Bitcoin: Today's Tulips

Nutso:

Markus’s trades raised many red flags. He never paid transaction fees and reportedly paid seemingly random prices for bitcoins. Most curious of all, we identified many duplicate transactions in which the amount paid was changed from an implausibly random price to one that was consistent with other trades that day. In the end, we have concluded that Markus did not actually pay for the bitcoins he acquired; rather, his account was fraudulently credited with claimed bitcoins that almost certainly were not backed by real coins.