{"id":25656,"date":"2023-06-21T23:02:59","date_gmt":"2023-06-21T23:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=25656"},"modified":"2023-06-21T23:17:34","modified_gmt":"2023-06-21T23:17:34","slug":"tis-the-season-to-write-the-bitcoin-goes-up-post-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2023\/06\/21\/tis-the-season-to-write-the-bitcoin-goes-up-post-again\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2019Tis the season to write the “bitcoin goes up!” post again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bitcoin topped $30,000 today, between 16:29 and 16:47 UTC! And I\u2019m getting calls about it. Number go up!<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n

As usual, this signifies very little. No more than it does when the price goes down.<\/p>\n

The number did not go up because of Wall Street interest, futile ETF filings, regulator signals, interest rates, the global economy or sunspots. It went up because of internal market shenanigans. It’s always <\/em>shenanigans.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Crypto is presently screwed<\/h3>\n

The crypto trading market is in the dumps. The retail dollars have gone home. Cashing out at scale is proving difficult.<\/p>\n

The crypto exchanges and trading firms have large piles of cryptos which they account at mark-to-market \u2014 if you have 10,000 BTC at $30,000, just account it as $300 million!<\/p>\n

Trouble is, there aren\u2019t three hundred million dollars out there looking for bitcoins to buy. The realisable value is much lower.<\/p>\n

So everyone has a great big mark-to-market time bomb in their accounts \u2014 as they all pretend they\u2019re not broke.<\/p>\n

(This isn\u2019t even getting into exchanges that count their own supermarket loyalty card points as money \u2014 as FTX\/Alameda did<\/a> with 5 billion \u201cdollars\u201d of its own FTT tokens, and as Binance does with its own BNB tokens.)<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re playing pretend with your accounting, you need the number your accounts depend on to stay up. If it\u2019s cheaper to pump the number up than to let your accounts go down, you pump the number up. And it is indeed cheap \u2014 the market\u2019s really thin right now!<\/p>\n

Prime directive<\/h3>\n

Binance has lost BUSD \u2014 no more will be minted \u2014 and it doesn\u2019t seem so keen on tethers. So Binance\u2019s stablecoin of choice is now TrueUSD<\/a>, or TUSD, which totally isn\u2019t run by Justin Sun of Tron, allegedly.<\/p>\n

Binance was caught printing BUSD out of nowhere<\/a> on its internal BNB Smart Chain – which is probably what led to Paxos being told to close BUSD.<\/a><\/p>\n

TUSD was, until recently, minted at Prime Trust. It isn\u2019t any more. Prime Trust, which Binance US used to use as a trustee, has hit financial trouble (because the crypto economy is running out of dollars). Prime has agreed in principle to be bought by BitGo. [CoinDesk<\/i><\/a>]<\/p>\n

TUSD lost its peg earlier this month at the news. [u.today<\/i><\/a>]<\/p>\n

TUSD has had to pause the automated attestations of its backing \u2014 the page that shows that every TUSD in circulation really is backed by some sort of assets. As it happens, the page updates can be stopped \u201cdue to an actual imbalance of liabilities and corresponding assets.\u201d Coincidentally<\/i>, billions of TUSD have been minted recently. [Protos<\/i><\/a>]<\/p>\n

What could you make the price of bitcoin do if you could just print a few billion fake dollars to move it with?<\/p>\n

None more organic<\/h3>\n

Remember that the crypto trading economy is Binance and some stragglers. Binance is under no effective regulation<\/i> \u2014 so nobody can stop them from doing anything they like that doesn\u2019t scare off the suckers.<\/p>\n

It is of course just allegations<\/i> that Binance engages in market manipulation, wash trading and trading against its own customers. Allegations that made it into the SEC complaint against Binance US<\/a>, and the Washington Post last year. And remember that CZ from Binance confessed that wash trading was standard at OKCoin when he was working there in 2015. [Washington Post<\/i><\/a>, 2022; Reddit, <\/i>archive<\/i><\/a>, 2015<\/i>]<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also how the BTC-USDT price on Binance US momentarily spiked to $138,070 around 03:00 UTC this morning:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From OperationAjax<\/a> on Twitter<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But is there hope for crypto?<\/h3>\n

If the SEC wins its very solid cases, Coinbase<\/a> is utterly screwed and Binance<\/a> loses the US market.<\/p>\n

Coinbase is hoping that Rep. Patrick McHenry\u2019s new crypto markets bill nullifies the SEC suit and lets them keep their business open. Really, that’s what Coinbase has for a plan. [Bloomberg<\/i><\/a>]<\/p>\n

I am disconcerted to hear there\u2019s a greater than zero chance of McHenry\u2019s bill going through. This is quite bad, because it would allow through all manner of bad and awful financial instruments and shenanigans that are presently illegal for excellent reason \u2014 if you tack on a gratuitous blockchain.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t think even this bill will save crypto in the short to medium. Cryptocurrency is still perceived as awful trash for crooks and idiots. Coinbase is still haemorrhaging money.<\/p>\n

A bubble won\u2019t come back for at least a few years, and then only if sufficient suckers grow back. If regulators mess up this time around, then perhaps crypto can bubble again!<\/p>\n

In the short term: if you have a big bag of dead cryptos you can\u2019t shift, this is the moment to turn them back into cash while you can. Coinbase still has US dollar banking. For now.<\/p>\n

\"Become<\/a>

Your subscriptions keep this site going. Sign up today!<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s\u00a0always shenanigans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18370,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[568,21,2450,3012,1275,86,985,522],"class_list":["post-25656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-binance","tag-bitcoin","tag-bitgo","tag-busd","tag-cz","tag-okcoin","tag-prime-trust","tag-trueusd"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/12\/bitcoin-rollercoaster-up.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25656"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25666,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25656\/revisions\/25666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}