Other bitcoin and cryptocurrency analysts were quick to join Schei in pointing to potential market manipulation.
"Somebody's trying to game the trading algorithms," said Glen Goodman, trading veteran and author of bitcoin investment book, The Crypto Trader, who explained how this could be used to move bitcoin prices on the market.
"There are algorithms programmed to look at Google Trends data and try to find correlations between numbers of searches for the word 'BTC' and the movements in the bitcoin price."
"If they detect patterns, it may be profitable to trade off that data. This hacker may be buying some BTC, then sending a ton of 'BTC' search queries to Google, the algos see search numbers have risen and are triggered to buy a lot of BTC which pushes the price up, and the hacker then sells their BTC at a profit. Easy money!"
