Bitcoin Whale Shorted $1.1B Right Before Tariffs
cryptonews.comIt makes me want to riot that we've allowed the presidents whole family to leverage their wealth on Bitcoin, its such an outrageous conflict of interest, literally with a few million up front you stand to become unbelievably wealthy by yanking the USD's reserve currency status.
Real monkeys paw action here tho because I always liked the idea of BTC as a viable alternate to USD, but, not like this.
As someone looking in at the USA from the outside, it absolutely blows my mind that the country went from “give up the peanut farm” to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$Trump
Like… what!?
I have no words.
It is genuinely amazing how fast it feels like it happened.
The whole monica lewisnky thing happened because there was an investigation into Clinton making maybe 100k off a partnership with a guy who later got arrested.
Granted that was over 20 years ago now, but like, hillarys emails???
wait until you learn about where $trillions went in last decades of war.
they would have profited anyway. be it stocks or forex. using btc only makes it public i guess?
corruption is one thing, I would call it merely unfair (unfortunately not illegal) to trade with inside information or by pulling strings. Crashing the dollar for personal gain, tho, it's practically treason.
Not practically - crashing the dollar on purpose is actually treason.
BTC means they can pull wealth out of the system at astonishing rates. Trump & Co are hardly the first to be corrupt, but the scale, the blatentness, and the damage being done to the country as a byproduct is unprecedented in modern history
Stocks are public.
There's a been a lot of people doing moves ahead of other tariffs announcements.
Bitcoin is arguably more public than stocks - all transfers are publicized. Transactions on major stock markets are publicized, but private transactions are not.
they most definitely are not.
How do you think the SEC finds it's insider trading cases?
They see a giant position placed ahead of a movement in the market and then ask the exchange who placed those trades. The only difference between an exchange and crypto is that cypto you can also see.
Perhaps it makes the burden of proof for the accusation higher, though?
Worth noting that this whale has/had $10B worth of Bitcoin. So his $27M in profits is a whopping 0.27% gain while the rest of his portfolio dipped 10%.
There can’t be that many people with $10B in bitcoin. Surely someone can work out who this is?
I hope they lose it all to some teenagers getting kicks on discord.
I'm confused: why would you short BTC if you knew in advance that additional tariffs would be announced? Wouldn't you expect that to increase the dollar value of BTC due to depreciation of the dollar?
It helps to not be too academic about it and just check what happened to BTC the last few tariff announcements.
If only BTC were a decorrelated, alternative investment.
This. It has not, in practice, turned out to be the hedge that people assumed that it was.
How do tariffs depreciate the dollar? Do you just mean in the “prices go up” sense? I’m not trying to nitpick, just wondering if there is some mechanism I don’t know about that actually devalues the dollar in a fundamental way. Like if there is a chicken flu and the price of eggs skyrockets, I wouldn’t say that depreciates the dollar, for example, in strict terms, prices have just risen.
Prices going up is dollar devaluation. One doesn't cause the other - they're already two different words for the same thing.
If potato prices rise but soybean prices fall, then you can say potatoes got more expensive, soybeans got cheaper, and the dollar is worth the same. But if prices go up all across the economy in general, that is dollar devaluation.
But tariffs don’t cause prices to go up all across the economy in general. Domestic products will get more expensive in the short term due to a positive demand discontinuity, but they will fall again in the medium term as domestic producers regain access to the large swaths of the market they lost access to under the old global free market trade policy. If the tariffs continue for a long time (not guaranteed) then domestic labor compensation will also recover (perhaps not fully due to automation, but automation on the high volume stuff would free up workers to work on smaller volume products).
Side question - would you consider the converse, globalization, to be a deflationary force?
Why would you expect anything with BTC?
Hating on Bitcoin was cool in 2015. It’s proven to be a reliable store of value asset, to the point that central banks are considering reserves on it.
Bitcoin maybe as useless as gold, but that doesn’t make it more or less valuable.
Tangential, but I find it strange how bank “reserve” means something entirely different from what it used to mean.
> to the point that central banks are considering reserves on it.
Specifically, central banks run by scammers and imbeciles. Nobody with any brains is going to put their reserves in something whose only value comes from the existence of greater fools and has the downside of propping up the North Korean government.
I think Occams Razor. Here I think it’s way more likely that the person who holds 10B in Bitcoin somehow by now has contacts to the inner circle of US government as being someone in the administration.
So if the government itself is the one holding the bitcoin then you can bet it won’t investigate itself… and a few billion in bitcoin wouldn’t even go very far if they tried to use it as a funding source which is wild to think about.
I'm grateful to those tracking and publishing this information, but as smoking guns go, the evidence doesn't seem particularly compelling.
China announced their rare-earth restrictions on 10/9. Trump predictably over-reacts with tariffs on 10/10. The trader had plenty of reason to expect new tariffs, and some reason to expect Bitcoin to go down.
If I were corrupt, I'd always make sure there was some justifying event in advance of my trade, even if I knew there was to be some precipitating event for a market swing. Plausible deniability.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people connected to the Chinese government are not also taking advantage of the fact that Trump is extremely easy to trigger, manipulate and predict.
it’s hard to believe anyone in this administration would something so blatantly corrupt.
it's not hard*
that's the joke.png
It was Bernie. He's had enough of this horseshit.
Expect to read about it here soon: https://www.quiverquant.com/congresstrading/politician/Nancy...