I have explained in the past what is fundamentally wrong with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: a currency is actually an expression of military and judicial might. A currency needs a state, or states, to back it up, and is a tool thereof: a state, or union of states, can exist without a currency, not reciprocally
Another problem with the concept of bitcoin is that crypto currencies rest on the the “blockchain”, a perfectly inefficient, energy devouring and thus ecologically criminal, idiotic technology… Which could be useful only if information and computation were ecologically free (instead I have proposed “AWE”… which is ultimate efficiency).
Indeed, the “blockchain” records all transactions everywhere, anytime… instead of some transactions by trusted actors. Bitcoin fanatics say they have a right to ravage the planet, because they don’t trust those “trusted” actors. Well, neither do I I say: make the actors (governments, and their agents, the banks) more trustworthy.
Bitcoiners have also insisted their activity was beyond any suspicion, it’s honest, it’s new age, it’s a new dawn, the geek world, better than anything the Greeks offered… Helpful bitcoiners sent me messages offering to educate me, in all sorts of ways. All this, in total violation of the simplest observation of the Bitcoin graph, which looks like a Tulip Mania. Just worse:

Market Capitalization of Cryptocurrencies dropped by ⅔, generating more than 200 billion dollars of losses.
And indeed, turning things on their heads, there is a new reason to criticize bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: they are manipulated by organized crime. Bitcoin enthusiasts may counterpunch that central banks are organized crime; well, I agree, and wrote so for more than a decade; however, it’s not because Rome is on fire that one should start new fires! Bitcoin enthusiasts should go the way of Nero.
- New research observes that at least half of the 2017 rise in bitcoin prices was due to coordinated price manipulation using another cryptocurrency called tether.
- The 66-page paper says tether was used to buy bitcoin at carefully selected moments when it was declining, which helped “stabilize and manipulate” the cryptocurrency’s price.
- “In general I research things that are potentially illegal, and there’s a lot of rumors surrounding potential questionable activity in cryptocurrencies,” says University of Texas finance professor John Griffin, who has a decade-long track record of flagging fraud in financial markets.
Here is the paper’s abstract:
John M. Griffin
University of Texas at Austin – Department of Finance
Amin Shams
University of Texas at Austin – Department of Finance
Date Written: June 13, 2018
Abstract
This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to U.S. dollars, influences Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the recent boom. Using algorithms to analyze the blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. Less than 1% of hours with such heavy Tether transactions are associated with 50% of the meteoric rise in Bitcoin and 64% of other top cryptocurrencies. The flow clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests incomplete Tether backing before month-ends. These patterns cannot be explained by investor demand proxies but are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis where Tether is used to provide price support and manipulate cryptocurrency prices.
Keywords: Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Prices, Tether
Suggested Citation:
Griffin, John M. and Shams, Amin, Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered? (June 13, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=
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Why was Bitcoin Organized geek Crime tolerated? Because those one bought, one owns!
All this was long obvious. As it was that organized crime used Bitcoin (didn’t just manipulate it). A high level contractor of Google told me the government (under Obama) was perfectly aware, but let it run its course. That may look strange. But not so, once one has realized that the government knows that conventional banking is organized crime, a major engine of inequality, worldwide: bankers create money, and they create it, for their friends.
By letting Bitcoin run its perverse criminal course, many geeks made lots of money, getting ethically very dirty in the process, while growing in power and influence by leaps and bounds. Same general strategy as with holding the world economy hostage of monopolies (GAFA, FANG, etc.): all these dirty, wealthy people are now stakeholders in the engine of criminal inequality. Organized criminality got them there, and their now criminally confirmed minds make them most qualified to help run the world… as the little soldiers of dirt. They are all accomplices in crime, so they will shut up, cooperate, and subjugate. Thus geeks may as well implement the system, they are not just crucial to the system… They are it (or so they think, and thus will thereafter behave as the true holders of power want them to).
When Augustus seized the Roman Republic, and made it his personal thing, he was not alone: several millions stakeholders (mostly having to do with the Roman army, its suppliers, accomplices, etc.) were helping him out. He had cultivated them carefully. Same now.
Patrice Ayme
Basic income is necessary for the indigent. However, basic income is not a new idea. It is as old as imperial Rome, where it was implemented. Thus, basic income has more to do with a system friendly with slavery.
The argument has been made by Silicon Valley that no one should know our data, thus the need for absolute encryption. That’s hypocritical: as I said, they use our data. Thus they say: fear the thieves, while stealing us.
Paul Handover worries that:”Millions of people with nothing to hide are, nonetheless, deeply concerned about a general loss of personal privacy.” That’s ironical, considering what the tech monopolies are doing with our data.
If people have nothing to hide, they have nothing to hide. They can stand in plain view of the governments. So they should not do what the tech giants want them to do. They should not behave as if they were plutocrats, and had something to hide. If they have something to hide, that nothingness should be exposed. And if the government cannot be trusted, it should be fixed. Right now, as it is, the tech giants of the USA, giants in unlawful profits, of the USA, are completely entangled with the government in Washington, DC. That should be exposed, made transparent, revealed, dismantled.
I have nothing to hide, the government can follow me all day long. What I fear is terrorists: I was attacked several times, and even bombed by right wing fascists in Europe, and got death threats. None of these attacks or threats ever came from a government, although I lived in Algeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, Peru, Bolivia, Iran, Mexico, Canada, USA, the EU, etc. Yet, everywhere I went, I did not keep my mouth in my pocket.
Transparency is not something we should fear. It is something we need. We need it for two main reasons:
Our future world will be transparent, or it will not be. The Roman Republic, since inception, was friendly to the rich.
However, the same Roman Republic blocked the rise of plutocracy absolutely, by limiting how much power individuals could control. In particular, the wealth of the richest families was capped absolutely. How did the Roman Republic do this? With the Cadastrum, the registry of all private property.
Right now, there is no world cadastrum. The plutocrats hide their money in various ways, mostly through anonymous companies. Some treasures islands have several times more anonymous companies registered than they have inhabitants. (It’s no coincidence that these treasure islands are often British, or Dutch owned, that is why the UK is so rich. And this part of the reason why it is so hard to change.)
The plutocrats want others to live in misery: this is how they feel like Gods. San Jose, the USA’s richest large city is a place, partly of utmost madness, destitution and people living in garbage. This what the Silicon Valley cool billionaires in jeans organized. Here you go, and it’s the same squalor all over the Bay Area, except in the billionaires’ enclaves:
San Jose, 2014. While Billionaires Fill Their Jumbo Jets At Government’s Expense, Normal People Can See Such Scenes Everyday, A Few Miles Away
[People walk along a thrash-lined trail at the Silicon Valley homeless encampment known as The Jungle, Monday, Dec. 1, 2014, in San Jose, Calif. City officials began posting notices on hand built structures, tents and tree trunks warning the 200 residents of what is likely the nation’s largest homeless encampment that the bulldozers are coming. People living in the Silicon Valley camp had to be out by Thursday, Dec. 4 or face arrest for trespassing. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)]
In the greatest scheme of things, it is plutocracy and the world of organized crime which has brought worldwide instability and terrorism (I have explained how in hundreds of essays, going along many threads; it’s the main story of the twentieth century). Should we not apply the brakes now, things will get much worse (think middle ages with nukes, spaceships and engineered life forms). Nazism was greatly a product of German plutocracy, aided and abaited by plutocrats from the USA. Should we want to repeat fully the performance, it would be much worse. Last time felt like the apocalypse, but it was just a warning.
Ordinary people commit, at most, tiny little crime. The plutocrats who “lead” the world (into the abyss) commit gigantic crimes, they depend upon the lack of transparency to operate. As Quantum encryption (completely unbreakable) is on the rise, it’s urgent to require a transparent world. Moral people have nothing to fear, crooks, plutocrats, and criminals, everything.
Patrice Ayme’