{"id":26937,"date":"2024-09-19T21:54:28","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T21:54:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=26937"},"modified":"2024-09-20T21:24:18","modified_gmt":"2024-09-20T21:24:18","slug":"no-the-bitcoin-price-did-not-move-from-debates-trump-buying-crypto-burgers-or-anything-other-than-shenanigans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2024\/09\/19\/no-the-bitcoin-price-did-not-move-from-debates-trump-buying-crypto-burgers-or-anything-other-than-shenanigans\/","title":{"rendered":"No, the bitcoin price did not move from debates, Trump ‘crypto burgers’ or anything other than shenanigans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bitcoin has fallen out of the public consciousness to such a degree that even the press have forgotten that the BTC price goes up and down like a yoyo for any reason or none. So I\u2019m getting questions I\u2019ve answered before, which means it’s time to make them into a post. [Newsweek<\/a>; Newsweek<\/a><\/em>]<\/p>\n

Donald Trump is talking about bitcoin and crypto a lot of late. You’d almost think he was short of ready cash. Zeke Faux and Muyao Shen have a great article on Chase Herro (a.k.a.<\/i> Chase Hero), the guy actually running Trump’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Herro has gone down in the world from selling colon cleanses. [Bloomberg<\/i><\/a>, <\/i>archive<\/i><\/a>]<\/p>\n

And yesterday Trump bought “crypto burgers” for supporters at a bitcoin-themed bar in New York \u2014 apparently paying in bitcoins, though someone else had to make the transaction for him. [USA Today<\/i><\/a>]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n

So is this why number went up?<\/i><\/h3>\n

No. You don’t need to invoke a Trump speech at Bitcoin 2024<\/a>, debate performance or buying hamburgers as explanations. Going up or down $5,000 in a day is par for the course in bitcoin.<\/p>\n

Cryptocurrency markets just don’t react to what would normally be considered a market signal in the same way as markets in well-regulated high-volume securities or commodities.<\/p>\n

These are small, thinly-traded and ill-regulated commodity markets. This means that internal manipulations absolutely swamp broader macro signals.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a nice study from the New York Federal Reserve. “The key result is that, unlike other U.S. asset classes, Bitcoin is orthogonal to monetary and macroeconomic news.” [New York Fed<\/i><\/a>, PDF<\/i>]<\/p>\n

Binance is where the price of bitcoin is set<\/h3>\n

The bitcoin price is set by trading, and that’s overwhelmingly trading against the unregulated Tether and FDUSD stablecoins on Binance.<\/p>\n

The volumes of just the BTC\/USDT and\u00a0BTC\/FDUSD trading pairs on that one exchange swamp all other trading in\u00a0 bitcoins. Coinbase or regulated ETFs aren’t even in the running.<\/p>\n

Binance is under severe US monitoring<\/a> with regard to money laundering compliance and keeping US entities off the exchange \u2014 but the trading floor remains completely unregulated.<\/p>\n

Every market abuse you can think of \u2014 wash trading, manipulation, the exchange trading against its own customers \u2014 is standard. And probably not even illegal!<\/p>\n

The Tether and FDUSD stablecoins’ backing is also extremely dubious. Tether admits that a large part of their backing is loans of USDT, where they create USDT out of thin air then claim the loan itself is the reserve asset backing those USDT. And I flatly don’t believe FDUSD is meaningfully backed by actual dollars.<\/p>\n

Amy Castor and I wrote about all this earlier this year, here<\/a> and here<\/a>. Nothing has changed through 2024.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin does not react to macro signals \u2014 only to internal market shenanigans.<\/p>\n

Could there be an outside signal that affected the price of bitcoin?<\/h3>\n

Sure. Some drastic regulatory or criminal action that changes the shape of the market \u2014 say, busting Tether or Justin Sun. That\u2019d probably do things.<\/p>\n

Short of that, I expect the present nonsense to continue \u2014 the public won\u2019t care, the number will go up and down and journalists will occasionally notice the number and wonder if there\u2019s a story there. But there isn\u2019t, really.<\/p>\n

\"Become<\/a>

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Bitcoin does not react to macro signals \u2014 only to internal market shenanigans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26938,"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":[21,3851,1362,3617,3850,39,3852],"class_list":["post-26937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-bitcoin","tag-chase-herro","tag-donald-trump","tag-fdusd","tag-markets","tag-tether","tag-world-liberty-financial"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/trump-crypto-burger.webp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26937","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=26937"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26967,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26937\/revisions\/26967"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}