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www.wired.co.uk stated that a newspaper by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin's department of finance indicates that someone at Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange may have artificially inflated the price of coins including bitcoin, ether, and Zcash. The responsible for this appears to have been Tether, a cryptocurrency with the same CEO as Bitfinex.
What are your thoughts about this? Do you think they really manipulated the price? Is it possible?
If you don't think there was at least a LITTLE market manipulation then you haven't been in the crypto community for very long. I remember even back when I was just getting started in 2013 how there were incessant claims about the market being manipulated, along with all kinds of other arguments about who was doing it, if it was the whales, the exchanges, if the normal users could do anything to fight against it, all kinds of fun things. I could probably go back into my post history and find out just how often there were threads like that since I typically ended up involving myself in them.
The chances that the market was manipulated and that there were some things that happened because of that - which wouldn't have happened otherwise - is incredibly significant and honestly, in my opinion, nearly guaranteed. It's like with Mt.Gox in 2013; the market was manipulated, inflating the price, bringing Bitcoin into the forefront of the news cycle for a while. I personally got involved due to that manipulation, so it's not always bad.