Legitimate trading was blocked by insiders and the exchange (kraken), the price was fixed, with a follow-up short squeeze.I have been a member of the Bitcoin community for quite some time, though a rather silent one. I read, I watch. I have also been actively trading. I am quite aware of some of the complaints and accusations that come up during periods of rapid price movement, particularly the ones that are quite simple to see coming. Though largely evidence is not available. I have experienced some sketchy things myself as well, though haven't been able to dismiss the technical hand waiving excuses that are issued.
Given this recent significant day was certain to have all eyes watching and all hands on deck, I was not going to be routed this time.
To substantiate what I am going to say, without identifying myself, let it be known I am highly educated and experienced in the relevant domains. What I am going to say is not an opinion but a qualified professional conclusion based on planned testing and observation.
The standard excuses are that the servers can not handle such peak loads, that that much traffic is no different than a DDOS. This ma ybe true or simply contrived and convenient. It doesn't have to be true but it may very well be. Though I'm sure the point still will be made by someone, in this case it has no relevance. I prepared to circumnavigate the bottleneck on the web front end.
To prepare for the day I wrote a python GUI to interact directly with the trading systems's API. It was simple with buttons for long and short orders at market rate. It also had a button I called 'clear' that fetched my account balanced details (it also toggled the colour of the buttons after use). This clear button enabled me to test the system responsiveness. As turned out it worked perfectly and I did in fact not suffer the same congestion the web front end experiences. Yay me. This GUI was set to be always visible above my other open windows so I couldn't fumble to get to it.
I also had my exchange account page open such that I could keep pressing F5 on my orders page to confirm that my orders were in fact processed and lodged into the system.
To ensure that I would be one of the fastest human actors, only beaten by well written bots or tightly placed Stop orders, I also wrote a script to fetch and parse a handful of pages that would likely post the ETF news and it did so on a 3 second timer. This data was continuously displayed in a terminal which then told me which of the open tabs I need to check before hitting those order buttons. The process was as efficiently streamlined as I could manage with the time I had. It worked perfectly. My Star trek Red Alert siren went off even before the price had moved much at all.
I had acted slightly slower than I was planning as the siren, my phone, and two separate chart pages all triggered their alarms in a cascade, it nearly gave me a heart attack while clicking to the correct browser tab (bats).
The following is a screen shot of what I was looking at during the activity (redacted to obscure identity). Followed by observations of the significant details and my conclusions.
This screen shot was taken at 4:40 Eastern Time (9:40 in my time zone)
Observation Notes:
1. 4 orders had been accepted by the system at the following times (they were significant in size):
Also, as you can see from kraken/cryotowatch chart tool, two other orders were filled at (pressed the button enough times would certainly saturate my limits ensuring end-to-end success in the event of high failure rate):
2. Observe the current time stamp: 4:40
This is 35 minutes after they were accepted.
3. Observe the data is current as the page reload timer reads 8 seconds.
Many people have commented over the last couple of days about how unprecedented the drop was. The current sock puppet narrative is that Bitcoin has really stabilised as a market and does not crash so much, it is now healthy. Nothing could be further from the truth. I do now sadly find myself in agreement with the SEC.
The current narrative is total bullcrap to cover observable strange characteristics of the market, Bitcoin is as unhealthy as it has even been and more. Bitcoin is now in full crisis mode after manipulation of this scale.
Corrections are healthy. The market must decide the base support price before any speculation can be reasonably made. On this big day, the market was blocked by an inside group that are now showing signs of significant degrees of criminality. This ETF day was ... a heist.
The market was not allowed to express it is opinion of the ETF result.
The general consensus was that the price was going to go sub 800. It could have gone much much lower.
Also, many people have commented since that the price didn't drop as sharply as they had expected. That the price didn't go as low as expected. That the price came back faster than they expected.
All of you were watching, I know you were. You thought the same things didn't you.
This is what I assume happened:
Wales in collusion with the exchanges rigged the order books (this just wouldn't work without inside collusion). They had a limit to how much they could invest in such a scam and a limit to their risk appetite. Leaving a high price massive purchase open to the behaviour of a free market could have worked out very badly. So they controlled the price trajectory.
Only a controlled amount of sell orders we are allowed to be executed. Enough to allow for a sudden drop (they f***ed up the rate of decent here). The rest of the orders were just stashed and ignored (no trading market has ever tolerated such behaviour from an exchange, this is capitol sin #1. Even just a small pinch of replaying the order book such that the house games the clients is outrageous).
At a controlled rate the orders were consumed by some massive buying holding the line at 1,000 Euro. This went on for half an hour!!!!!!! No f***in way is that realistic. The volume traded doesn't even support that detail.What followed then was a short squeeze.Excuses that are made when such behaviour has been suspect is 'network congestion'. Here in this case I have proved that didn't happen to me at least. The next excuse is the trading computer system was overwhelmed. That doesn't require counter evidence. Computers simply do not work like that. Processing orders is nothing like multidimensional numerical algorithms that take time to converge (which modern computers can handle). Trade orders is simple accounting, addition and subtraction. Computers rip through that work like they were born to do it (they were). As the provided evidence shows, orders were still not processed a full 40 minutes later! Even being pragmatic and accepting that sure some latency occurred, the processing slowed down some. It would have been in the order of seconds, at most if they really do have crap computers (they do not), a couple of minutes. Not 40 minutes. My single laptop could have crunched those number in less time. Furthermore, in almost all system, the network in the bottleneck. Computers can in most cases process whatever a network can deliver.
There was no system throughput problems anyway, I tested that too with a small buy order that went through instantly. The web front end was laggy, I'm sure that pissed people off (though irrelevant)
Software bug are also no valid excuses. The execution of orders is a very simple and straight forward algorithm. If there were bugs in it, the ALL orders would get effected, not a conveniently perfect number of orders.
No crime goes down perfectly as planned. The story is the the market handled the news of ETF denial well is a cover story. Given orders were outstanding for so long, though in fact they had more orders thrown at them than they anticipating. 40 minutes is an absurd amount of time to keep orders buffered, I would assume that was not the plan as it smells bad.
Then the short squeeze began. Once the insiders had consumed most of what they could handle at a controlled rate, they began constricting the sell orders even move such that they could begin artificially driving the price upwards. Once people who had buy orders placed down low at a reasonable prices saw the price begin turn around, many then would have reset their own buys. This then set the market upward cautiously. Anyone who didn't cancel their shorts would have screwed then as they were still proportionately being executed against the tide (one of mine was).
This comes on the very same day the SEC rejects an ETF on the grounds of a lack of regulation. It is then ironically proven Bitcoin exchanges are overdue for, and in desperate need of regulation and oversight. The degree of criminality is out of control. They are playing every old market game that is known and it is in your face. You are getting played. This was some over-the-top blatant price fixing.
I have been a very strong believer in and advocate for Bitcoin. Today I find myself disenfranchised.
- The market is not behaving healthily.
- It is clear the market is rigged. Sure there have been a lot of people saying whales move the price strategically to their advantage at odd times. In an open free market that is legitimate (rigging exchanges in not).
- The rhetoric on the Core vs BU is at an all time low. Neither Reddits are readable. Those that control the narrative are reaching new lows.[/li
- This rejection by SEC was not a good thing as die hard anarchists are claiming. Bitcoin must be accepted by the mainstream to survive. That's the f***ing plan. It's failing.
- It is known that half of all the BTC are owned by about 1,000 people. That is not a viable economy. But that was before Friday when there was the massive sell off and the big scoop. I seriously wonder just how many peoples coins the corrupt among them just picked up. If the BTC are owed by a very few then it is just like a jokecoin pre-mine.
In light of the latest string of serious problems, Bitcoin must be allowed to find it's true current value. If the support level is not known, Bitcoin really could go to $12
P.S. If this market looks like it is recovering to you, i warn you, this gang is going to strike again and dump the price while you do not expect it just as they don't allow you to participate when you do expect it. They do like to make it appear that the fundamental technical are working (though not on the day you see coming). The bottom has not yet been found.
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