Bitcoin Forum

As the title says, Do you think Bitcoin's 2017 highs were artificially inflated? Is it possible to manipulate price of Bitcoin?

It is true that until now the highest price increase occurred in 2017, and I do not think that is also a manipulation, and bitcoin will also rise again later this year although it is not as high as 2017

there is always a certain traces of manipulation in bitcoin because it is still small and is susceptible to manipulation. so the answer is yes, to some extent. these days people are over-exaggerating the manipulation mostly because of the drop and because during drops the manipulations become more noticeable since most people pull out their money and the effects become bigger.

otherwise there is nothing new and if anything this dip is more manipulated than the ATH. meaning if $20k was like 10% manipulation, the current price ($6.5k) is 30% manipulation.

I also think people too exaggerated price manipulation, because most of the time people are always looking for the cause of the decline, but when there is no reason to fall, so people will feel panic and think that someone control the price,

yes we can see that in 20187 the price of bitcoin is increase more and more, and we can see that its end on early of this year, and then how about manipulated bitcoin price? i think it will hard to happen as long the manupolator doesnt have the big money to pump and dump bitcoin with high value

There will always be manipulation to a certain extent to any kinds of markets.

On bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general though, it's possible, but I really don't know for sure. There were article posts on how tether(USDT) inflated bitcoin's price. Personally I don't know enough about this topic to come up with a conclusion. Take a look and decide for yourself: http://time.com/money/5310924/bitcoin-price-manipulation-tether/

2017 was crypto-boom. It coming to mass, especially with mining feature.
I think its not manipulated hype

Yes there will always be manipulation especially in crypto world. on 2017 it was probably the best year for bitcoin because of many companies and big names got their attention to it. It's like a trend that as a millionaire you cant resist to buy some BTC.

Yes,  to a certain extent bitcoin was artificially inflated in the previous year 2017. Bitcoin is in its developing phase,  when price level is dropping deeply everyone will sell their bitcoin and bitcoin will become a huge loss.  To avoid this,  In 2017  it was artificially inflated.

I don't necessarily agree with the term artificially inflated but I do believe that the price increase was not entirely down to individuals pushing the price up that high. I'm sure there was something going on behind the scenes that maybe pushed the price slightly higher than it would have otherwise reached.

the question you are asking here is meaningless in my opinion. the real question that you should  be asking is this one: "how much did manipulation affect bitcoin price" for example since you are talking about "highs" you should be wondering if there were 0 manipulation what would bitcoin price be. would it be the same $20k as the ATH, or a little lower like $18k, or a lot lower like only reaching $5k?

first of all you can not eliminate manipulation so it will always exist. and based on my experience even without manipulation the "highs" would have still be near the same thing meaning I believe it would have been nearly $20k because it was the FOMO with a little bit of manipulation that pushed the price up there. and it is always easier for bitcoin to go above certain levels when a big resistance like $10k is broken and you enter uncharted waters.
drop on the other hand is much harder and needs a lot more manipulation than the rise because people tend to have bull mentality when it comes to bitcoin even if they pretend otherwise so making them sell is harder.

Bitcoin can be manipulated. Manipulation takes place at the exchange of Mt. Gox, this price manipulation is done by two bots and listed as "??" in the user's country. They named this bot "Mark" and "Willy".

Markus buys and sells bitcoins at seemingly random prices and does not pay for transaction fees. After further examination, Mark does not actually pay for Bitcoin received. Mark earns 335,889 bitcoins and is active from February 14, 2013 through September 27, 2013.

Seven hours after Mark becomes inactive, Willy appears with 49 accounts. Each of these Willy accounts sequentially purchases bitcoins worth US $ 2.5 million and then becomes inactive. During this period, bitcoin prices soared.

Answer to the second question, yes. It's possible to manipulate the price of Bitcoin. But I don't think that it is the main cause of 2017 ATH. Last year's ATH was caused by the futures hype (CME, CBOE) and the market basically went full FOMO, causing the price surge to $19K in months. So, unlike 2013 where there was a suspicious activity in Mt.Gox, so far we had no clue about manipulation in 2017 bull run.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/one-person-caused-bitcoin-to-spike-from-150-to-1000-in-2013.html

Unfortunately it could have been done I think.
Because if you think just for a moment outside the box, how many BTC are related to 90 or more % of the total bitcoins ?
Too many for my view - so they indeed can control the whole market and even if someone if a true believer, you know what they say: no honey, no money.

And the power of money gives them a head shake

it happens every year that it will reach a highest price of bitcoin but not as big a as like year 2017 and i hope 2018 will be awesome if it will happen. however about the question i think its not artificially there are some whales that sell their own bitcoin to buy other coins that was a big impact why bitcoin price go down by my own opinion and observation.

There is the possibility of manipulating the market only when you reach big volumes in trades in several pairs of currencies that is the ratio to bitcoin. In 2017, there was a clear manipulation of the market and the quotation of this crypto currency.

Yes, as we all know that the sudden rise in the price was the result of the involvement of big whales and institutional investors. There was no growth in the user base to support the theory of overnight price rally. On the other hand when the institutional investors and big wheels decided to liquidate their investment the market has experienced a strong correction of 65%.

What experience do you speak of where you say it was barely any different to how it would've been with it. I think that you're right though. Manipulation will always exist but to what extent it makes a difference is really impossible to know.