Re:U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation
by dragonwriter on Thursday May 24, 2018 @12:36PM
(#17145716)
> If I create a billion 'FOOCoins' and sell one to a friend for $1, FOOCoin now has a 1 billion market cap, but only a single dollar has changed hands. He sells it back to me for $2, now FOOCoin has a cap of $2 billion! With only $3 having changed hands.
Only $1 has changed hands in this.
Re:U.S. Launches Criminal Probe into Bitcoin Price Manipulation
by ceejayoz on Thursday May 24, 2018 @01:45PM
(#17146424)
$1 changed hands, but the trading volume is $3.
There's a lot of speculation that this sort of "wash trading" happens in Bitcoin - some exchanges permit buying/selling to yourself, which lets someone boost both price and volume trivially.
This is false. Market cap is a meaningless statistic when applied to cryptocurrencies. If I create a billion 'FOOCoins' and sell one to a friend for $1, FOOCoin now has a 1 billion market cap, but only a single dollar has changed hands. He sells it back to me for $2, now FOOCoin has a cap of $2 billion! With only $3 having changed hands.
This is clearly an exaggerated scenario, but it does show that the market price multiplied by the number of coins is not meaningful.
> Do you really think that a 300-500 billion dollar market is being propped up by less than pennies on the dollar?
I don't think it's a 300-500 billion dollar market.
In fact the article you linked to goes on to explain this very phenomenon! That in fact it's possible that only around $6 billion in inflow has gone into cryptocurrencies, ever. This puts tether at around 1/3 of the entire inflow. Is that still trivial?