Bitfinexed

This article cites bitfinexed https://medium.com/@bitfinexed This blog is extremely entertaining and I recommend reading it.

For anyone who hasn't been following, the prevailing theory is that the largest Cryptocoin exchange "Bitfinex" also runs an altcoin called "Teather" which was marketed as being backed 1:1 by USD. So far they've created 2.8 BILLION USDT and coincidently the times they create millions of these happens to be in the middle of extreme market crashes. See this chart: https://i.imgur.com/Uo07d1d.jpg More details here: https://medium.com/cryptomedication/uncovering-the-real-cartel-in-bitc… https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/latest https://medium.com/@mattcollburner/bitmex-insiders-caught-in-a-web-of-…

Most recently, there's the tape-painting bot Picasso: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/meet-picasso-the-painter-on-gdax-c478ff… If you were paying attention in the week that followed this post, the spread between GDAX and the other major US exchanges narrowed from $1000+ per coin to just about $11 right now, and trade volumes on GDAX plummeted. Maybe theres's some other reason, though there's some crazy correlation there at least. I'm surprised more people aren't talking about that.

Yeah, I would be concerned about 'wash trading' too. And the Crypto trading space seems like the Wild West in int 1880s in how some crypto trading sites and exchanges are screening for this kind of illegal activities while others aren't. > PSA: The Bitfinex trade engine ALLOWS for WASH TRADING > The trade engine on Bitfinex will allow you to buy and sell to your own orders, the procedures to do it are as follows (which will likely be ‘fixed’, or partially fixed after this post…) Source: Wash Trading Bitcoin: How Bitfinex benefits from fraudulent trading => https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/wash-trading-bitcoin-how-bitfinex-benef…

There has been a blogger/journalist tracking this and writing some great analysis on Tether and BitFinex https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/

A lot of good reads on the Medium [1] as well. [1]: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

Digital currency trading firm Genesis Global Trading found bitcoin tends to recover dramatically from large drops. The last four times bitcoin has fallen more than 20 percent this year, it has gained an average 28 percent in the two weeks following, and an average 61.5 percent in the four weeks following, the analysis showed. https://medium.com/@bitfinexed to find out why

There's weird stuff going on with Tethers, which are supposedly pegged to the dollar and fully backed, being created apparently out of nothing when Tether has no US banking arrangements, and these being used to prop up margin trading on Bitfinex. The price then goes up on Bitfinex, then on other exchanges. The upshot is: every time margin gets too deep on Bitfinex, another batch of Tethers is created out of thin air, and the price gets a pump. Bitcoin's recapitulated the history of finance, and now it's got to Quantitative Easing. It's amazingly tangled, I'm trying to put together an explainer blog post, but Bitfinexed has the best coverage of the pieces: https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/

Its a fraud in that the money/gold/intrinsic fiat that is supposed to be backing it has not been credibly proven to exist, at least at a value matching the current amount of USDT in supply. --- Let's say I decide to make NerdBucks. I offer to sell you n NerdBucks for n dollars, 1-to-1, and tell you I will always buy those NerdBucks back at the same price. This is how NerdBucks get "pegged" to a dollar -- if someone will always buy the currency for a given rate, it will then always be worth at least that much. Now, you might say, "Okay, what's from stopping you from selling a billion NerdBucks, and when people try to sell them back to you, you just refuse?" Well, normally nothing (outside of litigation, but that is a rabbit hole I'm not going to talk about here). In theory, though, I could have a bank account that I publish the amount of inside it, to show you I am prepared to buy every single NerdBuck back in a worst-case scenario. --- Going back to Tether: The issuing body of Tether has suggested they are holding reserves of USD equivalent to USDT in circulation. If you look at some of the other articles linked in this thread [0] you can find deep-dives that suggest they are lying, and in fact have been using USDT as a way to print money. They are relying on the hope that more people will buy USDT than come calling to cash in. That is fundamentally the same hope that a Ponzi scheme relies…

You realize Bitcoin/Ethereum are simply computer software right? And you missed the essential caveat; aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin addresses control 96.53% of all BTC in circulation. This is a conservative estimate, as anyone familiar with how Bitcoin addresses and wallets work, would know one user is likely controlling many addresses. A perfect example of this, is a few days ago 1933phfhK3ZgFQNLGSDXvqCn32k2buXY8a created a script to subdivide 111,114 BTC into several hundred addresses, from 60,000 / 30,000 / 20,000 / 10,000 / 5,000 / 500 and then to 100 BTC accounts, over the course of a few hours. [2] Following the movement here now leads to recent deposits into the Binance and Bitfinex wallets. And most importantly, on the computer science behind Ethereum - In any DLT network with an adversarial threat model it's impossible to create a smart contract with any functionality relying on external data inputs (betting on the outcome of a sports game, or tracking any real world data input) within the network as there's no way to validate the authenticity of that data unless a trusted 3rd party is designated, at which point the network becomes useless. Not even to mention the question of why anyone would want to use a token with such wildly fluctuating market price, and who's supply is controlled by a small userbase of oligarchs. Additionally, the entire cryptocoin market has an Achilles' heel.. Tether, and Bitfinex are widely suspected of counterfeiting aprox $4,000,000,000 USD…

The difference is crypto is a chance to get in at the top for once. Not if you buy other cryptocoins like Bitcoin or Ethereum that someone else created for nothing to sell to bagholders. All you're doing there is becoming a late adopter and you must pray you're not too late in the pyramid that you'll be able to sell to some other speculator at a price higher than you bought meanwhile you're at a 1000x-10,000x disadvantage to anyone who acquired the coin for pennies/fractions of the cost to you. Simple game theory. Anyone who wants to just needs to create their own crypto-asset and market it like the others to convince "speculators" it's worth purchasing. Notice how bitcoin/cryptocoin advocates tell others to "HODL" - psychological manipulation is needed to maintain the artificial market scarcity as there's no real demand, use, or acceptance from retailers. [1] If you're genuinely concerned about control of the money supply, you would voice concern about how cryptocoins are majority owned by only a few hundred people [2] and because of how tether [3] has been marketed and used on exchanges it's essentially like the federal reserve of cryptocurrencies except it's just 2 guys and it's alleged to be backed by nothing which could mean they're stealing large amounts of cryptocoins. Given all the theft in the cryptocoin system, one might wonder if regulations and security standards exist for a reason. What happens if thieves become the majority wealth holders of all the…

Bitfinex stopped trading with US Dollars after their bank accounts were closed / blocked / whatever. To workaround that, they invented a custom cryptocurrency called Tether, which they claim is pegged to the US Dollar by keeping 1 USD in their bank account for each Thether that is issues. The really suspicious thing is that over the last couple of months almost 1 Billion Tethers have been issued, which is highly suspicious because we wouldn't expect sane people to send such a gigantic amount of money to a shady Bitcoin exchange in the other end of the world, in exchange for a crypto token of dubious value. The most likely thing is that Bitfinex is using these unbacked Tethers that they are printing to purchase bitcoin in their exchange and push up the price. It feels similar to the last bubble, which started out in MtGOX. MtGOX was insolvent (due to having a good chunck of their deposits lost to hackers and fraud). Eventually, they stopped letting people withdraw their US dollars so the only option people had was to purchase bitcoin and withdraw that instead. This extra demand pushed up the price which attracted outside speculation (the bitcoin price was higher than average in MtGOX but also quickly rose elsewhere) and kept MtGOX afloat for a bit longer than it should (because new investors kept throwing money on the dying exchange to get into the action). For more Bitfinex news, I would recommend following https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

Why Bitcoin forks? Exchanges would be where the fraud happens. MtGOX was insolvent and yet they inflated the price of Bitcoin across all exchanges. Bitfinex is alleged to be engaging in the same market manipulation through margin wash trades and their central bank scheme of free Tether minting. Bitcoin forks are funny because it's decentralized software with a shared database history from the time of the fork. After an update, users can choose to use one or the other. Unfortunately the incentives are warped for miners and devs, so users might not have the best possible design. There's an excessive amount of propaganda surrounding cryptocoins because "investors" need to psychologically lure you in to buy their supply, which they've acquired for significantly lower value, lower capital, and lower computational work then you if you're starting after them. [0] https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/latest

This paper mainly focuses on the miner-transaction fee-protocol economics, completely neglecting the real world economic interactions and history of BTC. Satoshi's core design of bitcoin minting favored early adopters to mint coins at extremely low cost and processing power, this is why someone traded 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas because it took no effort to generate those early on. Satoshi decided to decrease the amount of rewards as the network grew older and presumably more users would adopt it, why? This is a marketing gimmick seen with beanie babies and base ball cards where the cost of production is low yet you tell customers the supply is very limited so you must act quick while supplies last. And the supplies of this type of service are increasing with every day as alternative networks offering the same service (blockchains, trustless distributed databases) are increasingly sprouting up. The question speculators should be considering when evaluating the economic worth in trading bitcoins or any other altcoin should certainly take into consideration what value the network provides them versus alternative service networks, what the risk of volatility in each network is especially because extreme drops in value are much easier than rises in price as liquidity is severely limited and many "whale" accounts often own enough supply of coins to crash the entire market [1] [2] [3]. Exchanges like MTGox, Bitfinex, etc have been suspected of manipulating exchange rates and…

There's a number of people who make this claim, some of them leaning towards more credible [0], some hysterical [1]. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-manipulati… [1]: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

The usual blog when it comes to Bitfinex. https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

Bitcoin is owned by a tiny oligarch and operated by an ASIC monopoly in China called Bitmain. https://howmuch.net/articles/bitcoin-wealth-distribution As you can see, over 95% of all bitcoins in circulation are owned by about 4% of the market. In fact, 1% of the addresses control half the entire market. There's a theory Bitfinex and Tether might have created aprox 3 billion in counterfeit USD in order to steal and launder Bitcoins and manipulate their exchange and as a result, the entire cryptocoin market. Comprehensive investigation is detailed here: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

Probably "bitfinexed". I think I know the article you're talking about, but could only find another quickly peeking through my history, but perhaps it'll serve as a breadcrumb for you. https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/meet-picasso-the-painter-on-gdax-c478ff…

Even worse, they tried to get an audit, but it ended up with them and their auditor ending the process without producing an audit. Apparently they weren't too happy the auditor wanted to actually take a close look: “We confirm that the relationship with Friedman is dissolved. Given the excruciatingly detailed procedures Friedman was undertaking for the relatively simple balance sheet of Tether, it became clear that an audit would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. As Tether is the first company in the space to undergo this process and pursue this level of transparency, there is no precedent set to guide the process nor any benchmark against which to measure its success.” - Tether spokesperson See https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-and-tether-is-unauditable-why-…

There's also allegations about exchanges like Bitfinex where the owners/management trade on their own exchanges [0]. With insight on order book and people's stop prices there's an obvious conflict of interest there, as one can easily go stop hunting and manipulate prices. It's an unregulated market, and exchanges want to keep it that way (like how Binance's moving operations to Malta) [0]: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/wash-trading-bitcoin-part-ii-who-and-wh…

The bigger conspiracy is that Tether might have been used to pump the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The theory goes something like this: - Bitcoin starts dipping. - Bitfinex/Tether generates millions of USDT out of thin air. - They use them to buy Bitcoins, sending the price back up. - Once the price is high enough they can sell a few of these Bitcoins they effectively got "for free" and make a ton of money. A big proponent of this theory is "Bitfinex'ed": https://medium.com/@bitfinexed

More context on the shadiness—notice this was called out in October of last year but we are wayyy beyond rational markets for these tokens: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-never-repaid-their-tokens-bitf…

Bitfinex was already hacked: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/bitfinex-never-repaid-their-tokens-bitf… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitfinex_hack

Wash trading: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/wash-trading-bitcoin-how-bitfinex-benef… Allegedly unbacked reserve currencies (tether): https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship-auditor-dissolve… I'm sure there are more, any scheme/scam that gives someone an edge will be tried in an unregulated market.

Yes, and Bitfinex promptly gives it to Tether. Which they control. https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/spoiler-alert-the-institution-buying-te… https://www.coindesk.com/bitfinex-tether-break-silence-go-media-offens…

Relevant recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16152050 Also bitfinex'ed writes extensively on manipulation: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/

Employees at major exchanges can trade on insider information about whether a major exchange will support a new coin. Employees at token-funded companies can insider trade on that same information. There's already some evidence these schemes are happening at major exchanges. Coinbase's launches of Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash come to mind. https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/coinbase-insider-trading-litecoin-editi…

As far as I can tell it has mostly issued Tethers to itself [1](as Bitfinex). Bitfinex/Tether are hoping that they can entice customers to use their platforms for arbitrage with other exchanges such that they can cream off a healthy margin without actually holding much currency themselves. [1] https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/spoiler-alert-the-institution-buying-te…

Tether did a fake "audit" to show they were legitimate: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/the-so-called-tether-audit-that-isnt-an…

I believe the main concern is whether 1 tether is actually backed by 1 USD. There is a series of articles[0] about why tether and Bitfinex are scary [0]: https://medium.com/@bitfinexed