The bitcoin price experienced a double-digit rally on Wednesday morning, enabling it to climb back across the $7,000 threshold. However, due to an apparent bug — or something far more interesting — the bitcoin price soared much, much higher on bitcoin exchange OKCoin.
Reports on social media identified strange trading behavior at OKCoin, whose bitcoin price ticker showed that the most prominent cryptocurrency had experienced a 24-hour increase of 123.21%, raising it to a new βall-time highβ of $15,151.
That’s a steep price to pay for bitcoin — even for Zimbabweans — but further evidence reveals that it is actually a steep drop-off from BTC’s 24-hour high, which OKCoin reports touched the $10 million mark. Consequently, bitcoin apparently experienced a 99.8% flash crash during intraday trading before bottoming out just above $15,000.
But that’s not all. In a development that will provide conspiracy theorists with ample fodder for the foreseeable future, OKCoin apparently began transmitting pricing data from the future. Perhaps, confirming one news program’s wild speculation from earlier this year, the bitcoin price does crack the $1 billion mark in the future, leading an enterprising individual to travel back in time to purchase bitcoin when it was “only $10 million”.
At the time of writing, OKCoin’s website had been taken offline. In the coming days, it is likely that the exchange will release a statement apologizing for the outage and attributing the erratic pricing behavior to a bug, and trading data will subsequently be wiped from the record. Most people will believe them, but truly insightful individuals will see through the facade, recognizing that this statement was likely written by a clandestine government agency and published by the exchange operator under duress in order to conceal evidence of time travelers from reaching the general public.
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