Who is the Legendary Bitfinex Bull-Whale?
Who is this masked man who has single handedly bought 100 million dollars worth of bitcoin this week? I think I have the answer.
Treat the following as a fictional story. I have no proof, just theories and don’t want to be sued.
In August 2016… 120 THOUSAND bitcoins were hacked from the exchange known as BFX. This is enough coin to bring anyone to their knees in the fledgling 2016 market, and would be worth over 720 Million dollars today. Yet the exchange survived, and even thrived. Mind boggling how they pulled this off.
Enter Tether… a token worth one dollar that is supposed to be backed by real money. The people behind BFX and behind Tether are the same, despite efforts to hide their identities.
BFX has been hacked for a massive amount of bitcoin, BFX controls Tether. Whats the next logical step? Declare bankruptcy? Scrimp and save 120 thousand bitcoins to pay your clients back?
Or do you use Tether to print fake money and buy bitcoin with it? Then eventually sell the bitcoin at a profit and all of a sudden its like the hack never happened? After all, in 2017 it seemed the price will only go up. This is working so well that more and more bitcoin is bought up, maybe even traded on margin. BFX accumulates more and more with no worries because they can sell for a profit whenever they feel like it. Most of it accumulated at high prices during the euphoric bull run.
Enter the bear market….the market crashed fast, and it crashed hard. Everybody on Twitter saying it was going back to the moon, and only an idiot would sell. What if BFX did not sell? Bitcoin is now worth 1/3 of what it was. Now there are hack losses and possibly catastrophic trading losses for the exchange to deal with.
At this point many people expect the market to crash past yearly lows. And many expect the price to stay low for a long time, with no magical bounce. Just slow organic growth and retraces until the time comes for the boom, which could be a year or years away.
Bitcoin at 3k prices would result in a much smaller market cap. Maybe a major exchange would demand to sell all their excess and un-needed tether. There is almost 3 Billion tether out there. What if Binance demands to exchange 500 million tether for real money… while all the BFX owners have is a pile of bitcoin worth 3k each? The books could possibly never be balanced again, and instead of living the wealthy lifestyle, they might end up with lengthy prison sentences.
Now we see who the Bitfinex whale is. Why he is doubling down in an effort to drive price up.