A crypto analyst believes scammers dumping their ill-gotten gains are killing the Bitcoin price and they’ll keep doing so for two more months.
Crypto analyst Ergo doesn’t buy the ‘Twitter FUD’ about miner capitulation being tied to a drop in the Bitcoin price.
That’s why he analysed the wallets tied to 200,000 Bitcoin stolen by the Plus Token scammers. He believes they’re still selling off 1,300 Bitcoin a day.
That’s around three-quarters of the amount miners receive daily.
If his analysis is correct, it’s likely to have a similar effect on the price as the Bitcoin inflation rate doubling.
To put it another way, that would be the exact reverse of the anticipated effect from the Bitcoin block reward halving.
Going forward we can use the daily sell estimates and the ~58,000 BTC unmixed total to estimate the duration of the remaining selling at between 1.5 and 2 months.
— Ergo ∴Politically Charged∴ (@ErgoBTC) November 21, 2019
58,000 Bitcoin left to be dumped
Here’s the bad news: there’s 58,000 Bitcoin left that is being sold off over the next two months.
“If my numbers are correct, the 200k BTC estimates reported earlier this year were correct, and market impacts will continue for some time,” Ergo said.
And worryingly, his calculations don’t include the price pressure on Ethereum – and the scammers stole around 800,000 Ether from their victims.
He traced the Bitcoin from the PlusToken wallets into a crypto mixer called Wasabi which helps hide the origins of dodgy Bitcoin.
He said 54,000 Bitcoin, of the 187,000 he has tracked, entered the mixer or used a method he calls “self shuffling” to hide its origin.
The rise and fall of a scam
PlusToken was the third biggest scam in crypto’s history and took in around $3 billion of various cryptocurrencies, but mainly Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The mobile wallet promised returns of 6-18% monthly and was widely promoted across Asia. It also incorporated multi-level marketing, which is better known as a pyramid scheme whereby the newcomers helped pay the returns of the existing participants.
The scam’s ringleaders were arrested in July.
The Plus Token scam fleeced some 4M users of 200,000 BTC, the liquidation of which is likely part of the reason for the downtrend in the market since August.
Turns out a new scam called Cloud Token has already taken the torch, led by this gentleman.. ????♂️https://t.co/umJWTeDLwG pic.twitter.com/tDT7by4Ikn
— hodlonaut ????⚡???? (@hodlonaut) November 26, 2019
I shall rise up even stronger
The Plus Token scam may have disappeared, but the people behind it (who aren’t in jail) seem to have moved on to the new Cloud Token *alleged* scam.
It’s pretending to be a ‘cloud wallet’ and is *allegedly* fleecing people of their entire portfolio of coins.
While it’s made little impact in the western world, it’s incredibly popular on Chinese social media.