[kkielhofner]

The ingenuity of financial activity (especially with regard to fraud) never ceases to amaze me. While I can't come up with a wash trading practice that's net positive a lot of research indicates plenty of people do[0]. The provided reference talks about unregulated CEXs but one can only assume given the chains themselves have no regulation whatsoever I can only assume the practice is rampant there as well.

I just can't understand where the monetary volume you speak of comes from when a tiny number of merchants, platforms, etc accept cryptocurrency payments and (again) the number of transactions, addresses, etc just don't line up. As one example Venmo processes similar monetary volume with similar fees[1]. The difference is they have roughly 78 million users and every time I open the app I'm greeted with a running list of all of the people I know sharing their various (and copious) often daily transactions. The numbers for Cash App and others are similar. ~1B$ of daily volume for 500k - 1m users vs (assuming crypto address = user, which it does not) vs ~1B$ of daily volume for 78 million users... Yeah, something is going on with crypto.

Thank you for elaborating on your use case as an example of "shuffling bits around". Of course I'm not familiar with the situation but again (speaking to my lack of imagination/creativity) I can't imagine undergoing what ends up being a complex 12 step process involving multiple entities to obtain what is essentially a short term loan. Interesting and cool you pulled it off but not exactly something I see the masses being able to accomplish.

[0] - https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/what-is-...

[1] - https://www.businessofapps.com/data/venmo-statistics/