There is a lot of money to be made by exploiting crypto markets, and it’s something that whales appear to be doing on a regular basis. Putting whales aside for a moment, one Twitter user that goes by the name of Soleil Du Soir has pointed out that Ethereum miners could potentially manipulate the price of Bitcoin using a few rather shady tactics.
Nothing about crypto trading is fair – unless you’re a whale, of course – so we figured it’s time to give you a rundown on how things could play out and indicators to look for, allowing you to take advantage of this possible scenario and make some cash.
“Attacking” Bitcoin Made Easy – If You Have the Hash Rate
In the proposed “attack” it would involve having a lot of Ethereum hash rate and a good deal of cash to trigger a Bitcoin flash crash. Step one of the “attack” would be to short $BTC on as many exchanges and platforms as possible. Once you’ve got the major shorting trend going, the Ethereum miners would then leave a massive number of ERC-20 USDT transactions hanging in the mempool. This would prevent any BTC/USDT transactions from being completed, leaving people to panic sell for cold hard fiat. This type of crash isn’t too difficult to pull off, but you would need a significant amount of resources to pull it off effectively.
Here is a easy and cheap way in which Ethereum miners could earn money “attacking” Bitcoin: short $BTC and then leave a massive number of ERC-20 USDT transactions hanging in the mempool for several hours. BTC will dump hard as a result. @VitalikButerin @VladZamfir @Bitfinexed
— Soleil Du Soir (@soleil_dusoir9) September 9, 2019
Not the Perfect Plan
There are countless other variables to take into consideration, but if this plan was executed exactly like this, then there is a good chance it will only work for a few hours at most. There are so many other stablecoins out there and Tether even has its own Tron based token too. Exchanges looking to mitigate this could swap from the ERC-20 token over to the TRX-20 version in order to prevent this from being an issue. This would mean that the miners involved in the “attack” would need to hit Tron too.
While this attack could work in theory, it requires a lot of time, work and coordination between miners to pull it off successfully. Not to mention the fact that markets don’t really react to short positions being taken. It’s a nice plan on paper, but in reality it’s much hard to pull off.
