What a surprise -- the Bitcoin market might have been manipulated. I'm shocked.... shocked ! ! ! to learn that markets might not be honest.

This is from a NY Times daily email so I can't post a link. Anyone who wants to read the whole thing can probably find this somewhere on the NY Times website.

Quote:

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Regulators are increasingly worried that Bitfinex, a widely used (and famously opaque) exchange, has been propping it up. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has subpoenaed the company, whose Tether digital token is often used to buy other virtual currencies.
More from Nathaniel Popper of the NYT:
Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new Tether were created; almost always when the prices of other virtual currencies were heading down. The Tether were used on the Bitfinex exchange to make big purchases of Bitcoin and other tokens, helping push their prices back up, according to multiple analyses of data from Bitfinex.

“This became more and more concerning, because every time the markets went down, you have seen the same thing happen,” said Joey Krug, the co-chief investment officer at Pantera Capital, which runs several virtual currency hedge funds. “It could mean that a lot of the rally over December and January might not have been real.”

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