Coindesk irresponsibly sent bitcoin’s price diving by publishing an incomprehensible article that stated the Department of Justice was to make a major announcement in about one hour.
Without providing any further information at all regarding what the announcement contains, the bitcoin market briefly went into a speculative frenzy.
And into a dive, falling from $21,600 to $20,500, though it quickly recovered after the news naturally turned out to be a nothingburger.
The Justice Department announced they took enforcement action against the Russian crypto exchange Bitzlato and they arrested their founder.
No one had heard of this exchange in the wider crypto space, but apparently it’s what ransomware-ers use.
DoJ is obviously commended for this action as no one likes ransom, and they’re just doing their job.
Coindesk however should have known that putting out an article which says nothing more than DoJ will announce “a major international cryptocurrency enforcement action” in about an hour would lead to speculations regarding the worst imaginable with the article still amounting to a misreport – despite it being factual – as it suggested something far bigger than it was.
Indeed some were saying it might be against Binance, which makes no sense because if it was major where the market is concerned, they probably wouldn’t have gone to Coindesk. Instead they probably just routinely informed them there would be a press conference, which is what you do with the press so they can attend.
In addition the announcement was to be made just one hour after the article was published. Could they not wait one hour and then do actual reporting instead of interfering in the market? Or were the brief ad clicks far too tempting even at the cost of mini-panicking the market?
It did get some 3,000 people to watch live the DoJ announcement however, whom hopefully have learned that announcements of announcements are usually nothing as if they were, you just announce.
