Thursday, October 4th 2018
Cryptocurrency Trading Bots Manipulating Bitcoin, Altcoins' Pricing
The Wall Street Journal has come forward with a story confirming what we all knew, but could have been left out of the cryptocurrency narrative for various reasons: that bots are used on a daily basis to manipulate pricing of these digital assets. The practice includes various tricks, such as spoofing (creating a hue order in the ledger and then canceling), pump-and-dump schemes (where players can resort to a variety of manipulation techniques to pump um a given product's pricing in order to then dump all their positions at the ballooned price) and ping-pong transactions (where a holder of multiple wallets makes extensive trades between his assets, never moving crypto in or out of his control, but placing extra orders and volume on the markets.
Of course, most of these practices have been outlawed in real-world investment scenarios, as price manipulation doesn't really bode well for a free market. However, some players in the crypto sphere (trader Kjetil Eilersten, who developed the market-manipulation program Quatloo Trader) go as far as defending pricing manipulation tools' implementation, saying that a market where "everybody manipulates" results in a zero-sum loss for anyone. Now isn't that refreshing.
Sources:
The WSJ, via CCN
Of course, most of these practices have been outlawed in real-world investment scenarios, as price manipulation doesn't really bode well for a free market. However, some players in the crypto sphere (trader Kjetil Eilersten, who developed the market-manipulation program Quatloo Trader) go as far as defending pricing manipulation tools' implementation, saying that a market where "everybody manipulates" results in a zero-sum loss for anyone. Now isn't that refreshing.
37 Comments on Cryptocurrency Trading Bots Manipulating Bitcoin, Altcoins' Pricing
Yeah, other coins may briefly jump ahead in "paper" marketcap - but again: I have no problem saying no coin will in reality pass BTC for more than a blink of time. Heck go look at Ripple - it's all fake volume controlled by a central authority lol. Depending on how you count it, it already "Passed" BTC - but eventually Coinmarketcap had to intervene because of how faked and controlled the supply is. Then it fell (because it is useless lol).
But let's humor this - why would any coin gain more total value than Bitcoin? The very fact that it is Store-of-Value, means there is no reason for another use case to overcome it.
No, we aren't there yet as most clones are mundane things based on PoW or PoS and little varation. I think that day will come though.
If bitcoin tried to adapt that might change things. But the bitcoin devs have historically been quite conservative in regards to it's core issues.
The ONLY innovation of Bitcoin is sustainable decentralization. All other systems sacrifice this - and they die or fall apart.
P.S. Dump your shitcoin. I will bet you $1,000,000 that BCH loses, just like Jimmy Song bet Roger Ver. Ver backed out of the bet, will you?
There'll be a big change IMO. Probably something proof of time based and tied to automation of the economy and universal income. Of course, that depends on tying it into some kind of government ID system or unique personal identifier.
Remember, I'm talking decades, not years.What? Last coin I possessed was ZCash. And it was for an experimental mining article series. I haven't held anyactual crypto in nearly 4 months.
I'll do you better: I can promise you BCH is not far from dead. It's a complete failure to differentiate itself, chiefly. I'd bet on it's death even more than Bitcoin. I was only using it as an example of what a couple years and completely uncreative minds brought to the table.
Idk what the future holds decades from now, but please don't pretend anyone is smart for saying "things will be different in 50 years." <= Yeah, no shit Sherlock lol.
P.S. Bitcoin's bottom will likely be in within 2-4 weeks. idk if you actually believe in saving for the future, but food for thought.
P.S. People forget that we were below $6,000 exactly 1 year ago lol. We are still up YoY.
Nope if there isn't a fundamental demand for coins, or alt coins, you'll see the same cycle repeated over & over again. But will the regulators step in, since we also don't know if they'll do so given that the huge chunks of money entering cryptocurrency realm IMO wasn't from some random dudes?
I don't believe BTC will die.