i'm not convinced that wasn't a coincidence.

it's funny given the timing---it might fit perfectly with the "4 year cycle" bitcoin bulls are always talking about. chinese exchanges died in 2017, bitcoin mooned. bitmex dies in 2021, and.....?


whales fighting with whales. i reckon spot whales fucked with their share of bitmex whales too. that's just how it goes in such an illiquid market.

isn't that exactly what you would expect to happen?

when tether is created, it means dollars are being injected into the exchange system---to buy bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. on days where coinbase or bitstamp credit large dollar inflows to depositing clients, would you not expect the price to go up too?

i don't see how that is proof of manipulation at all. all it suggests is that tether/bitfinex, due to their position as one of the biggest liquidity providers in the world, leads the market sometimes.


presumably because they had dollar inflows that back the newly minted USDT.

we've already gone over all this. bitfinex's debt replaced the missing cash reserves on their balance sheet, which was later replaced by the LEO token offering. then tether continued business as usual.

you may not like how they went about surviving the liquidity emergency, but nothing you're saying suggests that tether prints money out of thin air. not even once, let alone on a regular basis.


because it was no longer true.

that still doesn't suggest they ever issued unbacked USDT. it just reinforces what we already know about their balance sheet.

i like it. the flop bet doesn't necessarily scream top pair to me; could easily be a steal attempt. and the J turn makes it even less likely that he flopped top pair. and we're drawing to the flush---you know how i like my semi-bluffs.

it's an interesting turn of events. for years, everyone has been waiting for wall street (hedge funds, institutional traders, investment banks) to drive the next bitcoin bubble.

it never dawned on me until the microstrategy announcement that regular companies---not necessarily related to finance, nor in the business of investment---might start accumulating bitcoins and driving the next bubble instead. exciting times for sure!


here's another way to think about it: it's more than 0.025% of the entire circulating bitcoin supply, owned by a single company---a small company, at that. imagine if more companies, bigger companies, want to accumulate their own stash.

it's 20% of the amount MSTR invested in fiat terms---even more in BTC terms since square got a better price on their coins. that's not an insignificant amount IMO. there's obviously no point comparing either. every company has a different balance sheet and different amounts of disposable capital.


indeed, looking for financial advice on an internet forum---probably not the smartest move.

can you elaborate? why is it more compelling?

i read through a lot of the claims in that filing. it's filled with conjecture and assumptions about how manipulation would have, or could have, worked.

interestingly, the CFTC began probing bitfinex and tether for market manipulation in 2017 and nothing has ever come of it. in contrast, the CFTC began probing bitmex in early 2019 and criminal charges have already been filed. completely different cases i'm sure, but i find the disparity interesting to say the least.


that would imply they issued unbacked assets, which is not what happened.

what the facts show is that one time, a bank seizure rendered bitfinex insolvent and tether then removed its 1:1 backing to fulfill bitfinex's liquidity needs. that's quite a far leap from this suggestion that tether is constantly printing money out of thin air!

to be fair, the vast majority of those are no-name exchanges with very little volume---not exactly significant. there were 5 names that i recognized: HBUS, the pit, virwox, cobinhood, and IDAX.

virwox, cobinhood, and IDAX are no surprise. virwox got hacked many years ago and never recovered. i'm surprised they were still around at all. HBUS (huobi's USA platform) never gained traction.

i was surprised to see the pit (blockchain.com's new exchange) listed, then i realized it was just rebranded to blockchain.com exchange. since re-brandings are included on the list, 75 might be an exaggeration.

the problem with that weak delayed cbet is that your only move now is to shove the river, and the villain likely feels pot committed if he has a made hand. that's why stack sizes made this one so tough.

i'm curious to see how this one turned out.

what specifically are you pointing to?

that filing spells out what we already know---after the crypto capital bank seizure and subsequent transfer from tether to bitfinex, USDT was no longer backed 1:1. i don't see any indication that USDT was printed out of thin air, or that there was an ongoing conspiracy for years to manipulate prices as the lawsuit alleges. the theories referenced (eg the griffin and sham study) and facts presented appear to be mostly conjecture supporting their theory AFAICT, and all are contradicted by other academic studies like this: https://www.coindesk.com/tethers-impact-on-bitcoin-price-not-statistically-significant-study-finds

the plaintiffs occur to me as ambulance chaser types. they were heavily invested in shitcoins during a bubble and are now looking for someone to blame for all their losses after the bubble popped. the idea that tether caused the 2017 bubble as they claim is absurd to me.

traffic has died down some. rake has gone up. i still love their software and i appreciate what they do for our forum series. i'm just not thrilled about the direction things have taken over the past few months.


i would say around july or so. they cleaned up their moderated thread on bitcointalk but the 2+2 thread has kept a good record of when/how things have changed for the worse: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=56314728&postcount=1820

what flaw?

let's say hypothetically that mass adoption has already happened and bitcoin usage has penetrated most of society. wouldn't that inherently make it less speculative? after mass adoption has already occurred, there must be diminishing returns on speculation. imagine speculating about whether refrigerators would get adopted after everyone already has one in their house. because adoption, and whether bitcoin catches on x years from now---that's what traders are speculating about today.

in theory, they may be right. in practice, bitcoin is barely more than a decade old---a brand new asset class and type of technology. we should expect the market to treat it as a speculative asset, at least for now.

i figure it will become less speculative, and may de-correlate from stocks, as it becomes established in terms of adoption and mainstream legitimacy. i really don't know though, and we could be talking decades from now.

absolutely! i used to run a mid stakes sunday schedule on stars back in the day and would sometimes mix in $109s. you're gonna run into much tougher players than at $1 R/As, that's for damn sure!

awesome score though. i wish i weren't so crunched for time lately. this shit makes me wanna get back to the poker grind.

i don't feel great about the current situation. i certainly wouldn't stay rolled for high stakes there. however, i don't mind keeping a few bitcents in my account---an amount i'm willing to lose.


indeed, this is one of the things that suggests an ownership change to me. so much belt tightening, hiking rake, etc and absolutely nothing to draw in new players. they are obviously trying to squeeze out profitability on a small scale rather than trying to invest and grow their user base.

any other reads on the big stack?

sometimes i like to raise out there......good equity, enough chips behind that you can opt to fold to a 3bet. as played, i like a CRAI but hey, i've been feeling splashy lately. can't tell if the big stack is just betting into weakness or actually has a hand, so fold equity is a tossup.


stack size makes postflop action tough here. i prefer a cbet on the flop (tough because you're almost stuck between donk betting and shoving) but like i said, been feeling splashy.


damn, another shitty change from SwC? satellite won tickets used to be good for like 2 years......

i think doug will win too.... but at those odds? i'm taking negreanu all day. lemme know if you feel like taking another little bet.


he's 100% fucking with doug's head IMO.

yeah, i hear ya. one thing to note is that BBJ tables are where all the action is on SwC, more often than not. also, it's not just the player that gets the bad beat who gets paid out---so does the hand winner + everyone else dealt into the hand. this dynamic tends to make the BBJ tables even juicier, so the jackpot isn't the only reason to play them.

i think it's safe to assume that stimulus payments had a positive effect on asset prices, including BTC.

the trump administration had been talking about another round of payments for months, so it's possible investors anticipated another increase in prices as a result. now that trump is backtracking and putting off talks until after the election, we are seeing the reverse effect.

no big deal. buy the dip.

i suspect that's a big part of this. they are probably leveraging criminal charges to force the owners into giving up all their user data. maybe it will be under the guise of sanctions enforcement, but one way or another i reckon the IRS plans to get their hands on that data and use it to go after large scale tax evaders.

last november, bitmex carelessly leaked ~30k customer email addresses: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitmex-email-data-leak-fallout-is-serious-many-users-already-affected

maybe that pointed the feds in the right direction. they have lots of user data from past requests from other USA-facing exchanges. if hundreds or thousands of those addresses belonged to confirmed USA residents, maybe the justice dept used that as justification to pursue a case against them.


IIRC the SEC and CFTC built a case against 1broker partly by having agents engage in prohibited trading activity from the USA---activity that 1broker should have been blocking. that demonstrated that they were operating in the USA.

i'm guessing agents did the same with bitmex, and that the case is not purely based on 3rd party data.