Very good article, explaining what I had begun to suspect a couple of months ago. Every-time we get within a week of these futures expiring, the price of Bitcoin suddenly starts to head south and it is conveniently accompanied by media FUD stories: the latest being that child pornography found on the Bitcoin blockchain could make owning Bitcoin illegal. This, it now turns out, is not true and the pictures aren't anything remotely illegal.

People said that as the daily volume of the futures is too low to make a difference, especially when compared to the volume of soybeans and corn, to cause a decline in the price of Bitcoin with a market cap significantly higher, but the evidence of the market fluctuations at expiration times told me another story. This also seemed to me to be missing the point: the whales own large amounts of Bitcoin and they have the ability to create large movements downwards, so the volumes on the futures market are a red herring.

Now we learn about the OKEx debacle and this is just the tip of the iceberg and we learn of the spike in the volumes of the US Bitcoin futures market and the intensifying sell volumes across the major exchanges.

It looks to me like Bitcoin has become a trading tool at the moment, with the volatility and ability to manipulate the price in an unregulated market being a traders dream. I don't know how we will see the price predictions for this year. If the value plummets to about 6.5k, or 6k and buy orders kick in, I think this will just turn out to be another bull trap, because the price will fall again when the futures reach expiry. The price of Bitcoin may take-off eventually, but we are heading for choppy waters in the meantime.

While this process of pumping and then dumping around expiration times continues, the altcoins are being killed off. They quickly fall when Bitcoin is dumped, they are too slow to recover when Bitcoin is pumped again and then when dumping starts again they fall even further.

Now, the next futures contract expires on the 18th April and let's just see what happens when we get within a week of that date. As the article says, we'll get plenty of FUD and a corresponding drop in the price of Bitcoin that gathers pace near and on the 18th.

A lot of people think this is just an off the wall conspiracy theory and they are same people who would have scoffed at the idea that the banks knew they could collapse, but it didn't matter to them, because they also knew they would receive government bailouts anyway.

What also concerns me is the CFTCs funding cut of 1%, although they had asked for a 12% increase. The head of the CFTC, Giancarlo, had called for a do-no-harm approach and this cut is a sign that his suggested regulatory approach has overstepped the mark.

Although regulators say they want to ensure they don't regulate in a way that will hinder the blockchain innovations, all the banks and big corporations want the regulators to do is facilitate their appropriation of the blockchain innovations for themselves and then they maintain their control of the financial system.