Now subtract out the wash trading. I'm not saying it would or wouldn't affect the valuation, I'm saying that the top-line volume is a known fiction. Remember when "Coinbase Employee A" traded some 99% of the entire global LTC volume between two bots at Coinbase? Sure it's old news, but that's the most reputable exchange. [1, 2]
Much of the crypto market is a digital Potemkin village designed to make you feel like you're not nearly as alone as you are.
Potemkin as an adjective is such a useful tool when talking about the crypto scene. here's a post from when I used it extensively I guess about 8 years ago, in the same vein. Unfortunately as part of the cold war argot it seems to just draw blank stares from a lot of people under 35 or so.
"Potemkin exchange, Potemkin conversation, it's Potemkins all the way down. Like a matrioshka doll each layer deeper is identical to the one before, but smaller and less articulately defined. "
I wish I could take credit for the term, but I'm also a huge fan of 'Sierpinski scheme'.
Also, what on God's green flat earth was that article about? The one you were responding to, lol. I mean the late Mircea Popescu was a real piece of work, but, just, wow.
Popescu is like the ur-bitcoiner, and by extension the ur-kleptocurrency scumbag. He's one of the handful of people who have (or in his case, had) quite a bit of influence over the perpetual number go up movement of the market cap due to being one of the very earliest large hoarders of coins at penny prices, and a complete Kool-Aid drinking Central bank/central government hating misanthropic troll.
Although I will say in his direct company, he was fairly well-mannered and clearly had a curious mind but one warped by what must have been some sort of Trisomy on the asshole gene.
That article was lifted directly from his blog which, I'm not sure may still be active even now, that contain much of his musings on that same topic as well as lots of others, all as reprehensible and in my view absolutely would have entitled him to an early death - assuming he didn't fake it.
Sierpinski scheme, hah! Now I really want to somehow tie that end with Zooko's triangle. Reminds me of the guy who made a guide to "writing your first ethereum contract in Pyramid Scheme" oh another variation just occured to me: Fractal Fraud
If liquidity goes away when big boys start selling, then, well, someone would have picked up on that, shown that, with data.
Otherwise, the (very real!) accusations of wash trading and other price fixing don't have tons to do with available liquidity, which as a term, refers to an investors ability to sell in a timely fashion.
You can sell $150M worth of ETH right now on-chain without moving the price much. If you aggregate the other chains and exchanges it's probably close to $1b in an instant sell, of course if you TWAP you'll get much better execution.
Daily trade volume doesn’t represent what it used to as market makers/HFT algorithms get into and out of positions several times a day. What matters for estimating impact is essentially the net flow across the day/week/whatever not the transaction volume. It’s unlikely to precipitate a sell off but a 1+% dip in the short term isn’t unrealistic.
