Bitcoin Forum

I saw this about central banks sniffing around Bitcoin to make a Frankenstein coin they can use to expand and scam everyone, business as usual.

http://www.coindesk.com/deloitte-central-bank-cryptocurrency/



But I thought many if they did this would prefer Bitcoin as they would see the price rising over time. BUT it made me wonder if you had enough resources they could hold the price of Bitcoin down like gold? I mean through deriveratives of BItcoin, not the actual coin. Could it be surpressed like gold?

I have a similar question.  Clearly the central banks don't seem to mind the idea of digital money catching on, but like this article suggests they  seem intent on centralizing it.  It would not be that expensive to execute a 51% attack on the bitcoin network for a large group of banks and destroy it, so couldn't someone do this as a way to devalue bitcoin?  When and will they do that?  What other ways could they use to force people into a centralized cryptocurrency like the one posted above?

Much easier I imagine :-[

This. Less people holding and using it, equals less money needed to manipulate its price. It's done all the time on alt coins, just depends on the market cap. The higher the market cap, the harder it is to manipulate the price directly. This is why Litecoin had a large spike a short while back.

My point is more about exotic deriveratives. I mean the price of Gold is not I believe a true market picture but one based on paper gold which people can multiple as much as they want it seems. Bitcoin itself can't I believe be manipulated downward BUT a deriverative could be dumped at various times to make it seem like a genuine Bitcoin dump is happening....possible?



Plus, when I say manipulation I'm talking about suppression not increasing the price. :)


This is a massively important question cause Bitcoin has as much chance of being a major currency as a gold has ie none....IF the central banks can print digital coins and suppress the price of bitcoin. If they can't then any system they tried would probably fail....unless they simply said Bitcoin is illegal but their currency isn't. Sadly quite a possible outcome.

This is the notion of using the blockchain technology without bitcoin. I do not think it has to be a scam. Central banks could do with a more transparent and efficient ledger to the bank reserve requirements.


Bitcoin's market cap is only $4 billion. The top banks and hedge fund firms manages an estimate of $10 trillion. They can manipulate bitcoin like a puppet. There is no doubt what they can do, if they want to do it.

Bitcoin is far easier to take possession of when compared to gold.

What are you talking about?

Gold is easy to manipulate because investors do not take possession of their actual gold. They own paper gold.

Paper bitcoins does not make as much sense, because investors can very easily take possession of their actual bitcoins. In fact, any who do not are morons. See sig for more details.

It is right now and has been for the past 2 years.


Until the ETF kicks off and/or a massive adoption event by either banks or people, bitcoin is laughably illiquid. On orderbooks today, there is probably 50k BTC buyable up to 100% of its current price. You could literally clear the entire world's order book for 1 hour with little coordinated effort for 30-40m USD. Conversely, because of sites that allow leverage and futures, consider how little BTC or USD you would need to begin pushing the price around. Someone with as little as 1m USD or BTC equiv could push BTC's price +/- 5% during off hours with literally zero effort or sophistication involved.

fake a few screenshots about OK coin, throw it on reddit. have a few sock accounts "confirm"

start dumping 1-3k btc on finex and finish off on btc-e. buy on the way back up

something so stupid and simple as that could cause a +/- 10% swing at current prices TODAY.

Absolutely the price of bitcoins can be manipulated like gold because there was a time when bitcoin were labled as $1000 in the beginning and now they are priced at $284 and are still changing.... :-X :-X

How with a ton of fiat alone could you manipulate Bitcoin apart from inflating the price? If they bought tons of coins pushing the price to the moon people would take big gains and likely pump them straight back in, all it would do is raise the VOL.

Well, it is quite simple you can buy small amount of bitcoin on different exchanges(or maybe from/through middlemen), of course not instant but over time.
When you achieve that you can dump these coins at once causing huge panic and price drop. Then you can buy cheaper.

Well in my opinion it would almost be easier to rise the price with manipulation comparing to decreasing the value.

yes, and in a strong and more fierce way, than gold, gold manipulation don't happen overnight like with bitcoin, when you suddenly see the price changing from 10-to 20 or more %, with gold this happen in a long time

much less destructive than that of bitcoin, you have time to respond to it, to not lose big money

In normal time this is true but when we have a major upheaval in world stock markets  the value of gold and shares can really change a lot just in a few hours.
I have some experience in Forex and I can tell you that even now the value of crude oil and gold changing a lot, even more than value of bitcoin.
Can Bitcoins Price be manipulated like Gold is?
In order to give a clear answer to this question we should know how much bitcoin have the largest investors.
Large investors can manipulate anything, it is only a matter of interest and expected profit.

What if someone sold their 1000000 stack of bitcoins to a central bank when they still was worthless?

not much will change if a big amount is controlled by one person or by a bank, it's always centralized, also that bank will probably start to sell those bitcoin for profit, since they can not use those coin

My answer is very simple : YES  ;D ;D ;D

Bitcoin price is easy to be manipulated ......

That's just messing with the price, it's not suppression. If anything it would just create more opportunities to trade it. A central bank would need progressively more fiat to do it till they point it would be ridiculous and Bitcojn holders would all be billionaires.

Please state how?  or are you blowing hot air?

how the SCAM company Mt Gox did it ? They built a bot that buy/sell continuously to manipulate the market. However, now-a-days it's not so easy to manipulate, but, with a huge amount of BTC you can easily do it same china are now doing it.......

Yes of course and the most it comes from China, they have much more potential and Bitcoin price is easy to be manipulated

^^^This.
Gox is the most famous example of price manipulation.
You can also check the buy/sell orders on exchanges and get an idea of what is happening. ;)

Can again the bitcoin price manipulated again to the 1,000$ , i really want to see people smiling

Bitcoin price IS manipulated by the big so called exchangers who are owned by the same persons. Look who owns CoinBase, Bitstamp, Bitcoin china and so on...You will find the same "investors" behind :)

I agree with you most of the exchanges manipulate the price, they can even increase the price if they all want

They buy loads of bitcoin off exchange, like bidding in auction, buy direct from miners, buy from payment gateways. Exchange prices will not inflate because their trades are not from exchnages. When they accumulate a large batch of bitcoin, they dump them on the exchanges at critical times to cause panic, successfully subpressing exchange prices. Then they buy them back slowly again off exchange.

Many people have explained the possible methods to you, if you still cannot understand it, you need to read more background info on how the market works.

This question is really turning into a bottom dwelling convo about exchanges and people making Bitcoin go to $1000 again. What I'm talking about is central banking and the suppression of Gold that is essential in a funny money fiat world that we live in where currency is printed in the trillions.


oh look at me I'm a dumbass cause I think the FED could come in and pump Trillions into Bitcoin and it wouldn't increase the overall volume, all they would be doing is popping a ballon that they were at the same time blowing up constantly, making it bigger and bigger every time, it wouldn't hold Bitcoin down.....Gold can be manipulated only because of the deriveratives that are many times more in value than the actual Gold. So a few billion in paper gold can be sold in literally a split second and then they can go make some more fiat to do it again......YOU CANT DO THAT WITH JUST BITCOIN!!!!

What does that have to do with what I said? In other words, why are you quoting me and then talking about something entirely unrelated to my quote?

Nevermind, I'm talking to a sig campaign zombie.

Give them some time. Already it's quite possible that major exchanges are operating on a fractional reserve. Therefor we have more bitcoins for sale than actually exist.

The best thing anyone can do to prevent this kind of abuse is to take possession (control) of their coins. There are day traders who need to keep a balance on the exchange in order to do their thing, and the exchanges know this and can take advantage of it.

There are various ways for exchanges to provide proof of reserves, but how many of them do it in real time? Investors should be demanding these features, yet Gox has shown us that people are stupid and willing to lose huge amounts of bitcoins for no reason.

Yeah I agree fractional reserve banking with Bitcoin could definitely play a part in suppression of the Bitcoin price later. But still, say a large entity wanted to dump on the exchanges they would still need Bitcoin to do so.

Unless it's the exchange operators themselves. They have access to so much more data than the average investor. They know how many withdraw requests they process per month. They know how much fiat is available to purchase bitcoins. As long as they manage to satisfy withdraw demands, they can constantly dump database coins on their exchange (not in a wild disruptive manner, but in an intelligent controlled way to avoid panic) which they can buy back at the lower exchange rate they've managed to create. Should the market go against them for an extended period of time, and they are unable to make up the difference, claim hack or just pull a Gox and run off with the money. Once you can steal enough money to live the rest of your life in comfort, what is the motivation to keep running a legitimate exchange? How many "failed" (self inflicted no doubt) exchanges have made their users whole?

Moral of the story: Be the sole controller of your private keys.

Yeah Bitcoin prices can be manipulated by the whales just like gold.
They create buy order and sell order in such a way that they are able to control the prices.

Because the Bitcoin volume and price are lower than gold, I'd say yes you can manipulate the price big time, if someone wanted to. 

manipulators are all over the place, the only question would be how much.
A wise man once said: hold!