> All exchanges have a huge % of wash trading to hold up prices
Even "knowing this" (I mean, none of us have really any proof just at what scale it's happening at and... the same things happens in the S&P500 with high frequency trading algorithms/bots trading back and forth, hedge funds, institutional investors, etc.) I don't feel like I can confidently explain who/how many people really dollar cost average into Bitcoin that can prop it up to $10k, $20k, $30k, etc.
Where/who are the buyers? How many people across the world are actively STILL investing directly into BTC to the point where it's up 80-90% YTD?
> none of us have really any proof just at what scale it's happening at
True, but there was an exchange a few months ago that turned off trading for customers for whatever reason, but the exchange forgot to turn of its bot and you could see a perfectly-formed, gradually-increasing, stair-stepping pattern in it's price chart.
Finance is extremely regulated even if there are shenanigans, Crypto is just an excuse to do finance without oversight, which means it's mostly shady.
Every attempt to peel away the onion layer reveals mass problems.
It's like saying 'we have no hard proof that all this Mafia gangs revenue came from illegal activity!'.
What I'm saying is, the point of crypto is hustle, there is no real economy, and the players are all shady as can be.
Literally nobody knows where the Binance guy even is!
Why would the Binance guy want to hide from global authorities?
Regular bank CEO's don't.
It's mafia-adjacent the whole way down, with a lot of small dupes and kids playing with some amount of money.
There is no 'there there' in the value creating sense that we might want to see.
If you told me BTC was 95% regular people using it for business and 5% shady, I'd say we need to work on that problem. But it's only 5% 'useful' and the rest is just layers of scam and fraud.
We need to dump crypto, and if we want to try that experiment again - because I think there might be value there - we can give it a new name and keep it clean from the start.
Even "knowing this" (I mean, none of us have really any proof just at what scale it's happening at and... the same things happens in the S&P500 with high frequency trading algorithms/bots trading back and forth, hedge funds, institutional investors, etc.) I don't feel like I can confidently explain who/how many people really dollar cost average into Bitcoin that can prop it up to $10k, $20k, $30k, etc.
Where/who are the buyers? How many people across the world are actively STILL investing directly into BTC to the point where it's up 80-90% YTD?