I don't buy it. My intuition here is that Benford's law is a thing because for pretty much any statistical distribution, large numbers are less likely than small numbers, and small numbers are more likely to start with 1. But I'd only expect this effect to show up when aggregating across many different statistical distributions (e.g. looking at all stocks in the S&P 500 at once) rather than looking at individual distributions (i.e. I think maybe he just got lucky choosing Berkshire, and other S&P 500 stocks might not show Benfordness in their price even if they're not manipulated).
Plus, even if Bitcoin's price is mainly a product of manipulation -- speculators trying to make the price rise or fall relative to where it is right now -- there's no reason we can't think of that as also being a random process which produces some statistical distribution.
Benford's law works for detecting fraud because the process that humans use to choose random numbers -- just write down a bunch of random digits -- results in a statistical distribution that is unusual relative to what would be produced by a natural process. But it seems quite unlikely to me that Bitcoin price manipulation takes the form of a whale saying "OK, I just wrote down a bunch of random digits, this is our BTC price target for Wednesday".
Plus, even if Bitcoin's price is mainly a product of manipulation -- speculators trying to make the price rise or fall relative to where it is right now -- there's no reason we can't think of that as also being a random process which produces some statistical distribution.
Benford's law works for detecting fraud because the process that humans use to choose random numbers -- just write down a bunch of random digits -- results in a statistical distribution that is unusual relative to what would be produced by a natural process. But it seems quite unlikely to me that Bitcoin price manipulation takes the form of a whale saying "OK, I just wrote down a bunch of random digits, this is our BTC price target for Wednesday".