Eh 20-ish years ago the shit happening on Island and Archipelago would blow most people’s minds. Undocumented, conditional, non-displayed order types. Routine wash trading. Shear-but-don’t skin multi-venue arbitrage. The ECNs were the Wild West. Smoke-filled dark pools.
Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now.
But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have dual-class share structure, and IPO without a profitable quarter. What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more.
Crypto will have it’s 2001-style GC cycle, the useful stuff will stick around until Goldman owns it and the SEC makes a show of regulating it, the tulip garbage will wash out leaving behind a bunch of rich guys who are really annoying because they never built anything, and we’ll go back to arguing about programming languages.
I truly appreciate your experience and cynicism here. People who haven't worked in financial markets have a hard time appreciating how deep the muck can get. Which makes them especially valuable suckers for the unregulated markets.
> Well unless they pay no dividend, have dual-class share structure, and IPO without a profitable quarter. What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more.
I think the idea would be like what happened to Apple: they eventually grew so much, became so successful, accumulated huge piles of cash bigger than they could possibly spend, that they had to start paying a dividend.
And there is a difference between a company with an inherently unprofitable business model, and a company that would be profitable if they didn't spend so much on growth. Admittedly, it is pretty hard to distinguish those sometimes, especially with the endless rounds of Series D, E, F, G, H, I, etc funding some startups are getting.
That is all speculative, but it's not unproductive beanie babie trading. It is pretty close, especially when the only rationalisation I can think of involves Apple paying dividends, which they didn't do for decades, and Facebook and Google still don't.
Even tulip selling is actually a real business, the tulip mania wasn't as bad as crypto from the "real value" perspective, I think.
> What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more.
Ultimately you think someone will pay more for a future share of SNAP than of [OTHER THING] because you think SNAP's growth story is better, business model is promising, blah blah blah.
We may be trading on the derivatives of the fundamentals, or even the hope of future fundamentals, but even that's turning back some as it's been harder to get a big huge IPO purely on hope than it was in the recent history. Throw WeWork in against Snap there, even. Gambling but against numbers that will eventually be reconciled with performance with customers, not just other gamblers. Though personally I'm certainly hoping that some of that "eventually" starts to turn back into a backlash against dual-class stocks.
The equities market is still ultimately betting that at some point, the business results will keep the stock comparatively more attractive.
There's vague talk about "the backbone of future banking systems" or such for crypto as having similar fundamental value, but I haven't been convinced. Particularly, I'm not convinced today's big chains would be what the future would be built on - why pay the huge transaction costs and help the current crypto-rich get richer, instead of making purpose-built chains for your future applications?
All I want to know is: will the annoying guy at my gym who put brags about putting all of his retirement into Bitcoin this summer provide me with some decent schadenfreude at some point?
A counterpoint would be that what some call the intrinsic value is the expected future share price based on expected future revenues. There might or might not be future revenue for SNAP, but there is no revenue for a digital currency.
But I do think digital currency has intrinsic value, in that for now, it affords you anonymity to commit crimes in a way that ordinary currency does not. I’m not happy about it, but this is a form of value.
> But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have dual-class share structure, and IPO without a profitable quarter.
Should the company's assets be liquidated, shareholders are entitled to that value after creditors.
If BTC tanks, there is little value to extract from liquidation.
With crypto these days alpha is still very easy since it's a small backwater. Microstructure is all complete bullshit (and has been as long as these markets existed), and leverage is basically unlimited. A huge sell order is more likely to indicate buying than selling, for example. At least liquidation cascades don't literally hit 0 like they have in the past, which is an improvement.
There are also all sorts of unpublished arrangements like colocating servers for privileged partners; you will _never_ trade into an order they don't want you to when you have 5ms latency and they have microseconds.
On the one hand, people have never really understood just how dirty it is. On the other, most of that is now just the long flat line on the chart...
> But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have dual-class share structure, and IPO without a profitable quarter. What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more.
Folks always levied these criticisms about Apple. So long as the company is growing and can do better re-investing the capital in itself, it should do so. Companies intentionally avoid creating profits to avoid paying taxes, electing instead to re-invest that capital tax-free. The idea of going public without a "profitable quarter" is meaningless if they could just be profitable at will.
Apple has paid over $1B in dividends to Warren Buffet alone since he took his stake, and returned just around $100B to investors last year between $85B in buybacks and $15B in dividends.
Buying shares you are paying for a combination of the present intrinsic value and your estimation of its future assets and cash flows. That doesn't mean your appraisal of these future outcomes are correct, and that's the risk.
But equities are fractional ownership stake in businesses whose value increases through non-investor participants. You know, customers? That's the difference between a positive-sum game and a zero-sum game like futures and options, or a negative-sum game like crypto assets. With especially proof of work crypto assets, value is constantly being removed by external participants, rather than added.
Yes traditional assets are mired in garbage behavior, but that doesn't mean that crypto is better - far from it. Decentralization makes it borderline impossible to control the behavior of bad actors while providing essentially zero material value to anyone beyond a few edge cases. And as usual, folks mention there will be some crypto folks who create value left behind after some wash-out. 14 years later, zero value created. It is true that not all equities are good investments (of course), in the fullness of time, zero crypto token investments as we see today will ever be good investments.
There's a hype cycle right now with the claim that Walmart is going to issue NFTs, or get into cryptocurrencies, or something.[1] Walmart is not saying that. They filed for a trademark for "WALMART" for the trademark class that includes cryptocurrencies. Which means only that WalMart, Inc. spent $400 to protect their brand name from someone creating "WalMartCoin". WalMart, asked for a statement, said they had no immediate plans in that area.
Reminds me of the whole market-moving news cycle about Amazon accepting cryptocurrency “by the end of the year” last year. Tons of coverage, like this[1]. It never passed the smell test, all traced back to one anonymous City A.M. source, and of course it didn't happen.
This is some interesting analysis, but all of the causal language is unsupported -- and I think mostly inverted from the reality. Here is an equally supported description:
- Retail and futures traders create instability by placing leveraged trades and stop orders that amplify swings.
- Market makers are aware of instability and design their bots to turn off so that they don't end up on the wrong side of a liquidity cascade.
- People with large orders often cancel them in order to improve their orders when chasing the price. (This happens in non crypto markets too, but some of those markets have incentives and regulation to force market makers to provide stabilizing liquidity.)
The most explicit manipulation is the news outlets designed to amplify positive news. But even that can be explained by desire for clicks as much as short term market shifts.
"An aside on NFTs Because they’re “unique” objects, NFTs are a perfect vehicle for wash trading. You can easily ensure you only wash trade to yourself. The common scheme is to wash trade with yourself until some credible dunce buys the NFT from you at your manufactured “fair” value, leaving you to walk away with real money."
It's such a stupidly simple idea it's actually brilliant.
Depends on what you mean by the manipulation. Many stock, future, precious metal prices are affected by actors who want to temporarily move it for profit. Some are illegal, some perfectly legal.
In what way do you expect Bitcoin to be different? This is a technical question, once you define it one could debate if this particular behavior is present in BTC.
I think that every and all markets are manipulated by groups with money and power. Everyone wants to game the system to act in their favor right? What would I want with more money? To earn more money of course.
The "Bart" pattern had me in stitches because there has been similar stock meme among Korean individual traders mocking strange price actions and doing technical analysis using cartoon characters to figure out the best entry/exit points.
That thread is just describing a long squeeze, which is an mechanism, not manipulation. The allegations in the linked article (against the same guy!) are quite a bit more detailed. And they absolutely are illegal in real money trading on licensed exchanges; whether they constitute crimes in the crypto world is sort of an open question.
I think you'll find that market manipulation is prohibited in the US under Section 9(a)(2) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and in the EU under article 12 of the Market Abuse Regulation (etc.)
The US Securities Exchange Act defines market manipulation as "transactions which create an artificial price or maintain an artificial price for a tradable security".
I don’t have enough mathematical knowledge in this subject to back this statement up but I swear I noticed this for SPACs too. There’s these really odd spikes up and down that does not make any sense according to public information
May I suggest a similar look at September’s fake press release about WalMart accepting Litecoin.[0] Unlike with the Amazon hype which had arguably an unknown non zero price signal at the time, price manipulation here was the alpha and omega for the initial so obviously fake press release.
It's a good and fair article. Even without media manipulation, there's a huge amount of futures trading on high leverage which tends to pile up. Then, all that is needed is a fuse and something spectacular will happen, either up or down.
The author could have picked from a series of other dates, where seemingly relevant/important news to Bitcoin is revealed, and somehow...price action does nothing on those dates.
Why not? Not enough leverage built up. So it's the nature of the trading making price so volatile. A small event can trigger a cascade of liquidations.
To a skeptic, this would be a reason to reject the asset. To a long term holder, it doesn't matter as they don't trade. To short term traders, it's the way to make a lot of money quickly, or to blow up your account and lose it all.
It’s not so much price manipulation as timed restrictions / throttled deposits / withdrawals / order execution. basically market malfunctions / barriers. you can always arrange over the counter transactions though.
What else is new? Kudos for all the research, but I don't think any reasonable person needs any proof that all crypto is ripe with manipulators and scammers.
Dumb question, but is price manipulation wrong when it's for something that doesn't have a "true" price?
Like I get why it should be illegal for stocks. If you pump it and the price reverts back to some true price (calculated from expected future earnings or whatever), then people who bought it expecting it to be at an efficient price will lose money.
In the case of crypto where everything is driven by supply and demand only, who loses?
Stocks also don’t have a “true” value. Their price is driven entirely by supply and demand, which in turn is weakly anchored by investors doing fundamental valuations on the stock (there is more demand for an underpriced stock). The issue is that market manipulation is outright theft, usually from retail investors.
Think of it like playing blackjack. When I hit, I make a bet and I know roughly what the odds are that the bet will pay out. If the house was to manipulate the cards in the deck so that the odds are different, I would lose much more often then I should, and it would be theft. Similarly, if someone uses artificial demand to drive up the price of btc above the natural demand and I overpay, then they are selling to me at an unfair price. Eventually the price with fall to the natural price and I will lose money. Btc is weird because people keep buying more, but the principle is still the same.
If the price is going to go from 40k and 50k over the next few months, and the price is artificially raised to 45k (which is when I buy in this example) then even if I get out at 50k I’ve lost 5k of profits I would get if the market was fair.
So the short answer is that in any case of any market manipulation, it is theft from other investors. Usually (but not always) small retail investors.
Now the argument some crypto folks make is that market manipulation is part of this market, so take that how you will.
This is only a partial answer: broadly, we lose as a society. Openly fake markets and obvious manipulation erode trust in systems that, even when corrupt and manipulated, are ultimately tied to real value (people’s labor, their retirement accounts, &c.)
None of what we have is great, and I’m not going to bother justifying traditional financial markets. But cryptocurrencies represent a massive moral hazard to our handling of hundreds of millions of peoples’ economic security.
I'd argue there's no right or wrong at all when it comes to this. There's only bigger and smaller, stronger and weaker, early and late. We draw an arbitrary line somewhere and say that people on one side cannot trade on information they have and the people on the other side can. And we trust that the people on the former side will never try to find a cheat or workaround.
The market is completely made up. It's driven by inequality in access to information. You're only going to make money if you're:
Because (layman here) you could still pump & dump and influence prices. Perhaps it’s tougher with bigger established coins BTC or ETH, but it’s still a thing afaik.
IMO the other explanatory post by Coral Alexander linked at the beginning this post did a better job to describe the hypothesis in a more accessible and clearer language. https://www.coalexander.com/post/binance-spoofy-bots-and-liq... In this post, the central thesis that spoofing was the key igniter of the event was not clear IMO and it didn’t explain well how spoofing works, while the other post lays it out very well, along with dedicated explainers for the key terms.
No, this is the anatomy of an off-chain price manipulation of a private futures market that exchanges something that is tradeable for Bitcoin. It used to be funny but now it's just sad seeing everyone confused about the difference between bitcoin and third party markets. Only a vanishingly tiny fraction of this actually has any representation on the bitcoin blockchain. It's like buying stolen Tide detergent out of the back of a shady car in the parking lot of the actual grocery store then complaining about the grocer when you get home and it's watered down.
This is the normal finance people with their normal scams manipulating private enties like Binance which are vagely associated with Bitcoin. The finance people and the public at large cannot see bitcoin as anything other than an investment and that perception blinds them.
While I appreciate the amount of work that went into this article, there are at least 50-100 potential current "news" stories in the crypto space at any given time. It's easy to find one that correlates with price movements after the fact, but more or less impossible to do so with forward testing. Virtually no successful crypto trading firms are using real time news data as a centerpiece of their trading, because news has almost no impact (contrary to popular belief and the assertions of this article), especially compared to equities. Elon Musk's tweets, which ostensibly should matter least for fundamental value, are probably the biggest drivers of capital, albeit only in the short term. See [0].
And then the part about "suspicious" orders on the book before the liquidation cascade. Come on. Amateur crypto traders are reinventing religion, where mysterious unknown "whales" are the gods, pulling all the strings.
> And then the part about "suspicious" orders on the book before the liquidation cascade. Come on. Amateur crypto traders and outsiders are reinventing religion, where mysterious unknown "whales" are the gods, pulling all the strings.
[+] [-] benreesman|4 years ago|reply
Island and Arca are NASDAQ and NYSE now.
But Ben, US equities have intrinsic value unlike this BTC garbage! Well unless they pay no dividend, have dual-class share structure, and IPO without a profitable quarter. What’s a share of SNAP entitle you to exactly? Ah right, you think someone will buy it for more.
Crypto will have it’s 2001-style GC cycle, the useful stuff will stick around until Goldman owns it and the SEC makes a show of regulating it, the tulip garbage will wash out leaving behind a bunch of rich guys who are really annoying because they never built anything, and we’ll go back to arguing about programming languages.
[+] [-] wpietri|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaashif|4 years ago|reply
I think the idea would be like what happened to Apple: they eventually grew so much, became so successful, accumulated huge piles of cash bigger than they could possibly spend, that they had to start paying a dividend.
And there is a difference between a company with an inherently unprofitable business model, and a company that would be profitable if they didn't spend so much on growth. Admittedly, it is pretty hard to distinguish those sometimes, especially with the endless rounds of Series D, E, F, G, H, I, etc funding some startups are getting.
That is all speculative, but it's not unproductive beanie babie trading. It is pretty close, especially when the only rationalisation I can think of involves Apple paying dividends, which they didn't do for decades, and Facebook and Google still don't.
Even tulip selling is actually a real business, the tulip mania wasn't as bad as crypto from the "real value" perspective, I think.
[+] [-] majormajor|4 years ago|reply
Ultimately you think someone will pay more for a future share of SNAP than of [OTHER THING] because you think SNAP's growth story is better, business model is promising, blah blah blah.
We may be trading on the derivatives of the fundamentals, or even the hope of future fundamentals, but even that's turning back some as it's been harder to get a big huge IPO purely on hope than it was in the recent history. Throw WeWork in against Snap there, even. Gambling but against numbers that will eventually be reconciled with performance with customers, not just other gamblers. Though personally I'm certainly hoping that some of that "eventually" starts to turn back into a backlash against dual-class stocks.
The equities market is still ultimately betting that at some point, the business results will keep the stock comparatively more attractive.
There's vague talk about "the backbone of future banking systems" or such for crypto as having similar fundamental value, but I haven't been convinced. Particularly, I'm not convinced today's big chains would be what the future would be built on - why pay the huge transaction costs and help the current crypto-rich get richer, instead of making purpose-built chains for your future applications?
[+] [-] SavantIdiot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alecst|4 years ago|reply
But I do think digital currency has intrinsic value, in that for now, it affords you anonymity to commit crimes in a way that ordinary currency does not. I’m not happy about it, but this is a form of value.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|4 years ago|reply
Should the company's assets be liquidated, shareholders are entitled to that value after creditors.
If BTC tanks, there is little value to extract from liquidation.
[+] [-] tyrfing|4 years ago|reply
There are also all sorts of unpublished arrangements like colocating servers for privileged partners; you will _never_ trade into an order they don't want you to when you have 5ms latency and they have microseconds.
On the one hand, people have never really understood just how dirty it is. On the other, most of that is now just the long flat line on the chart...
[+] [-] dheera|4 years ago|reply
Really? My impression is that many US equities in 2022 are more like Reddit up/downvote scores than a reflection of intrinsic value.
Which isn't a bad thing in my opinion, by the way.
[+] [-] arcticbull|4 years ago|reply
Folks always levied these criticisms about Apple. So long as the company is growing and can do better re-investing the capital in itself, it should do so. Companies intentionally avoid creating profits to avoid paying taxes, electing instead to re-invest that capital tax-free. The idea of going public without a "profitable quarter" is meaningless if they could just be profitable at will.
Apple has paid over $1B in dividends to Warren Buffet alone since he took his stake, and returned just around $100B to investors last year between $85B in buybacks and $15B in dividends.
Buying shares you are paying for a combination of the present intrinsic value and your estimation of its future assets and cash flows. That doesn't mean your appraisal of these future outcomes are correct, and that's the risk.
But equities are fractional ownership stake in businesses whose value increases through non-investor participants. You know, customers? That's the difference between a positive-sum game and a zero-sum game like futures and options, or a negative-sum game like crypto assets. With especially proof of work crypto assets, value is constantly being removed by external participants, rather than added.
Yes traditional assets are mired in garbage behavior, but that doesn't mean that crypto is better - far from it. Decentralization makes it borderline impossible to control the behavior of bad actors while providing essentially zero material value to anyone beyond a few edge cases. And as usual, folks mention there will be some crypto folks who create value left behind after some wash-out. 14 years later, zero value created. It is true that not all equities are good investments (of course), in the fullness of time, zero crypto token investments as we see today will ever be good investments.
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/16/22887011/walmart-metavers...
[+] [-] Ekaros|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulgb|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://gizmodo.com/amazon-to-accept-bitcoin-by-end-of-2021-...
[+] [-] evrydayhustling|4 years ago|reply
- Retail and futures traders create instability by placing leveraged trades and stop orders that amplify swings.
- Market makers are aware of instability and design their bots to turn off so that they don't end up on the wrong side of a liquidity cascade.
- People with large orders often cancel them in order to improve their orders when chasing the price. (This happens in non crypto markets too, but some of those markets have incentives and regulation to force market makers to provide stabilizing liquidity.)
The most explicit manipulation is the news outlets designed to amplify positive news. But even that can be explained by desire for clicks as much as short term market shifts.
[+] [-] skilled|4 years ago|reply
"An aside on NFTs Because they’re “unique” objects, NFTs are a perfect vehicle for wash trading. You can easily ensure you only wash trade to yourself. The common scheme is to wash trade with yourself until some credible dunce buys the NFT from you at your manufactured “fair” value, leaving you to walk away with real money."
It's such a stupidly simple idea it's actually brilliant.
[+] [-] mbesto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptero|4 years ago|reply
In what way do you expect Bitcoin to be different? This is a technical question, once you define it one could debate if this particular behavior is present in BTC.
[+] [-] recursive|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sosuke|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temp8964|4 years ago|reply
So the real question is whether a coin is being manipulated, but what kind of manipulation you can accept.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|4 years ago|reply
I think all of it is manipulated at a scale never before seen.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eric_cc|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] DJBunnies|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcurve|4 years ago|reply
https://m.blog.naver.com/kwonhs225/222201971395
Pretty hilarious.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/AlamedaTrabucco/status/14672197118301511...
Ready for a move up again soon.
[+] [-] ajross|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulpauper|4 years ago|reply
does not look like it
[+] [-] noja|4 years ago|reply
Errr - what?
I think you'll find that market manipulation is prohibited in the US under Section 9(a)(2) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and in the EU under article 12 of the Market Abuse Regulation (etc.)
The US Securities Exchange Act defines market manipulation as "transactions which create an artificial price or maintain an artificial price for a tradable security".
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_manipulation
[+] [-] syntaxing|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acjohnson55|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitxbitxbitcoin|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/business/litecoin-walmart...
[+] [-] fleddr|4 years ago|reply
The author could have picked from a series of other dates, where seemingly relevant/important news to Bitcoin is revealed, and somehow...price action does nothing on those dates.
Why not? Not enough leverage built up. So it's the nature of the trading making price so volatile. A small event can trigger a cascade of liquidations.
To a skeptic, this would be a reason to reject the asset. To a long term holder, it doesn't matter as they don't trade. To short term traders, it's the way to make a lot of money quickly, or to blow up your account and lose it all.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] naveen99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mslupski1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gfd|4 years ago|reply
Like I get why it should be illegal for stocks. If you pump it and the price reverts back to some true price (calculated from expected future earnings or whatever), then people who bought it expecting it to be at an efficient price will lose money.
In the case of crypto where everything is driven by supply and demand only, who loses?
[+] [-] lcvw|4 years ago|reply
Think of it like playing blackjack. When I hit, I make a bet and I know roughly what the odds are that the bet will pay out. If the house was to manipulate the cards in the deck so that the odds are different, I would lose much more often then I should, and it would be theft. Similarly, if someone uses artificial demand to drive up the price of btc above the natural demand and I overpay, then they are selling to me at an unfair price. Eventually the price with fall to the natural price and I will lose money. Btc is weird because people keep buying more, but the principle is still the same. If the price is going to go from 40k and 50k over the next few months, and the price is artificially raised to 45k (which is when I buy in this example) then even if I get out at 50k I’ve lost 5k of profits I would get if the market was fair.
So the short answer is that in any case of any market manipulation, it is theft from other investors. Usually (but not always) small retail investors.
Now the argument some crypto folks make is that market manipulation is part of this market, so take that how you will.
[+] [-] woodruffw|4 years ago|reply
None of what we have is great, and I’m not going to bother justifying traditional financial markets. But cryptocurrencies represent a massive moral hazard to our handling of hundreds of millions of peoples’ economic security.
[+] [-] c7DJTLrn|4 years ago|reply
The market is completely made up. It's driven by inequality in access to information. You're only going to make money if you're:
A. Lucky
B. Ahead of the game in some shape or form
[+] [-] prox|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SZJX|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kkjjkgjjgg|4 years ago|reply
- fake news stories about Amazon accepting Bitcoin, and something Tether
- "momentum ignition", trying to start a trend by placing a big trade offer and withdrawing it when takers arrive
Are those really a big deal?
I guess technically every trade in crypto or stock markets is also a "market manipulation", as it has the potential to move the price.
[+] [-] hestefisk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|4 years ago|reply
This is the normal finance people with their normal scams manipulating private enties like Binance which are vagely associated with Bitcoin. The finance people and the public at large cannot see bitcoin as anything other than an investment and that perception blinds them.
[+] [-] mulcyber|4 years ago|reply
Anyone has a good introduction to trading for engineers/mathematicians/programmers?
Something that goes into the theorics and the math of the thing. Like an MIT open course or something. I'm always a bit lost with these things.
[+] [-] VHRanger|4 years ago|reply
Generally I would discourage people from trading - 99% of people who try fail.
[+] [-] lend000|4 years ago|reply
And then the part about "suspicious" orders on the book before the liquidation cascade. Come on. Amateur crypto traders are reinventing religion, where mysterious unknown "whales" are the gods, pulling all the strings.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging
[+] [-] setr|4 years ago|reply
Sounds like something a whale would say…