I think the funnier part is this hits every single crypto cliché:

1) "exchange" doing shit that would put you directly in jail in any professional finance context

2) people with ~$0 money participating in the most speculative investment schemes

3) "exchange" having minimal handle on what they're doing, reverse scalping as part of 1) and not realizing this costs money (see Knight Capital)

4) "exchange" just ghosting with the 2) money when faced with negative pnl

Future of finance, amirite?

Thanks for posting this article, it's a real "the more the world turns" reminder for me. We're having the exact same conversation now about Bitcoin ETFs, based on the exact same concerns: https://www.reuters.com/technology/nasdaq-refiles-blackrocks...

100% - although this time around there is (in my opinion) _a lot more data_ [1] that regulated markets (like CME bitcoin futures) drive price discovery.

[1] There was data back then too, it just wasn't received.

What's so suspicious about the distribution on that graph from, say, ExRates?

It's far from uniform, looks plenty ragged and random to me. Though I can't read the axes so I may be misinterpreting it.

The x-axis is size of trade, and the y-axis is % of trades at a specific size. ExRates had _many_ large trades, which shows up as a significantly different distribution than other exchanges like Coinbase/Bitstamp/Kraken (which had many small trades, and a long tail of larger size trades). See slide 42-44 here: https://www.sec.gov/comments/sr-nysearca-2019-01/srnysearca2...

Was this fake volume allowed by the new transaction system in Bitcoin? Because it seems like the old one would make that prohibitively expensive.

The volume we were looking at was on exchanges (not on chain).