Slow clap for all of those who thought Bitcoin (or other crypto currencies) were / are not being manipulated. Techcrunch reported on 15th Jan and MIT Technology Review reported on 16th Jan about a research which gives insights into how Bitcoin was being manipulated by two bots named Markus and Willy – in 2013. They performed valid trades but did not actually own any bitcoin themselves.
Entitled “Price Manipulation in the Bitcoin Ecosystem” and appearing in the recent issue of the Journal of Monetary Economics the paper describes to what degree the Bitcoin ecosystem is controlled by bad actors. 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.”
Now you can imagine if this happened in 2013 then what is happening today. For all its talk about decentralisation, the fact that it is so susceptible to such manipulations, should be a warning for everybody trying to ‘try their luck’ in Bitcoin or other crypto currencies.