Bitcoin Forum

It is obvious that someone is VERY short BTC right now from the unnatural level of concentrated sell volume whenever the price gets around $465.   Who do you think is manipulating the market to hide the fact that their company is likely going to blow up like Gox did?
My suspicion is with the businesses that allow people to buy and store the coins at their brokerage.  Those companies can stay short as long as people do not move the coins to their personal wallets (similar to demanding physical delivery of a commodity).
If you look at the last four weeks it is obvious someone is in very deep trouble that worsens when the price rises.
Any one else have thoughts on why a rational seller would sell huge amounts of coin all concentrated in a tight period that only serves to drive the price lower?

Someone is realizing gains?

Can you explain how the solution to cover a bitcoin shortage is to sell huge amounts of bitcoins?

Manipulation or not, this thing is coming from China.

Just see, for example, Huobi price, that last days is always $10+ above other exchanges. Such gap was not the rule in the past

If Huobi is the leader,  then why did Huobi have no volume on the Friday move? It seems like Huobi is just this Chess game where Chinese day traders get together for 3 hours a day and duke it out,  at a certain time of day that's completely unrelated to market movements.

Chinese whales having some fun in an unregulated market. When they take their profits there will be many tears. The big bump dec 10th was testing how much control they have over the price.

Tread cautiously.

was not okcoin the leader in the volume among the chinese exchange, this changed lately?

Yes but neither of them had any significant volume during the move on Friday.  It was all Bitfinex. He mentioned Huobi so I responded about Huobi.

Your speculation could be wrong, because there's no exchange that has much higher price than others, and even tho demand seams to be coming mostly
from China, other exchanges are not so far behind that would insinuate something fishy is going on. And regarding the large cashouts - they could be just
people that want to make large purchases or are shorting due to reached price.

This is what GOX kept doing.    It ONLY works if I can sell enough to stop the demand and push the price far lower than my volume would allow.    And then if it bases, you do it again.   Until you get to a point where you can cover your bad short.
Look back at the concentration of selling.   If you have 1,000 coins to sell, you would NEVER sell them all in a 10 minute period.   It is not in your own economic interest.  Unless, you are short and started to feel the squeeze.

This is great for the people that want to use and sell their bitcoin, but what about the people who want to buy.

It does not have so much to do with the exchange price compared to others.   What if, for instance, I owned an exchange and started getting greedy and taking bets that the price was too high.   So, when customers bought coins, I never actually bought the coin.   ONLY when customers removed their coins from their account on my brokerage to their own wallet would I buy coins.
If an exchange did this because they felt the price would go lower, the losses would add up but greed makes you not cover because you do not have to cover UNLESS everyone pulled their coins to a wallet (which they do not, look how much was sitting at GOX).   This, in effect, would be shorting bitcoins.   When BTC went below the exchange's average cost of sale, they could buy actual inventory into their wallet.    If BTC goes up, they have a paper loss and can use the exchange's wallet to "punch" the price down.

The problem with "selling to push the price down" is that you have to REBUY all those coins eventually and by the time you  finish that,  you're probably right back where you started,  or much worse,  especially if there's some other accumulating buyer who wants hundreds of thousands of coins.  Then after you've taken a loss from that,  you still have to rebuy your missing coins, which will be an even bigger loss than before.  This is a really bad idea during a bull market.

You can speculate about whatever gox dud but Mark could do whatever he wanted on gox because it was a closed loop with no deposits or withdrawals and he could completely make up all the accounting numbers.  He never paid anyone their fiat OR their bitcoin (defaulted) and he's now in jail. So that's not proof of any kind of a winning strategy.  

There might be something shady with Huobi and Okcoin. Volumes are absolutely unrelated.

http://s014.radikal.ru/i327/1512/c5/cb9e17bc44bd.jpg
http://s017.radikal.ru/i409/1512/df/db8c4cf9e318.jpg

What's shady about the volume on those exchanges is there are no fees.  So actually they're completely irrelevant.  This was established TWO YEARS ago.  Get with the program.

The highest demand has been in the US equity market. GBTC has been holding over $600 with >1K volumes for a week now. That is reflective of what we are going to see once the twins get their ETF running.

I see your point, but if you just calculate the profits from bigger exchanges in just 24 hour period, you will see that there's no point for them to abuse customer funds.
Comparisons with mt.gox are not really appliable here , because that incident was caused by ignorant and incompotent CEO.
Forcing exchanges to prove solvency by regulations would solve any future cases like that one, and would protect both exchanges as business and customers as well.

cheers

Chinese exchanges are obviously pumping hard. Their volumes are reaching new records quite often. I find OkCoin and Huobi to be the exchanges that are manipulating heavily. Other exchanges also manipulate, but on a much smaller scale.

I agree, on exchanges with no fee, the volume should not be taken seriously. One could simply buy and sell at the same time, and simply fake volume,
which is exactly what's going on now. The main question now is why ? Just to be considered a more important exchange or is there something more to it than just that..

I am not arguing that it is a "winning" strategy.  It is gambling which is ALWAYS a losing strategy.   In this case you are gambling with customers' money so the risk reward is very skewed and the losses do not impact you until you have lost so much you are completely illiquid and blow up.   That is what I think is happening and I am wondering how long before someone owns up and blows up like Gox did.

I'm guessing they just got new high frequency trading bots and are playing their daily Kung fu game against each other with more trades occurring faster than ever before.  The same coin is being flipped 1000 times per day in attempt to make an average of 0.001% profit per trade.

What do you mean why? To be called the biggest Bitcoin exchange! To attract new customers by being the biggest! It's all about the marketing in the world and also in the Bitcoin world!

To be honest, I believe that nearly all exchanges might be inflating their volumes a bit, just to attract the fresh blood!

to some extent the Chinese exchanges with no trading fees are also able to artificially inflate the volumes and paint the chart to what their please is. However I agree with your first post in this thread, that selling big amount of Bitcoin in order to get more coins is a very risky strategy and probably the market is already to big to use it in practice.

Did anyone notice that whomever it is also tried the same concentrated dump last night and it only moved the price down $10?   They must be getting desperate.

don't worry, if the price start moving down, it will go much further than $10. Just take the recent rise to $502 and the correction afterwards as an example. The point is, for now there are still not sufficient reason to get the fast growth. That would be unhealthy and unsustainable in any perspective longer than two-three weeks. We are currently in the sideways trend, occasionally popping a bit up, but then correcting back to the main channel we sit in for now: $350-400.