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Insider manipulation of bitcoin price may be legal
The Bitcoin Whales: 1,000 People Who Own 40 Percent of the Market
By Olga Kharif
Bloomberg News
Friday, December 8, 2017
On Nov. 12 someone moved almost 25,000 bitcoins, worth about $159 million at the time, to an online exchange. The news soon rippled through online forums, with bitcoin traders arguing about whether it meant the owner was about to sell the digital currency.
Holders of large amounts of bitcoin are often known as whales, amd they're becoming a worry for investors. They can send prices plummeting by selling even a portion of their holdings. And those sales are more probable now that the cryptocurrency is up nearly twelvefold from the beginning of the year.
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About 40 percent of bitcoin is held by perhaps 1,000 users; at current prices, each may want to sell about half of his or her holdings, says Aaron Brown, former managing director and head of financial markets research at AQR Capital Management. (Brown is a contributor to the Bloomberg Prophets online column.)
What's more, the whales can coordinate their moves or preview them to a select few. Many of the large owners have known one another for years and stuck by bitcoin through the early days when it was derided, and they can potentially band together to tank or prop up the market.
"I think there are a few hundred guys," says Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital. "They all probably can call each other, and they probably have."
One reason to think so: At least some kinds of information sharing are legal, says Gary Ross, a securities lawyer at Ross & Shulga. Because bitcoin is a digital currency and not a security, he says, there's no prohibition against a trade in which a group agrees to buy enough to push the price up and then cashes out in minutes.
Regulators have been slow to catch up with cryptocurrency trading, so many of the rules are still murky. If traders not only pushed the price up but also went online to spread rumors, that might count as fraud.
Bittrex, a digital currency exchange, recently wrote to its users warning that their accounts could be suspended if they banded together into "pump groups" aimed at manipulating prices. The law might also be different for other digital coins. Depending on the details of how they are structured and how investors expect to make money from them, some may count as currencies, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. ...
... For the remainder of the report:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitcoin-whales-1-...
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