacked stablecoin's death spiral (as people attempt to redeem more cash than they actually have on hand), and perhaps lead to a healthier, less mania-prone crypto market.
[0] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/wash-trading-centralised-cryp...
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/06/13/tether-manipulat...
[2] https://dialogo-americas.com/articles/china-sells-fentanyl-f...
Also, I think that if BTC falls below, say, 10K, a lot of loans are going to get called in suddenly, and we're going to see that a lot of people were swimming without trunks [0], i.e. mismanaging customer funds and assuming that the crypto market would go up indefinitely. In other words, I think the story we're learning now about Alameda is going to turn out to be a lot of people's story.
But we shall see!
[0] https://money.com/swimming-naked-when-the-tide-goes-out/
https://ia801508.us.archive.org/25/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.5...
Aww do you? :'(
A record amount of BTC not moved on chain for the long term has reached all time highs, "wash trading" or not, that can't be faked, it's being held as it's primary value proposition, a store of value.
I can't believe the Tether FUD is still widespread after all these years, all completely unproven and wrong time and time again.
If the USG stopped to think for just a second maybe they'd ask themselves why they'd sell absolute digital scarcity for something they can just print out of thin air for themselves.
I thought it was supposed to be a currency?
1. Unit of Account (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_account)
2. Store of Value (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value)
3. Medium of Exchange (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_of_exchange)
So think about a couple examples of these:
Goats would be terrible money. A unit of account that is "goats" would be subject to birth- and death-rates.
Sports game tickets would be terrible money - they're significantly more valuable before the game, and after the game, they're far less valuable.
Mountains would be terrible money. How could you exchange them, unless you were able to keep track of who owned the mountain?
Dollars are actually pretty good at all three. They don't die. They're pretty stable in terms of value. It's pretty easy to give someone Dollars.
Bitcoin are... ok... at some of these. It's pretty good as a unit of account - if you can secure your wallet. It's... ok... at being a store of value - there have been some very high-profile sudden value fluctuations that left people holding a bag. It's pretty easy to give someone Bitcoin, but not trivial. It looks like it costs about $1 to make a bitcoin transaction happen, where I can transfer a few dollars for free.
I'm not a Bitcoin supporter, but I don't think it's fair to malign the tech for things it actually can do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
2. Yeah, I was trying to come up with a simple "can't be exchanged easily" things and I (pretty obviously) failed. Got any ideas of "can't be exchanged easily" stuff?
The Rai stones are just a curious example of how creative people can get with their ledgers. And by extension - what happens when people who can manufacture your unit of account out of thin air come along.
I hope you have a great day.
> I can't believe the Tether FUD is still widespread after all these years, all completely unproven and wrong time and time again.
is false.
Tether knowingly falsified documents when applying for bank accounts [0], lied about its backing [1], and is the currency of choice for pig butchering scams [2] and Hamas [3].
Overall, a really bad, obviously criminal org, and someone who responds to that with "FUD!" is generally either on the payroll [4] or soon to be in for a very rude awakening [5].
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-companies-behind-tether-...)
[1] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8450-21
[2] https://www.trmlabs.com/post/pig-butchering-scams-what-the-d...
[3] https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/militants-behind-israe...
[4] https://protos.com/astroturfing-and-fake-support-for-tether-...
[5] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/31/us-tether-bank-fr...
How much of this is due to people losing access to their wallets and the BTC being lost forever?
The number of BTC lost forever was already pretty high from what I remember. My suspicion is post-FTX there was a surge in self custody and many of these people likely lost access to their wallets from any number of the issues self-custody can bring. Or they just can’t figure out how to get it out.
Self-custody is completely impractical for 99.999% of the people walking around. The UX is horrible and the entire process overall has the most foot guns anyone will ever see.
It’s also worth pointing out that the “primary purpose” as a store of value now claimed today is only a result of bitcoin failing at the other claimed “purposes” over the years.
This one is especially entertaining to hear from crypto/BTC advocates as the title of the BTC paper is “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”.
As usual on this site, the assumption that 99% of people are complete drooling idiots for anything remotely tech-related runs firm. Believe it or not, a surprisingly large percentage of the population can rather quickly learn to manage relatively non-complex things like holding their own crypto and so forth without having to be specialized devops or top-tier tech workers.
Not everyone outside a certain bubble is blindly stupid just because they do other things with their lives.
What I am saying is that everyone forgets things and makes mistakes. Have you ever had to do a password reset? I know I have. Have you ever messed up a backup or deleted something accidentally? I know I have. HNers are in many cases lifelong technology professionals and all of this and more still applies to us. Just like how even the best and most brilliant physicians in the world still carry malpractice insurance. People mess things up all of the time. This is basic and fundamental being human stuff.
Extrapolate this to large numbers and the general population with varying levels of technical proficiency. Bank of America has over 60 million customers. How many times a day do you think they click a password reset link? How many times a day do you think someone calls customer service because they can't get in their banking app or account online? How many times do you think someone ends up walking in a branch to get it figured out? How many times a day do you think someone does an "oops" transferring funds, etc?
The answer is almost certainly a staggering number of people, every single day. Even 100k is just 0.16% of those 60 million customers so I would put that on the low side. Banks like Bank of America don't operate call centers, branches, etc because they're running a jobs program and like to waste money on unnecessary payroll. They have these resources because they're necessary. In the real world people forget things, lose stuff, mess things up, and occasionally need help.
The crypto self-custody mantra combined with irreversible transactions essentially depends on never make a mistake, never forget, and never lose anything. Combine that with the poor UI and UX I mentioned and it's a recipe for disaster.
It fundamentally goes against everything we universally know about human beings.
Until crypto FINALLY realizes it needs to bend to the real world and not the other way around it will continue to have some of the poorest adoption numbers of any technology from the past 100 years.
And if the government seizes $5B in something perishable like pumpkins, does it have a responsibility to offload those seized items before they're worth nothing?
Bitcoin doesn't exactly suffer from the problem pumpkins do, but I'm curious where that divide is between, "we've put it in the evidence locker" and "it will decay to nothing so we need to act on it, even if the legal matters have yet to be resolved."
IMHO Yes! The Government holding BTC indefinitely is equivalent to just taking it off the market and enriching all existing BTC owners by increasing scarcity.
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese
Cryptocurrency is actually specifically mentioned.
Gold currently has a market cap about 20x that of Bitcoin.
So the US has a bigger share of the world's gold than of the world's Bitcoin.