I'm sure we all had max fun last night (GMT time) watching the price of BTC go up and then DOWN.

I personally had no idea what the cause is until I saw THAT denial Tweet, apparently from Gary Gensler saying the SEC account had been hacked and that the BTC spot ETF had NOT been approved.

(NB my first reaction to this was..... 'is any of this real...?)

So it would seem that the SEC account tweeted that the ETF HAD been approved (which was quite literally FAKE news), which triggered a lot of BTC buying and then....

Whoever it was hacked the SEC account sold their BTC HARD, and then probably sat back and enjoyed the take-off to the Bahamas. If they were clever enough and had enough guts to pull this off, they probably had their physical exit strategy planned.

I mean most likely scenario here is that it was someone within the SEC who had access to the account, and this had been planned for months. The most obvious means for hacking is that it's a corruptible force INSIDE whatever institutional account has been hacked.

That was clever, so nice move. I never saw it coming, but in retrospect, all the hackers were doing was taking advantage of a one-off opportunity to make a few million, and that's pretty normal in capitalism as usual, whatever the token or fiat currency you're dealing with.

What's also usual is people knee-jerk reacting to tweets without first checking sources. That is VERY stupid.

I mean who buys crypto on the back of a tweet, anyway...?

Obvs that's a rhetorical question, we all know LOTS of people do it, but this... I mean honestly, is an institution like the SEC honestly going to announce one of the most major shifts in financial policy on Twitter first...?

I mean you'd expect social media coverage... but not before a large official post pinned on the SEC site and press releases.

Those people that bought off the back of the tweet probably thought they were getting in ahead of the game, then possibly, probably, BOTS reacted.... and they got burned.

It's come to something when people take the VERY hyperreal as real - as in X/ Twitter - rather than verifying via other sources, OK they are still hyperreal, but when it comes to something like this waiting for news releases may be a sensible idea... most large news agencies verify their facts first, which makes them a little bit less susceptible to fake news.

Final Thoughts...

I'm not surprised by any of this... but I find myself congratulating the hackers and lamenting the amount of stupidity still out there.... but I can't in all honesty feel miserable when clever beats stupid, which is the case here.