Forbes claims that more than half of Bitcoin trade records are fake

[Ever-young]

As we all know Bitcoin hold about 40% + of total market capitalization which is the coin with the highest trading volume both monthly and daily trading volume. Which I have no doubt that. I just came across account published today by Forbes titled  " More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake"
How on earth will they believe that.
The trading volume for btc is increasing day by day on individual exchange, of a truth their are exchanges which manipulate trading volume on their exchange to draw the attention of traders, exchanges like Finexbox
But that does not mean that the total daily trading volume up to 51% for btc is false.
Going through trade history to total volume recorded by different exchanges, both centralized and decentralized exchanges I fine their analysis wrong.
According to them  Companies like Binance, MEXC Global, and Bybit are examples of some of the largest issue areas when it comes to phony volume.
Really don't know where and how they got their source and come in conclusion to this. Btc market is large and it's trading volume is a big representative of how large the coin is.

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[stomachgrowls]

^
Where they do get those percentage? Do they able to check out every trading or exchange platform and verified out that some of those trades were fake?
There's no way that you could really able to verify it out unless if you do have some internal connection when it comes to verification of things.
Of course they could really presume out about fake volume or trades which is common not only on crypto market but also in other market as well
but putting up some numbers and feels like they are sure about it but having no solid back up with those claims then it would really
be just simply be ignored by this community.

[odolvlobo]

The Forbes methodology for discounting bitcoin trading volume follows a series of steps.

Regulation. We identify crypto licenses and from what regulatory body that each exchange possesses and use that as proxy to gauge their level of sophistication and intent to deter wash trades and publishing fake volume.

Third-party input. We considered the work of select third parties such as volume data from CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, Nomics and Messari. Messari’s volume statistics are less extensive by pairs, and it has fewer exchanges than its peers, but it has its own real-volume calculations. Forbes tracked in recent months how Messari applied a volume discount ranging from 40% to 65% to Binance volume, compared with the averages reported by CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko and Nomics at the time. Messari also discounts the trading volume of FTX by a lesser percentage (less than 20%) and that of Kraken by 99%. With regards to this latter, Forbes doesn’t share the view of applying a heavy discount to a firm that is among the most regulated crypto exchanges in the world. Most exchanges going through the Messari real volume analysis, however, lack any type of volume discount.

Web traffic. Forbes employs third-party data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb to heavily discount the volume of firms claiming a high trading volume without having sufficient crypto licenses and web traffic to generate such volume.

Forbes interviews. Forbes has conducted dozens of interviews of senior executives at major crypto exchanges to supplement quantitative information on a firm’s profile.

As you can see, other than the web traffic analysis, their numbers are entirely subjective.

[n0ne]

To keep themselves high on the market, exchanges gets involved in such kind of act. There is possible chances, because in the past similar incidents have happened and many exchanges have terminated its services. In particular it was the first time the People's Bank of China made an inspection and found a big detail of fake volume by the Exchanges to keep the market high. During those time period the market experienced a massive decline and further the recovery happened.

[dothebeats]

I know exchanges somewhat pad and inflate their own statistics, but for it to be more than half is IMO reaching. Bitcoin is still a popular trading asset for a lot of people, and if they think that it's easy to still fake trades for exchanges in this day and age then they must be delusional. They never seem to lose angles to attack bitcoin continuously, even though their claims are getting more and more absurd each day.

[Yamifoud]

I'm not sure about half of the trade records are fake but I believe that some exchanges had faked their taking volume in order to attract more traders to join. I'd see this most in non-reputable exchanges and much more for scam exchanges. I'd see how devastating it was and ruining the trust of the people and this make some to felt worried and doubtful. This kind of trick is very known to us now but this would never win as long as we've done the research, we still found them who manipulate the records.

[DooMAD]

I know exchanges somewhat pad and inflate their own statistics, but for it to be more than half is IMO reaching.

I'm not sure about half of the trade records are fake but I believe that some exchanges had faked their taking volume in order to attract more traders to join.

It really wouldn't surprise me if it was more than half, given how many years it has been going on.  Exchanges like Huobi and OKCoin spent at least five or more years reporting what I'd estimate to be around 90% fake volume.  And I'm fairly sure that nearly all exchanges are guilty of it to some extent.  If you average it out over time, more than half seems pretty reasonable.

[Hydrogen]

During the big block debate. It was claimed that some miners were filling BTC blocks to less than full capacity. Blocks 1 megabyte in size might contain less than 300 KB of actual data. This was back when there was a push to increase block size to 2 megabytes or larger.

Bitcoin transaction volume being one indicator that traders use in an effort to gauge demand. It is possible that some will send bitcoin from one wallet they own, to another. To artificially boost transaction volume and produce artificial demand. There are other motives for the practice.

Its a real world case for why building a better system won't necessarily deter unwanted actors from carrying out questionable schemes. People like to argue that capitalism or socialism will systemically prevent evil. But if people are determined enough, they can usually find loopholes in any system. As none are ever perfect.

[pooya87]

Nobody has ever doubted that the cryptocurrency exchanges have been reporting fake volumes. Some more than others, for example the Chinese exchanges that the Chinese government cracked down on and shut them down were reporting unrealistically HUGE volumes and were actually using it as a covert to launder large amounts of dirty money through their centralized platforms. The other exchanges are doing the same too.

The thing is, you can't calculate how much of it is fake by looking at public data. You have to actually gain access to their internal private data and use that to compute the fake volume and then arrest them for money laundering.
What people at Forbes are doing is simply nonsense and the article is only using technobabble to justify the numbers they reported in their FUD.

[Ever-young]

Where they do get those percentage? Do they able to check out every trading or exchange platform and verified out that some of those trades were fake?

That's my worry mate, their is no doubt of fake volume on some exchanges, but for them to justify and give actual percentage (51%) that's stating that they are very sure of what they are saying, they can't just judge by what they get from few exchanges and draw conclusion instantly.

Forbes has conducted dozens of interviews of senior executives at major crypto exchanges to supplement quantitative information on a firm’s profile.

As you can see, other than the web traffic analysis, their numbers are entirely subjective.

They can conduct the interviews, gather sources from third party but that doesn't make them 100% certain to their claims, to me that figure is  wrong unless proven otherwise.

[NotATether]

I just came across account published today by Forbes titled  " More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake"
How on earth will they believe that.

Here is the problem with articles like this:

Notice how the title says Bitcoin Trades not Bitcoin Trades on Exchanges.

This seems to imply that a large amount of Bitcoin's trading volume being fake is the fault of Bitcoin itself, and in particular the protocol (which ironically has nothing to do with exchanges).

Simply because they made a careless ommission of the word "Exchanges" in the title, now thousands of lemmings around the world are going to believe that bitcoin actively facilitates fake trading just because its scientifically proven that most people don't read beyond the headline.

[krishnaverma]

The concept of crypto is still in early stages. It is possible that exchanges are faking all the data but it does not mean that everything is wrong with crypto and we should ban it. We should remove the problems associated with crypto.

We should not forget that there are so many advantages of crypto as well. It is being used in so many areas and has changed the complete scenario of those areas.

[spiker777]

As we all know Bitcoin hold about 40% + of total market capitalization which is the coin with the highest trading volume both monthly and daily trading volume. Which I have no doubt that. I just came across account published today by Forbes titled  " More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake"
How on earth will they believe that.
The trading volume for btc is increasing day by day on individual exchange, of a truth their are exchanges which manipulate trading volume on their exchange to draw the attention of traders, exchanges like Finexbox
But that does not mean that the total daily trading volume up to 51% for btc is false.
Going through trade history to total volume recorded by different exchanges, both centralized and decentralized exchanges I fine their analysis wrong.
According to them  Companies like Binance, MEXC Global, and Bybit are examples of some of the largest issue areas when it comes to phony volume.
Really don't know where and how they got their source and come in conclusion to this. Btc market is large and it's trading volume is a big representative of how large the coin is.

i heard a lot of fake trading volume. i heard that some big exchanges generate fake trading volumes to attract more traders and investors because obviouly they make money from trading fee etc.
but I think fobes just made a guess for saying that half of the trading volumes are fake. because there is no way they can confirm and validate all the trading going on in all these trading and exchange platforms. unless they have some insiders who provide them all these necessary data which is unlikely possible..

[Haunebu]

I claim that more than half of what Forbes claim is bull. They are a media company which implies that not everything they say is true and they know that. They don't care about truth or lies since what matters the most to them is money.

Overall, what I'm trying to say here is that Forbes really isn't the best site to trust when it comes to cryptocurrencies basically. Anyone that says otherwise don't really know a lot about cryptocurrencies like BTC etc.

Sites like Bitcointalk, Reddit, Quora etc are the sites to look into when researching cryptocurrencies.

[Die_empty]

The Forbes methodology for discounting bitcoin trading volume follows a series of steps.

Regulation. We identify crypto licenses and from what regulatory body that each exchange possesses and use that as proxy to gauge their level of sophistication and intent to deter wash trades and publishing fake volume.

Third-party input. We considered the work of select third parties such as volume data from CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, Nomics and Messari. Messari’s volume statistics are less extensive by pairs, and it has fewer exchanges than its peers, but it has its own real-volume calculations. Forbes tracked in recent months how Messari applied a volume discount ranging from 40% to 65% to Binance volume, compared with the averages reported by CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko and Nomics at the time. Messari also discounts the trading volume of FTX by a lesser percentage (less than 20%) and that of Kraken by 99%. With regards to this latter, Forbes doesn’t share the view of applying a heavy discount to a firm that is among the most regulated crypto exchanges in the world. Most exchanges going through the Messari real volume analysis, however, lack any type of volume discount.

Web traffic. Forbes employs third-party data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb to heavily discount the volume of firms claiming a high trading volume without having sufficient crypto licenses and web traffic to generate such volume.

Forbes interviews. Forbes has conducted dozens of interviews of senior executives at major crypto exchanges to supplement quantitative information on a firm’s profile.

As you can see, other than the web traffic analysis, their numbers are entirely subjective.

Is it also possible to get an accurate data from web traffic? All these numbers are not verifiable hence this work lacks the quality of a good research.  
It is possible that exchange companies and other firms that offer third party services might manipulate their figure just to get the right attention. But bitcoin is not the problem. Forbes should have reported that third parties give fake records on bitcoin trade and not half of bitcoin trade records are fake. 

[so98nn]

During the big block debate. It was claimed that some miners were filling BTC blocks to less than full capacity. Blocks 1 megabyte in size might contain less than 300 KB of actual data. This was back when there was a push to increase block size to 2 megabytes or larger.

Bitcoin transaction volume being one indicator that traders use in an effort to gauge demand. It is possible that some will send bitcoin from one wallet they own, to another. To artificially boost transaction volume and produce artificial demand. There are other motives for the practice.

Its a real world case for why building a better system won't necessarily deter unwanted actors from carrying out questionable schemes. People like to argue that capitalism or socialism will systemically prevent evil. But if people are determined enough, they can usually find loopholes in any system. As none are ever perfect.

Thats some fact there. It does prove that no matter how elegant system you build there will always be loop holes to that which can destroy the system inside out. However, in crypto space they are using it to manipulate the way trading works and to attract more clients in their data base. Even noob coming on an exchanger based on the volume perspective since it holds importance of getting any coin traded quickly. This ensure fast service for them and thus they would go and spend at least couple of hundred in their tenure over an exchanger. Now, on the world wide scale this can sum up to millions of dollars getting traded and exchangers fat wallets getting even fatter! Definitely way to adulterated business which comes with seven star service at the reception.

[franky1]

they seem to have confused a few things..

they use the term "wash trading" which is a process of buying from one exchange to sell on another exchange. but this process is done to try to make one exchange price rise.. whilst another exchange price falls.
also its done as a laundering process(hense the term wash)

however looking at the market charts the charts show the prices of most markets follow each other. so there is no gaming one exchange against the other

this following of prices, is because of something similar.. something that is a legitimate trading technique
called ARBITRAGING

arbitraging is where instead of an in at A and out at B
its instead a full circle round trip
thus taking the opportunities of a deviation which then balances out and brings both exchanges into alignment in a cycle

so they seem to have foolishly tried to pretend arbitraging is "wash" trading

[jrrsparkles]

Its called wash trading which literally means exchanges manipulate their trading orders with fake buy and sell orders to get higher numbers at the end of the day which is known by most of the crypto community as well.

In reality it is not possible to find the accurate trading volume of centralized exchanges because its all happening off the chain so what they report is the data we can get for calculating but I have a question why we have to care about the trading volume?

Fake trading volume affects only when a coin listed of a few exchanges and desperately manipulated to increase the price of coin and exit scam once the threshold point reaches but it is not same with bitcoin since we have enough volume and listed on all the cryptocurrency exchanges.

[PrivacyG]

A big number of exchanges are doing this.  Some of them are pretty large in volume and number of users.  Have you ever used an exchange that instantly changes the entire order book every time you start purchasing or selling a particular coin, changing every time significantly against your orders?  Chances are they are wash trading.  Back when I was a complete Newbie I remember selling a Shitcoin for a few bucks and almost immediately it got launched 'by coincidence' into a bull run on the said exchange.  Then bought it back and the price sunk immediately.  What is even more interesting is, all of these 'instant transactions' appeared in the order book history and the other exchanges had no bull runs and no dumps.  Unfortunately it is happening, and it could at any time be happening on a very large scale.  Many of the numbers you see are unreal.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

[hZti]

Even if the volume is fake, if the exchanges do actually execute the "fake" trades than it is good for the market since with the high liquidity it is way easier to buy and sell since the market will be moved less. This is done with every major financial instrument also, so I dont see any issue.