According to Business Insider, "one or two" big players helped pup the price of bitcoin by more than 700% from $150 to $1,000 in late 2013, before the collapse of the Mt Gox exchange.
The paper claims two bots, Markus and Willy, traded with themselves bitcoins they didn't have, and managed to obtain over 600,000 BTC, worth over $188 million, in the process as bitcoin's price kept pumping because of the trading volume they were bringing in.
Notably by mid 2014 Mt Gox went down amid hacking allegations, and thousands of bitcoins went missing at the time Researchers suggest the cryptocurrency ecosystem is currently being manipulated as well given the aount of iliquid cryptocurrencies there are out there - it wouldn't be too hard to pump and dump them.
The research paper reads:
“Based on rigorous analysis with extensive robustness checks, the paper demonstrates that the suspicious trading activity likely caused the unprecedented spike in the USD-BTC exchange rate in late 2013, when the rate jumped from around $150 to more than $1,000 in two months.”
The paper is titled "Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem", and it was publushed on the Journal of Monetary Economics. It was authored by Neil Gandal, JT Hamrick, Tyler Moore, and Tali Oberman.
Do you think this is true? Is bitcoin's price currently being manipulated as well?
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