Bitcoin Forum

how did it happen?

is it that easy to manipulate the market?

It's that easy to manipulate a young market.
You should hold your btc for some months and wait for the market to return to its former splendor.

you broke it

its not easy to manipulate well not unless your MT.gox

what happened was a number of things mostly the fact MT.gox couldn't cope with demand which had to shut down for a few hours so the market could settle and at the same time the news with good new bitcoins worth a fortune and at the same time some little pricks called hackers attacking pools. personal computers and everything in between (i dont encourage violence but at the same time id happlily beat the crap out of anyone attacking bitcoin)

But you must admit that such an exponential growth was bound to explode at some point, independently of the specific cause.
If you grow that fast you'll eventually find an obstacle and with such momentum you'll crash into it. This time was mtgox being unable to cope with requests and hacker attacks. It could have been something different, with the same result.

I believe bitcoin will start to grow again and even surpass 260$, eventually. I hope this time it will grow slower...

imo mt gox has been shorting since this thing started taking off. then when it plummeted they started covering. which has artificially kept the price up. you saw the dead cat bounce at $120 then it went back over $200 as they had to buy the coins back to cover. and this pattern has and still will continue. they are now slowly unwinding their positions.  there are no RULES. they can do whatever they want pull bids or asks, short on downticks etc. I have a feeling there is going to be alot more pain. my advice would be not to try to catch a falling knife.

its interesting but i mostly believe it was down to hack attacks and mtgox failing but when 80% of something goes through 1 point what do you expect??
on the other hand they have one of the best and easiest to use trade websites out there (im still tempted to make my own)

We now have no choice but to parry against any and all future attacks now. We have seen the beast and it most surely and likely is even still roaming among us.

Being the Mother of all exchanges and main "wholesalers" of the future securitized derivative contracts Mt Gox have no choice but to be the main "reserve pool", nor way to avoid practising a degree of "bankstering". This means that they have the largest and prime systemic risk of being ruined by poorly regulated speculative volatility.

The problem with the fiat nature of BTC-derivative trading is that "democracy" (even so-called "free" market laissez-faire) is no way to run a well regulated Supra-National Global Labour Exchange Currency system! The hallmark of a Adam Smith sort of Freed Market is that it is always well-regulated.

The challenge the Bitcoin Nation now has is to develop a self-regulating set of automatic trading (fiat value voting) rules that advantage, reward and encourage staid and conservative trade-exchange, over reasonable and tiny fractional ranges about current values, yet HARSHLY and PROGRESSIVELY, EXPONENTIALLY PUNISH out of range (more volatile) bidding and asking with exorbitantly prohibitive fees, thereby automatically attenuating, limiting and shutting down volatile ramp-ups and slides in the preciously guarded DURABLE VALUE of our new currency...


See this proposal/explanation
 Re: stable bitcoin pricing...The "Bubbles with Bitcoins" nightmare
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=175708.msg1832923#msg1832923

hyper-liquidity + unregulated speculation=wildly swinging market.
This is what stock markets looked like in the 19th. century. 

I believe this is a panic reaction to crashes on all major trading platforms, Mtgox especially, but also Bitcoin-24, which is not up till now, BitStamp also failed to handle the spikes ...

just buy LTC

it happens...

Star mining LTC ;)

who made the money when the bitcoin price plunged? stock trading(bitcoins) is zero sum a winner and a loser, my question is who won when the price came down????

I'm holding all the way... down :(

I think it was perfectly normal to expect a spike and crash, its a part of the transition that bitcoin is undergoing as a currency.

I like how volumes are increasing now on mtogox. Its close to 600,000 today. More volume less volatility.  :)

MtGox and don't forget BTC's glaring technical issues, especially to newb's who are not computer savvy.

MtGox has to go, and it is already dead.  I think the only people who don't know this are the idiots who work at Gox.

BTC will always lend itself to being exchanged in a central location due to the huge effing hassle with transferring btc to another location.  WTF that it takes sometimes over 24 goxing hours to get a single goxing confirmation is goxing ridiculous.  New adopters of btc will not understand why in this day and age of almost instantaneous money transfers between accounts that btc takes a day.

Since it takes anywhere from 30min, best case for 3 confirms, and 1 hour, best case for 6, that's why I say btc has to be traded on one exchange, to hard for the hated speculators to arbitrage, also too hard to convert btc to fiat and get out of the system.  It's nearly impossible to move between exchanges unless you have a great automated system and have large accounts on all exchanges, which by the time you do that you're really just trading on each exchange and not physically altering the amount of btc traded on any one exchange.

Other issues

The cool down period that resumed prices at the level off Gox trading had reached was goxing stupid.  Not rolling back trades to before Gox lost everyone's money was goxing stupid.  Don't even act like Gox couldn't do that cause they freeze accounts and steal people's money all the time with their goxed up policies.  People need to grow up and get over the "money laundering" moniker/issue.  Goxing high priced art is money laundering and that's right in your face.

Also with all the idiotic KYC stuff at Gox, any half intelligent person would merely pay x number of people to get verified at Gox and traded through those accounts.  It's not goxing rocket science to get around all these childish laws. 

For Goxs sakes a major fiat bank[HSBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20673466] was recently fined ~1.9billion for money laundering.  The the kids who promote the money laundering mantra in the media and regular people who parrot the media narrative need to let that horse die and decompose in regards to BTC and any exchange being used for money laundering.

2013 is now the year of the Gox.

Some of the buyers were likely people who sold pre Gox, and they saw a lot of value in buying lower priced BTC.

Other people were likely people who injected more fiat into the system to buy the lower priced BTC.

Professional speculators is my guess. They weren't here to make friends ya know. If they did profit they are quite likely to do a pump&dump again. 

for the last time. when a stock/bond/currency etc goes down the short seller makes money. when bitcoin went down who made money?

For the last time, speculators who sold as soon as a 5% drop occurred. They turn their bitcoin into fiat at the drop of a hat.

Technically speaking, one can make money if one borrows and sell. (Short selling)

I don't think there is a mechanism of borrowing and selling in bitcoins right now, so no one made money on the downturn.

But, people who wanted to get in at the dip are the real winners here. They got a lot more than what they wanted.

I hope you guys sold in time. Sold mine at 185. Could be better, still pretty decent

I did. Got in at 120 +- and out at 190 +-.

Overall less mad fees I got about a +50% return in a few days

It's really interesting to see this stuff develop over time...

Panic was the reason.

I personally think BTC will launch a bit higher than there former peak, and possibly stable out. Essentially a spike graph, super highs super lows and eventually stable..

What i'm keeping my eye on are LTC :D

and then right back up bitch

er...will it have a chance to drop below 30 again?

no, dumbass.

bitcoin prices and bouncing balls...both fun to watch go up and down til it falls into the sewer :o

like kaiser said, strong holder eat weak ones at those times.
those time mean price bounce hard

Waited for bigger drop but no. Interesting to see is there a second drop when price rises a little more.

ofc there will be, increaseing in user or DDOS or watever other reasons

We are getting back up on the horse again do not worry  ;D

Seems to be holding above 150 for now.

here in chile is a pain to buy. all systems to buy bitcoins are either very expensive or unavailable.
wish i could buy and mine.