There is a lot of risk investing in bitcoin, it is nothing like commodities, that's just the latest identity have dreamed up for it after it completely failed to live up to the hype of the previous identities first as a currency outwith government control, then as a distributed trust-free database, then as a foundational layer for myriad apps, and finally as a 'commodity' which nobody actually uses (unlike other speculative commodities like oil or corn which usually have a use value which the current value fluctuates around).
You do in fact have lots of protection when you buy other commodities, in the form of rules against cornering the market, rules against fraud, insurance, regulators etc. Look up the silver corner or similar episodes for what happens when markets in commodities are completely unregulated, as we see in the Bitcoin market at the moment.
Nursie: Oh sure, I thought he was talking about like your trades on the exchanges being misrepresented or something. Weve known about the wash trading for probably 6 years now. Theres aggregators that eliminate the wash trading volumes. Its mostly asian exchanges that are competing for business. theres still a lot of organic volume. Yup theres going to be bad actors that occurs all over finance.
I agree there are bad actors all over finance, which is precisely why finance and banking is so heavily regulated, in a way that btc is not, and that lack of proper auditing and controls is what makes btc incredibly risky as some sort of investment IMO and utterly unlike commodities like oil or corn as an asset.
Bitcoin is neither a useful currency, nor a reliable store of value, nor a good way to share data, nor a foundational layer for an app ecosystem, nor a commodity. It has been sold as all those things and more, but it has succeeded at none of them and I fear in this latest mania a lot of people will lose much of their money.
The volumes on many exchanges (particularly the less reputable ones) have been faked a lot. Also exchanges have several times been found not to have the reserves to actually cover the customer accounts (i.e quadriga).
