Bitcoin Forum

Hi here !

So, the captitalization of BTC reached 40B $ , this is nice but not huge at all compared to FIAT currencies.

My question is : with such a "low" amount of money, does the traders have real power over the Bitcoin price ? I always heared about the natural inflation, simply more demand etc... But don't you think that if a lot of early investors with huge amount of BTC could gather and have control over its price ? Or they are simply slave of the system like every one of us ?

I'm waiting for your toughts  ;D

the bigger it becomes, the harder it is for small groups of people to control the price, but it is still possible.

no one sets the price other than the people buying and selling on the exchanges and there probably ain't very many who do it full time. but all it takes is one surge of serious demand and the coins they use to play are eaten up and never returned.

in the early days on mt gox there was one guy who was putting up walls of thousands of coins, the chart was a vertical line into infinity. some other guy came along, bought it all and he was never heard from again.

Isn't that the story of the Bearwhale ? I've heard about that.

similar, but this was years before, maybe 2011 or 12.

that guy on mt gox was putting up walls of tens or hundreds of thousands of coins. all gone in one buy.

if you're interested the bearwhale has returned - https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6d2tp1/i_am_the_bearwhale_uasf_now/

but in his case he intentionally wanted to sell all at once. he wasn't eaten up by buyers. pretty stupid move but he still got millions of dollars.

For now traders are the determinants of bitcoin pricing and the forces of demand and supply are the tools in their hand. The market capitalization of bitcoin which stood at over $41b today are sign that bitcoin is not control by individuals, governments and nations.

I'm sorry but it works the other way round

Market cap should be made a taboo word across the forum since it has lured so many people into delusions and forced them to arrive at false conclusions. More specifically, market cap is just the price multiplied by some constant (more or less constant variable). But as I have already explained it numerous times and harsh reality has already proved my words, higher price destabilizes the market since you would need less amount of coins (both crypto and fiat) to "reach out and touch the price". Thereby, even small groups of people are then able to control or otherwise manipulate the price (even if temporarily), contrary to your claims

that assumes that the same old bunch of people are selling and buying back their coins all the way through. every wall that's put up is at least partially eaten by someone else. and eventually a whale bigger than you swallows you whole and the cycle starts again. i don't believe the traders that dominated in 2013 will be the same people in 2020.

I don't think that traders directly determine the Bitcoin price. Maybe the wales ans that ones who trade realy big sums but it's more thing about the demand and supply. Despite some theories I don't think that any group isn't powerful enough to control and influence the Bitcoin price on their own.

I agree, it can happen if say 5 whales gather at August and do their move ;)
Low trading volume and it will be easier for them to push the prices and
essentially "play" with the rest people trading at those looping periods.

Not that much. In 2014, a bitcoin whale dumped 37 million worth of bitcoin or something along the lines, and the sell order (which was a single huge wall) got quickly eaten.

Notice that the price was around $300, so back then whales would have cause much more damage easier.


Here you can see the sell wall in action and how it got eaten:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uX_bB_4VJk

Isn't whales are traders?  If yes, this means Traders have power to dictate Bitcoin price.  They are the one  supplying and demanding bitcoin according to their target price  that is after they bought the coin from the first supplier (Miners). But, most Miners who supply the market with fresh Bitcoins from mining are traders too.  

Ok starting from cap. You said $40B cap. Let me tell you such caps are just imaginary and estimated, nothing to do with real money flow in bitcoin. It is ascertain from no. of btc * present price.
Now coming to trader influence over price. I don't feel at least 2017 traders have any influence over price. When millions of dollars are traded in btc everyday, how could someone holding even 100-150 btc effect the price significantly.
Although don't know if some union or associations are working to drive prices.

Or even its existence. Btc wont appear without miners thus traders' only job is to profit by storing some amount then selling. Seems boring but thats already part of it. Can't just really changed something because it is there. Prices also increase to increase in supply and sometimes demands can make it's price increase too. either ways it is not always traders that affect the price but also on how much it is willing to risk for it to not die at least.

If I got your point right, that should be inconsequential to my point

One whale eating another whale or one shark attacking another shark - this all happens at lower walls, i.e. with reduced number of coins if the price is to stay balanced (when demand approximately equals supply). Otherwise the price would inevitably crash to a new balance (or surge to a new high), and this is what now happens, and this also proves that my theory of escaping volatility (ultimately leading to Bitcoin Big Rip) is correct

They are already manipulating the price, those early adopters/ whales of the present time, but as the price grows and marketcap increases it becomes harder and much difficult to simply manipulate the market, don't you think bitcoin is small compared to fiat total marketcap. bitcoin is big as it is, generated out of thin air, that is even a million dollar market is a miracle.

First and foremost bitcoin is not generated out of thin air,it is a carefully calculated and an innovative network and the person who created this phenomena is a genius without a doubt to create a new form of electronic value so that the whole world starts accepting it and if you start evaluating an asset which has a huge market cap you really cannot make a point that it is a fluke inventions .Manipulation can be done when there are a small amount of people but it is hard to make a huge impact when the number of users are huge.

In the limited supply environment, the early whale investors will lose their power when there will be enough many small investors come in.
The prices nor market cap are insignificant here but only how many people are currently adopting alone matters big.

For example : There are 100 units in one market and there are 10 traders and only one trader is holding 40 units and remaining 60 units are being controlled by rest of 9 traders. The price of one unit is reaching $1/$10/$100 and now that whale sells his all 40 units and there are only 9 traders to match those selling and prices may reach to $0.01 also.

But in the case of those 9 traders becoming a group of 100 traders by trading those 60 units and waiting for buying more units. Now that whale's selling of all 40 units might not enough for those 100 traders and prices will not find any significant down fall.

Whales will lose power when there will be more adopters joining us !

yes and no.
in my opinion it is always a battle. when we are talking about something like bitcoin that is well distributed then it is like a battle. there are a lot of whales, aka the early adopters, and there are a lot more big players with less amounts than whales and there are a lot more traders with regular amounts.
these groups don't work with each other. if someone or couple of them decide to go against the market or try to push it in other direction they will not succeed 100%.

as an example of failure you can see in the past months when price was rising from the $888 dip Bitstamp whales have been dumping the price in there but all the other exchanges were rising. finally the market won and price broke $1200 and continued rising.

Since now bitcoin market capitalization has grown quite big so it is not so easy for any big whales also to control the market prices for a long time. But for short term than can do some impact but for the longer term results only demand and supply makes the difference. If slowly more and more public start holding coins and don't trade them then its demand will grow even higher.

It seems that people will never stop falling the victim of the market cap appeal, charm and magic

Market cap doesn't mean a shit on its own, and in regard to how easy (or how difficult, for that matter) it is for whales to manipulate the market, its increase works in quite the opposite direction to what you assume. That is, market cap increase in short term simply reflects the price rising, and with the price rising the market is necessarily thinning which makes market manipulation easier, not more difficult (as the recent volatility clearly shows). I hope this helps somehow

When we study Market Types in the books of Economics first type which comes into consideration is 'Perfect Competition Market'. Under this market situation, there are numerous buyers/sellers such that single buyer/seller is not in power to influence price and price is determined by forces of market. Bitcoin is based on this assumption.
But while we continue reading book, we came to know that 'Perfect Market Competition' not actually occurs in any real world industry. So no matters what theory says, Bitcoin prices can easily manipulated by some smart traders, big holders or maybe by some hidden cartels, who knows  ::)

Illuminati confirmed xD  ;D

I think that small traders can rrally manipulate the market cap. They can usually gather with some other small groups most of them watches and when someone from small trader triggers the market they joined of course with one agenda

Whether early adopters or not, who have big amount of bitcoin and money have more power over bitcoin price. But, I don't think someone could dominate the market as bitcoin has spread widely and have quite huge market cap, besides  no one will do something stupid if they hold big portion of bitcoin obviously, maybe keep it save and convert small portion from time to time.

I think that (new) people are buying bitcoins and this lowers the chances of others to manipulate the price as it will be harder but not impossible. Early adopters have the ability to manipulate easier the price and the traders yes have the power to increase or decrease the price, I have seen many traders or a group of traders how bump or pump the price in altcoins exchanges with hundreds of bitcoins which worth a lot.

I might sound pessimistic but we cannot remove the element of some people controlling bitcoin away from the direction of prices swinging in both direction. The reason is that sometimes you just wonder why there is either increase or decrease in the price of bitcoin without any explanation or any news to support that. The capitalization is still low that an individual or group of individuals holding 1/4th that amount can control things in their own direction which to me its achievable considering there is no regulation against such in the case of bitcoin.

Btc price may not be controlled by traders anymore but there is no denial that some exchanges do manipulate it heavily.We in india always have to pay a higher price than international market because of manipulation of some exchange and wallets

The price of bitcoin is not depending in the traders because the price can changed in the matter of seconds because of the real amount of investors and also the real demand in the market while in traders they are just taking advantage of the demands and also the fast growing price so they can easily make money faster than the investors.

Traders has a small power over crypto, the big miners are the one wish has huge power to manipulate the market as well some big exchanges are able to make it happen, the thing is there is opportunities always for all that take the risk, traders power maybe around 5-10% considering whales.

Bitcoin market is entirely different from altcoin market.Altcoins have small market cap and so it is easily manipulated by big whales.But bitcoin market has big market cap and it has investors world wide.Even the chinese could not manipulate bitcoin price as earlier.So its hard to take control over bitcoin price.

Agreed but in there own little ways traders then manipulate there investments depending on the timing to when would they sell it and when to buy. Probably there are also traders that invest in altcoins and yave at least a good profit because how trader can make a living. Finding things in low prices and sell it to the highest stockmarket.

The power that trader has is the exchanging of coins which turns their coin into btc value and became their holdings. If they could generate a bigger amount of bitcoin from sold token, it will be an opportunity for them to hold for long term investments and in the future it will be sold again for another profitable income. Traders has helped a lot of holdings particular at investments of different crypto currencies and buying is always involved when every coins was exchanged to bitcoin.

The market capital is there, but it is harder to track than the stock market because once the FIAT line is crossed it falls into another system of finance, plus there are some groups that have a good amount of market leverage, but they are not public in their assets and remain mostly quiet and anonymous to a large degree.

Traders with large amounts of Bitcoin can manipulate the price especially if several whales work together. Of course as Bitcoin becomes spread among more smaller investors and traders, this manipulation will become harder to accomplish and there will most likely be less volatility in the price.

Well that is why volatility goes down with higher marketcap, but there is also a herd mentality which is what causes bubbles and major crashes. When everyone sees the price going up they FOMO and put more money in, and when it crashes they panic sell. I think day to day traders will have less of an impact but during big events they will all act together.

They are both, they are masters and slaves, they are masters because they hold so many coins that it is easy for them to manipulate the market especially if they collude with other whales, but they are also slaves because unless they were rich beforehand then that means they are rich in bitcoin and if the price crashes then they lose most of their net worth.

In any kind of market, the traders has a certain power to influence the movement of a currency or a commodity. I am sure of that but how the traders in general will behave when faced with many factors can sometimes be hard to predict because they are humans too and not robots.

The question is: Can they influence the price of Bitcoin considering that compared to fiat money the volume here is not yet that so big? I think the answer is really yes but this situation is getting dimmer as Bitcoin can be growing bigger when new markets would be opened soon.

Pumps and dumps are caused by some whales who like to play games at the expense of the small investors. But as more and more dive in and start to invest, these whales become less powerful because of the distributed buying capacity. Moreso, if institutional investors hop on board, the market cap would be too big for several big players to really influence or dictate the price behavior. The more investors there are, the less volatility on the price is to be expected.

On the public surface, the majority of the market holdings appear to be exchange controlled, putting them in the same place that banks appear in the FIAT markets, as "holder" of most of the funds, but "controlling investment" of a much lesser amount.  There are many deceiving points in the crypto market, starting with Bitcoin that are very tiny things in the FIAT currency arena.

I think traders are just sheep like the rest of us following the general trends and hoping to get rich quick, there are too many whales for them to be able to realistically collude enough to affect the price substantially.

I think that the price of Bitcoin is much more easier to manipulate in the 3rd world countries and other countries other than the main ones that are more lenient on Bitcoin exchanges because there is not much Bitcoins being put on the order books. I usually see Bitcoin having a high price in the India region and I don’t really know why someone would pay so much for that when they could just use LocalBitcoins.

True, if the market capitalization is small, people with lots of bitcoin can control the bitcoin price, but globally it is not possible. I think the issue is the main reason for the bitcoin price drivers

It is still possible but it simply doesn't make sense

There are quite a few multimillionaires sticking around the world and looking for sources of reliable income. What they are looking for is nowhere near hundreds of percentages annually (many would be quite happy with 20% that Warren Buffett has been making for decades), but the price of the question is in the billions of dollars. Bitcoin is simply not ready to swallow and devour this amount of money. If that much money gets poured into Bitcoin within short time, it would wreak total chaos at markets

While many traders try to follow the trends the truth is there are many traders that are anti trends, they try to time the market and see when the trend seems to be about to change, when this happens they short bitcoin, obviously the problem with that strategy is if they time it wrong then they can lose a lot of money if a big bull run follows.

Bitcoin price is controlled by small, retail investors, which is harmful to it as a currency. It means that the price is driven by mob mentality and the market is very inefficient (the price and intrinsic value rarely match). So the answer to your question is yes, regular every day bitcoin investors like the people on this forum do affect the price. They don't affect it individually, but together they do.

However, for bitcoin to grow as a currency, it needs its price to be controlled by institutional investors instead (such as hedge funds, banks, etc). I discuss why in a post here if you are interested: http://demoinvestor.com/articles/00000001

In all trades that determine the price is the trader itself where the number of requests and offers received so that the price provisions can only be done by all trades.

For now traders are the determinants of bitcoin pricing and the forces of demand and supply are the tools in their hand. The market capitalization of bitcoin which stood at over $41b today are sign that bitcoin is not control by individuals, governments and nations.

Bitcoin, and alt coins in general, has easily the largest percentage of unreported lost monies.  There is a vast number of wallets that cannot be retrieved with BTC in them and that amount is still part of the overall circulation.

Certainly no one control the btc prices. But as a country if we would have to say then it will be China. So majorly if they bring a transformation changes overnight in their bitcoin policies then certainly the prices will get impacted in a very big way, Else generally the price may not be significantly impacted as such even if bunch of people may come together and try to buy/sell or create a short term demand supply gap.

A lot of power. That's why the price can be stable. Traders are a necessary work-force that keep things under the markets control.

Bitcoin always have a development to have. Yes I agree that the more development happened to bitcoin the more transaction can possibly made by higher people because its price is way to high to do. And the changes of the price of the bitcoin also the traders point to trade because in trading you have to monitor the changes of price for you to earn and have an income on trading.

The reason of why people buy in local exchanges at higher prices is very simple, they do not have access to cheaper coins and they still want to buy bitcoins, this is a classic case of supply and demand, there is a lot of demand but there is not enough supply so the price goes higher and higher,  another reason may be they just don’t know better and buy from the local exchanges because they do not know they can buy cheaper bitcoin elsewhere.

Traders have all the control over bitcoin price.

Now, you and I can both be traders as long as we sell/buy bitcoin actively. There is no real "minimum" per se for you to be classified as a trader. But the more capital you hold, obviously the more influence you are going to have on the price.

Market capitalization rising is good, it does reduce manipulation to some extent. But the fact is that early adopters still hold bitcoin - so their share of the entire fiat market capitalization remains the same as their bitcoins has risen in price as well. So if they dump their coins, there will still be a major impact on the bitcoin value.

We all hate price fluctuation, but unfortunately that's what makes bitcoin special. It is completely out of the grip of governments.

First we would have to differentiate the type of trader, those who have more coins or money they could certainly exert more influence than one or more small traders, so in function of your investment and strategies seek to maximize your profits trying to manipulate the price, but they are only part of the puzzle, there must actually be many more factors that significantly affect the price even more than traders.

Traders have a good place in influencing the ups and downs of a certain cryptocurrency. Traders are bringing in the demand as well as the supply in the whole trading system. Although I would say that it is the general demand and supply of the coin that makes the great impact for its price.

Traders can be liken to agents bringing in the juice or the fuel needed for cryptocurrency to get into the roller coaster ride experience. I am just a new trader in Bittrex but am starting to see the whole picture.

Good job comparing the combined valuation of fiat currencies,just consider it has two different form of currency. The big whales you are talking about does not have that much significant amount of control over the price of bitcoin and if they did they could have done that already.Just embrace the current volatility and try to make some profit.

The traders have influence on the price of bitcoin to the best of my knowledge because those money bags you are referring to are also traders but the issue is just the volume they control whether individually or collectively is enough to make a difference considering the market capitalization which is just like a bucket of water from a pool in comparing it with foreign exchange market and other stock exchange market.

Basically this, traders bring liquidity to a market that is full of people not doing anything with their coins, just think of satoshi approximately he has 1 million coins that is about 6.5% of the whole supply and those coins are not moving at all and we have no reason to think those coins are ever going to move at all, traders help this situation by being willing to buy and sell bitcoins.

One cannot completely take away the influence of buyers and sellers  (i e. Traders) from not affecting the market value of Bitcoin. This is because the forces of demand  ( buyers) and supply  (seller's) always has a positive or negative impact on the market value of Bitcoin. In summary, traders has both negative and positive impact on bitcoin price.

Alt coins, and Bitcoin, deemed by Florida courts as "meaningful value tokens", behave differently in the currencies markets as other world currency.  Normally, if the US dollar rises in the markets, that means at least one other currencies has fallen to some degree, Bitcoin can gain value and all FIAT currencies actually benefit from the additional movement power that increased value has brought to the world.

There are really two kinds of people who control the price of Bitcoin. The traders and the buyers. The traders want to sell for a high price so that they can earn the most money. This doesn't make them the controllers of the price. However, they do become the controllers when buyers come into the equation. Some buyers are so desperate to get Bitcoin that they are wiling to pay an extremely high premium for something they could get for a much lower price. This just continues to make the price go up and up as more people are interested in buying Bitcoin.

With the demand of Bitcoin going up, people are also becoming smarter. They want Bitcoin but aren't dumb enough to buy it for such a high price. This sort of stabilises the price and sometimes even lowers the price because when people see other people selling their Bitcoin, they get scared and also want to sell. But they sell for an even lower price so they can get rid of their coins even faster than everyone else.

Bitcoin is steadily getting importance in the market. Because many people are heavily involved in trading and investment and many more are following the example, it is entirely possible that bitcoin will leave the fiat currencies behind becoming the most used currency and one of the powerful currencies in the world.

It is true that bitcoin can be the next most used currency in the country because of the power of bitcoin in terms of transactions and also investment, bitcoin is slowly getting more popularity that before and it is the start to make people realize that there is a good currency that will void the government from controlling it and that is why bitcoin is keep improving to be the proof for the future currency.

They really have the power to control Bitcoin, even traders that are involved in other assets can influence such price. Much more for a currency that is decentralized the whales which are the biggest profit takers during a price action will benefit it all. Traders can actually influence the price in both ways from up and down, they can pressure the market in buying higher prices and they can make sellers sell Bitcoin at lower prices.

traders alone don't have the power to contorl this current market, maybe this was true in the past, when bitcoin was tiny, now it's different

on the other hand a group of whales can stil control a single exchange, not the whole market, but the influence of a single exchange being controlled can have consequence on other exchanges

As an user stated in the past this has been taking place that the traders with higher bitcoin holding moves the market. Now such scenario is no more effective. These days the traders have certain impact on the price moves. Most of the time exchanges were the one who has got majority control these days. Importantly this too came to light when the Chinese exchnages made fake volumes to manipulate the value.

Traders cannot form the price of bitcoin. It can only generate demand. Traders just trying to make money of the situation. I think that in pricing a lot more influence than news traders.

The market of bitcoin solely depends on the traders that is the buyer and seller and is not dependent on fiat currencies. Therefore normal stock market or inflation do not affect the value of the bitcoin neither do the fall or rise of currencies nor inflation which makes it a secure investment.

I think that even small traders can manipulate the market cap. Because They can gather with some other small groups. And when someone from small trader triggers the market they join in.