I wouldn't trust Weiss, wreaks of the same old banking crony parasites. You would be better at doing your own ratings! I’d give more credence to those than Weiss. Re the futures, that lovely play thing of the bankers that saw massive shorts placed on American Airlines stock days before 9/11; nothing fishy going on there! Future contracts; Yes, originally these were designed to reduce exposure to commodity price volatility for producers and consumers, but today it’s largely just an outlet of speculation for Traders. Traders that have no interest in taking actual delivery of the commodity in question. Re bitcoin futures, the 'rigging', is based on them being invested in BTC themselves, or colluding with other BTC investors. To be honest no one in the financial world participates in this unless they know that it is rigged, because the risk is too great otherwise. If they short BTC in the futures, then the cash settlement means that they have the right to buy Bitcoin at the lower price at a future date; being cash settled, they are just given the difference in Fiat, no BTC is traded re the contract, which is often the case anyway in futures. (But) from what I gather, the thing is that the movement is (leveraged) for instance they get $5 for every 1$ movement! Now you can see why damaging the value of your own bitcoin is worth it, when you get 5X leverage on the loss. Then if you're a sicko you can use those profits from market rigging to buy up more BTC off of the people who have lost hope because the price has fallen significantly. The more they have and the less the others have, and we're talking big numbers and market share, the less liquid the market is, and the thinner it trades, meaning the whales can buy up, or sell off the order book on multiple exchanges even easier. Typically, by dumping a load of BTC on market order, or a silly low-priced limit order (they do this with gold all the time). The thinner it trades the easier it is to cause a flash crash. Which is great for them, because it takes less BTC to initially jerk the market in one direction, the rest is done by real investors reacting emotionally to the sudden price change (and/or; perhaps a flurry of negative news in the MSM, hmmm). If you're really evil, at the bottom they guess where peoples' stop losses are, such as 5-10% below big evens or long-term chart trend lines and manipulate the market to cause a dipping wick to trigger their stops, and relieve them of their BTC. The hole in my knowledge is where the fiat comes from to pay out the futures investors at the clearing house, maybe someone can help? I'm guessing it's from suckers who get cleaned out 5x betting the wrong way because they don't have the inside knowledge. Or it's the same people, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Which wouldn't matter when you can buy up more BTC on the dip, and repeat. But basically, its Wall Street corruption, and one of the biggest pump and dumps of recent time (not saying they won’t pump it up again). The futures were beginning to be put in place back in May/June (it takes time to set this stuff up) Look at the Bitcoin Chart! What really bothers me is that some outspoken Bitcoin proponents, were instrumental in setting up the Futures by liaising with the banks, under the guise that it legitimises Bitcoin. Really!? Do me a favour! That stinks to high heaven, if they are as intelligent as the appear, then they must have known what this meant.