Thank You Captain Obvious

I'm shocked!

So, it appears that there is a professor at UT Austin who specializes in uncovering financial fraud of various forms, and he has now turned his attention to cryptocurrency, for the second time, and once again sees worrying signs of price manipulation.

Not a surprise.  Discovering players in the crypto sphere who are not liars or deluded?  That would be a surprise:

Back in 2017, John Griffin, a professor of finance at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business, noticed something strange. Griffin follows a totally different beat from typical business school finance profs who explore, say, how business cycles influence commodity prices or Fed policy sways the term structure of interest rates. The 6-foot-2 former high school football star views himself as a crusader for good, a moral sleuth who, as he tells Fortune, “looks to expose financial evil, to shed light on the world and expose dark things in the markets.” After the Great Financial Crisis, Griffin became a devout Christian. He has since dedicated his distinguished career to righteous forensic digging that’s unearthed abuses ranging from insider trading to mortgage fraud to the doctoring of bond ratings during the financial crisis.

As Griffin and Amin Shams, then a doctoral candidate at McCombs who’s joined Griffin in several gumshoe investigations, screened for misdeeds in 2017, they were fascinated to see that a little-known token that’s supposed to be backed one-for-one to the dollar was getting printed in large quantities. That clue led the pair to another: When new batches appeared, the price of Bitcoin seemed to jump. It looked like someone, or a group, was using that freshly printed “free money” to inflate Bitcoin’s price for their own profit. He and his coauthor Shams sifted through an incredible 200 gigabytes of trading data, equal to the troves that the Smithsonian Institution collects in two years, and followed sales and purchases from 2.5 million separate wallets.

In 2018, they coauthored a groundbreaking study showing that a single, still unidentified, Bitcoin “whale” almost singlehandedly drove the token’s giant run-up in late 2017 and early 2018 by distorting the trading in the token.

Toward the end of 2022, another mystifying trend caught Griffin’s eye. Despite the crypto crash and myriad other negative forces, every time Bitcoin briefly breached the $16,000 floor, it bounced above that level and kept stubbornly trading between $16,000 and $17,000. Almost unbelievably, as the crypto market has continued to unravel into 2023, Bitcoin has gone in the opposite direction, trading up 35% since Jan. 7 to $23,000.

Gee, I wonder if this "Whale" has, on occasion, gone by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto?

“It’s very suspicious,” Griffin told Fortune. “The same mechanism we saw in 2017 could be at play now in the still unreal Bitcoin market.”

For Griffin, the way normally super-volatile Bitcoin went calm and stable in the stormiest of times for crypto fits a scenario where boosters are uniting to support and juice its price. “If you’re a crypto manipulator, you want to set a floor under the price of your coin,” added Griffin. “In a period of highly negative sentiment, we’ve seen suspiciously solid floors under Bitcoin.”

Some folks suggest that it is merely the magic of the market providing this stability.  This is bullsh%$.

If Bitcoin were priced according to its true value in a free and fair value, the value of the token would approach 0¢, not tens of thousands of dollars.

Cryptocurrency has always been a toxic mix of fraud, puffery, and delusional libertarian fanboi philosophy.