Topic: BTC Futures Manipulation (Read 446 times)

Long and short positions in futures / margins are reasonable, and examples of decisions assumed by the OP by making decisions in two opposite directions in a short amount of time are also normal actions. Decisions of 1-2 whales will not permanently affect the price psychology and prices will always move in a consolidative manner, futures are contract systems, I think traders also know the difference with the others.

Well, Bitcoin's price is regrettably controlled by the whales, that's why the market is volatile due to they certainly have the biggest countable of Bitcoin and maybe other cryptocurrencies like, Ethereum , Bitcoin cash, Ripple. Plus, Bitcoin's future is linked to these whales and some governments like, US and China. Unfortunately, we have nothing to change and we are just watching the market and waiting for the appropriate moments in order to make the right decision ( buying in a big dip  or selling in a big pump ).

I agree that if its illegal or not depends on the country you are in as well, I mean some countries don't care about bitcoin at all but they do care about billion dollars going out of their own pockets (money leaving nation) so in the end you might be in trouble. Everyone is forgetting how many bitcoins or billions required to change bitcoin enough to make profit.

Like you would need "red alert" level of money to do this, no nation in the whole world would allow you to play with one billion dollars, they will ask you where that money is or what are you doing with that money. The idea at the same level could apply to a low level altcoin for example, you can pump and dump an altcoin and nobody would mind, hell people have been doing that for years now and nothing happened, however for bitcoin that is impossible.

We cannot deny the fact that these are really happening. Since by nature its a decentralized manipulation, those that has huge investments are more likely to dominate it. Its quite unfair or something but these people are just being who they are up to there capacity. Of course its there right and opportunity as well. If we in there position we'll surely do what they do now. Human as we are we all find ways to be great and we have no contentment. For small investors like us, we'll just do whatever we can have. In the end, we still earn even a little but most importantly we are happy of it.

Manipulation will certainly be arises in the future in crypto. It is already been started and it is getting more stronger by now. It is really disappointing how the regulatory board let this thing happen but that is all about. Only we have to get preferred coz the time will come that whales will play again. Only I'm afraid if the government will control the entire market and change everything into centralized in form.

To protect yourself from market manipulation, you should use minimal leverage in trading. If you do not understand the market and just hope for luck, then it is better to allocate an amount that you can afford to lose in margin trading. In any case, it is better to start trading without leverage on a spot market.

BTC Futures is very difficult to manipulate it usually depends on its price. BTC prices are falling because the demand for BTC is very low. If people overdo it then the price will eventually rise. Investing in crypto has reduced the risk of many investing now. But its character is not possible to remove the whole Puri it is possible to increase the price of BTC if the market remains stable.

I think the factor that many rich people did not do that strategies because they are only practical. All we know that crypto investment is very risky, and there is a big possibilty that government will ban the crypto so it is big problem in side of businessman or rich people. So I think there is no man even the richest man will do that so it is impossible that this is the reason why of price fall.

IMPORTANT:
Let's say leverage is a trap. first if you look at it you will see a epic amount of profit you can get.
but "playing with leverage is like playing with fire." between my friends 80% of money they on leverage.
If you trade normally even if you lose you can hold your cheap coin and sell then later even after 1 year. but in futures when you lose you will liquid you money.
I would highly recommend you to just invest 20% of your balance or even less.
and when you are doing this, never be greedy about the profits you get.
crypto markets are moving too fast even if you don't use futures and now imagine you make it X125 faster!
Even for most experience traders they usually avoid using it.
I imagine you are going to climb a ladder what you do?! 1. Moving slowly but strongly 2. Ignoring some steps and moving too fast.
Obviously, if you chose the option "1" this will tale longer but "YOU WILL" reach top of the leader. Believe me, people in option we fall one day. sooner or later, but they will.
In the other hand you should take care about your life. do you want a stressful life and always keep worrying about losing all your money?
Some people say "If you risk more you will get more rewards." and It's true. But always remember the "RISK" part and what kind of risk you are going to take. Before knowing any technical strategy money management and the risk management is much more important.
I'm just saying this because I lost too much money on it and I don't want other people to lose.
In the end you are the only choosing for your investments and I'm just giving suggestions.
Sincerely

Depends on which nation you are in as well. Doing this from USA is quite illegal, because USA has SEC and they do care about your bitcoin trading as well, if you manipulate even bitcoin market and make money from it, SEC will give you a penalty worth quite a chunk of your profits.

But like everyone said, this can't be done due to lack of volume in the market, as soon as you throw money at the market that is equal to current all volume, you will cripple the market to freezing and you won't be able to make money, you could possibly use it to increase it just a slight bit instead of making huge movements and that is the max you can do without hurting the market. Hopefully no whale would read this because if even one of them ever tries it, we will have a horrible market in recovery for years for sure.

I know SEC try to protect their citizen and never allowing their people invest with wrong investment project, SEC have been long time when hype project keep running and many time SEC make hype project hold their balance with  SEC regulation, now they try to give little space for bitcoin and not make bitcoin good destination for investing.

The SEC isn't protecting anyone. It's extremely hard to build up a case against certain entities that are said to manipulate the market. It's a false sense of security people think the SEC provides. If you lose money, you still have lost money even if the SEC manages to build up a case against the manipulators. They're not an insurance company.

Another thing is that we have plenty enough evidence where the SEC hands out fines but doesn't take any further action. The fines paid are an absolute joke compared to the profits that have been generated, so what incentive is there for people or companies to follow the rules? It's far more profitable to break the rules with how the fines are just a few % of the actual profits generated. 

It feels like a Market manipulation because you can control the price and the time when you will buy and sell. It is impossible for someone hold a huge amount of btc, it is very hard to mine and buy because of its uncertainty in price. The whales are the secondary enemy when it comes to bitcoin. First, is the Market because it is very hard to understand and control the market.

Whales can either lose or win the games because of the strategies they perform. They took advantage of the moment and doesn't let anyone hold some. That's why it is very impossible to hope for a better circumstances in bitcoin.

And we also know the market status and don't feed our small capital to them. Manipulation tends to happen only when we allowed it to happen, if not (just like following hypes) it eventually they will never succeed. But it is so sad to think that some of us here want instant and quick returns, but the result is totally a deniable loss to their ends.

SEC only protecting people from pump and dump group that give a false signal and wanted profit from scamming people. For those whales on the market I'm not sure SEC will consider it as fraudulent activity, even if it's group of whales.

And yes, put all in one basket is the worse thing. Those whales (or group of whales) is organized, they know how to shake the market sentiment just thru order book.

Generally, fewer trader knows what these whales can do with our small capital and I believed that they're fearless. They're not merciful on small traders, but more often times whales won't bite you off if it's not their moment of harvest. You should be more smarter to determine their signs of dominations towards the market. Decentralized market experience on trading is great but we need to be careful and vigilant with our actions.

Without the SEC or investor protection organization, we certainly will never get fair trade.  Trade was originally called gambling and now our odds of losing are higher and higher as whales constantly use their bitcoins to manipulate.  It is also one of the dangers of trading in a decentralized market, so I advise people not to be all in and to manage their capital well.  The whale is always stalking you and it can swallow you at any time.

Yes, even I think the same. Only the big whales are the one's who have accumulated at the approximate dips and now are holding majority of bitcoins into their bags just looking for an opportunity to empty their bags once the price hikes a lot giving them access profits.

In these kind of markets, small amount traders get usually manipulated as until they come to know the trend of the current markets, the markets change their direction according to the big whales which might leave small volume traders on an edge of loss. But yet, each small volume trader too can have a chance to fill their bags with profits if they could understand the market phenomenons.

It may sound easy for small scale investors still huge amount of money can get the market easily manipulated. Billions of dollars can be doubled up, trust me, if that person only knows what to do and when to do it. Such huge amount can set traps to center the speculation and then out, just like that. Things are pretty easy when you have money, that's the reality.

It is legal since we are talking no rules about that, they can do whatever they want with their money and it's up to them to decide where they are going to take it. But I doubt the price of bitcoin is reflected from this, speculation is still the core of its price we just have to admit that there are just unequal effects.

still legal because the futures system moves in the accumulation of contracts, traders can make decisions with a variety of leverage offered. Traders are accustomed to the averaging process to determine various profit positions, concentrating everything in one order and so on will only make losses, several times it looks successful, but you will see the opposite in the next order.

Even the exchanges wouldn't allow this type of thing because they are insured against these kinds of behaviors, all those exchanges will be in big trouble if there are more payments they have to make than the deposits they have for the other side, lets say someone has 1 billion and put it all on long futures, there has to be at least 1 billion on the other side as well, otherwise exchanges would have to pay it, so either they won't allow it, or they would just make them buy the opposites as long as there is available, otherwise they would have to pay themselves and that is not really possible with the amount of money exchanges make.

I assume there are many ways to prevent things like these happen in the exchange world, I don't know the exact method but I am sure it exists.

In using cryptocurrency, we all know that many people are using their money to invest with the use of bitcoin, and those people are so influential because sometimes having a lot of coins. It depends on you how will you run the market price, we all know that the whales or the people who have a lot of bitcoin gives a lot of market value when they are trying to release some of their investment and use for trading so the market will be affected because of the amount they release. There is a chance that the bitcoin manipulation price will happen. Still, we cannot stop other people from doing this because every trader and user wants to have a reasonable market price of the coin and make a lot of money because of their knowledge and skills.

I do not really think you can manipulate the price for bitcoins with 400btc or even more because already bitcoins are been traded on extremely higher volume which would require much higher funds to manipulate the markets for your sake. You can assume, you would need at least 40% of the total volume onto the exchange which would than make it possible for you to manipulate the price by using futures leverage trading to short bitcoins in small pumps or dumps.

If you have those amount of funds than you can find any lower volume exchange where bitcoins are traded regularly but with a comparatively lower volume so that you can manipulate the price there by adjusting the buy or sell orders accordingly. Off course this might not be something which might be legal.

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1.) It is illegal I think once the owner or company under that exchange is something connected to doing those actions.
2.) I don't think so, there are lot of factors why BTC is dumping/pumping, like some ETF things, exchanges hacks or manipulations just like what you said with some big players with also have huge money.
3.) For me, stop supporting those kinds of exchange and start learning or use some decentralized exchange. And for me, NOT DOING TRADING is good.

Exactly! You just need tons of money to do that, but I don't think so if you can really do it on the futures market, it's difficult especially you are trading contracts. And that's also applicable in some exchanges with low volumes, or a trading pair with low volume.

I'm curious why the whales is determinated midnight while cryptocurrency is worldwide and the users are coming from different timezone
I think they will pump it on random time, even when people are expecting a big pump and a bull run, they could dump it because they owned a lot of btcs and crypto assets

yes, they are most active at the time we sleep so that the volume can be reduced to a minimum and they can manipulate a lot easier. I feel this is one of the actions that should be condemned in this market and traders really need to be protected. As for the derivative market, we only have to fight with other small traders, so our account is less risky when confronting with the stalking sharks. or we should only trade in the morning, when everyone wakes up and the market works normally it will be safer. haizz, trading in crypto market is so hard.

This is reality, and we can't be serious for that manipulation dominated our market price nowadays. Holders remain calm at this moment while fears of dumps will be possible at any random situations, that because sellers are waiting for another some spikes of btc price. Huge btc holdings are still in the whales, we should wait until such time the market is freed from bearish trend.

oh, this is a problem that everyone has known for a long time since many exchanges opened margin trading and futures. This is completely real and it happens at Bitmex a lot. You can see many of the Kill Long and Kill Short whales within 2 hours and people often burn their accounts a lot. In fact exchange and whales are one organization and they have enough capital to manipulate the whole market if they feel the buying or selling force is diminishing.
Since this is a decentralized market, we do not have SEC protection of manipulations, so we need to be careful

Well, the way you explain it, it is possible with every stock or cryptocurrency. Manipulation is always a possibility but the odds of that happening is a bit low or the extent of the possibility of making huge swings is not that high. A lot of BTC is kept on HODL, according to recent reports, $100 Billion worth of BTC hasnt even moved since 2017. So, the manipulation chances are a bit lower coz of it.

It is possible to see more market manipulation will arise in the future but most likely it happens to centralize coin and not for Bitcoin.
I could foresee that Bitcoin will remain as what it has today. Volatility is not a question anymore and can't be considered as the effect of market manipulation cause even we think that whales could change the trend but it is just got temporarily, they can't still control Bitcoin's movement.

Future markets can be manipulated and that is not the case with bitcoin market alone it is the same with the rest of the market as well as the investors with huge amount can always manipulate the market.
 
In regulated market if there is an organized manipulation then the authorities will fine them huge amounts and since the bitcoin market is not regulated whales have the freedom to do anything as long as there is no regulation in the market.

Sharks always manipulate the price of bitcoin and people cannot fight them. The way they manipulate the market through the news, if they want prices to rise they will launch good news and vice versa if they want prices to fall they will launch bad news.

Conceptually from decentralization, such a thing is legal because there are no binding regulations in trade like fiat. So every trader is free to trade in his own way, yeah it's a bit like manipulation and monopolizing the market for the whales, but it's a fact that this is legal in the crypto market and this has been done since bitcoin was traded.

Not that anyone with one billion dollars would ever go into future manipulation like that because we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars lost if they can't do what they are trying to do, don't get me wrong it may sound easy to you but this is a market with billions of dollars of volume and there is a high chance you can achieve what you are trying to do if you have one billion dollars but on the off chance you fail, that is hundreds of millions of dollars, not hundreds of dollars.

However, even if they want to do what you are saying, they have to first buy a lot of bitcoin before buying long, you need bitcoin to buy bitcoin long anyway, so they can only buy a lot of bitcoin after the long with whatever is left, same with buying short futures with bitcoin as well, then sell the rest, so they can't do huge moves with one swift motion, they have to keep putting it into two different things.

Manipulation is an old topic but always exciting to discuss, every person with big fund can do that and small trader is the victim. Create bait with large fund to invite people to replace open position and take the money away, that's bad habit. The problem is we can't detect manipulation and avoid it is impossible. When people say no one can't control market movement that's wrong, whales only need create bait and make sure people see it as good opportunity to make transactions.

It's legal yes, and no you can't do anything to stop it if anyone can actually successfully 100% manipulate the market. Though I think such cases of manipulation are rare, and even if there was, there would only be a small margin of difference from the normal state of the market since it would probably require an astronomic amount of money to do as such. Though maybe some people who profit off of Futures actually just have a legit strategy and analysis that they can easily do as such. There's close to no way to differentiate between the two since anyone putting BTC to volumes is anonymous, so if it was illegal, then everyone might have been labeled as such.

There isn't really anything illegal with it, since that's how BTC futures work, but manipulation like that isn't that easy to perform, even if you have a large number of funds at hand. If that kind of action was illegal, then they should just remove the feature altogether since it already defeats the purpose of it once they ban it like that. BTC price drops because supply is greater than demand, that's it. If people demanded more BTC, price naturally goes up. Even if whales suddenly dumped coins, demand would naturally eat it up and the price would naturally go back to its natural state, but it would probably take up a bit of time.

futures also need a strategy or they will face liquidation. the futures system is still legal for now, opening long positions for a short time to make a profit, and then opening short positions at the same time does not break the rules at all, whales with 1B funds may not trade all at once, 90% will actually be made for positions annual length and the remainder for daily positions, the system also continues to set Mark prices to suppress manipulation. their strategy also remains risky if it is certain to fail because they are not the only whales that play there.

Basically, yes. 100x leverage means it takes 1% to trigger liquidation or 1% to double your capital.


Yes, but the mistake people make is assuming whales are always successful when they try to push the market around like that. I've seen many whales attempt large spot dumps that were instantly swallowed by the market before a move up. Those whales lost a shitload of coins. Some of them likely ceased to be whales altogether because of it.

Consider the Bitstamp bear whale. He dumped 30,000 BTC at $300 when the rest of the market was trading ~$50 higher. The market bought all his BTC then rallied to $450. He returned in 2017 as a bull, signing messages to prove it. So he dumped everything at $300 and bought back during the 2017 bubble.

He's not the only whale to make mistakes like that. They are not infallible!


I don't believe so, at least not in countries like the US. It doesn't fall under any of the market manipulation laws I'm aware of. If BTC were a security and manipulators were engaging in misinformation campaigns, this sort of activity might qualify as illegal "pump and dump" or "short and distort" schemes handled by the SEC.

There are types of manipulation exist and those are controlling the price and manipulating the fuds, And I don't literally believe on price manipulation by having a millions of btc since for sure there's no people hold that and the strongest fact there is maybe they are riding the fuds to lower down the demands that's why we can see those fake and other bad news coming just to make the price of the bitcoins cheaper and those rich guys can buy and earn on the next pump wave.

Manipulation by price pump and dump will be always happen because there are already too many people are holding thousands BTC and i'm sure they're making a group of people who can control market movement. I'm sure a big group of whales could posses 1 mil BTC and when they move the market must be going crazy either it's pump or dump

Big whale can manipulate coin price easily especially during non peak period eg. holiday season or midnight when everyone sleeping. They just need to pump or dump BTC for few minutes to make good fortune.

Future manipulation is unpredictable on anyone. Because BTC is a decentralized platform so huge investors are easily manipulate the BTC. Nowadays market stability is depends on BTC pump and dump so we can survive any situation because of crypto potential. I hope every year some countries are legalised in BTC so every year we some positive uptrend. Once it will globalized, manipulation will never occur.

Hey everyone. I wanted to get your take on this because i want to figure out how it works exactly.

So BTC futures is betting on the price of BTC going up or down (Long or short)

So lets say someone who has 1B in USD funds and they buy 1B worth of BTC on an exchange such as Binance or Kraken etc.

And if they were to long the price of BTC BEFORE buying up all of those BTC @ 100x leverage

So lets say they have 100BTC Long position using 100x leverage , and they buy up 1B worth of BTC on an exchange , and the price of BTC goes up lets say 1% , would that mean that they would double their original Long BTC position from 100 -> 200 BTC?

And then when they do that, could they short it using 100x leverage and sell all of their BTC at the same time and make the price fall to liquidate all of the Long positions to net them 400 BTC (Assuming they used their 200 BTC from their long position to open a short position?)

Is this illegal in any way at this point in time? And if this is legal , Whats to stop people with lots of money to do this?

Is this why the price of BTC is down because there are people doing this?

And if this is the case , how can we stop people from doing this or is there no other way around this?