Bitcoin Forum

wherever i look today it seems like there are a lot of people who are surprised about the "rise", which doesn't make any sense to me because there is nothing surprising about this rise in my experience.

the only thing that surprised me was the Fall!
when the market was in bull mode and the price was strongly rising and we had the reasonable correction after the $13k record, things were normal. then the dumping came and price fell, that part was surprising. when price entered the $7k range again 2 days ago it was one of the most surprising things after the $3k drop earlier this year. that drop was "manipulated".

this "rise" that we are seeing today is not at all surprising. it was long overdue and should have happened a lot sooner. we are seeing the market correction and coming back to real prices once again.

Yes both the recent fall and rise were manipulated because there was some huge sell orders in multiple exchanges at the same time for bitcoin which is not usual as it's a clear attempt of deliberately pushing the value down and making it fall and then again reinvesting by placing massive buy order to give a pump so i that they can again sell at high but this time we need to wait rather than buying or selling which might again keep us at the receiving end if we buy or sell at these situations.

The fall came because of the news of quantum computers and since, a strong support was broken, the price was expected to undergo more drop. But instead price went up by 3k in a few hours without any news or happening to support it. The rise was more manipulated than the drop. There was no reason for such a big pump when sentiments were negative. This shows that whales were playing against the market sentiments.

the "news" about quantum computers is not a new one. not to mention that it has nothing to do with bitcoin as they are far far away behind the day they can even get close to breaking ECDLP. the only thing that we had was FUD and manipulation.

I do not believe that these FUD news will make any difference in the market valuation but the future contracts can be the reason for these rapid movements other than that i do not find any reasons for these rapid variation in price in the past few days, if not for the manipulation in the market i do not see the market recovering like this in a few hours and may be institutional manipulators might be behind these market movement.

Neither one was surprising to me, to be honest--but both were pretty dramatic. 

I'm not a big seeker of explanations for short-term market movements, but I do wonder what caused this last rise.  There was some news out of China, statements by the president or whatever and record volume on Bakkt too, so it could be any of those or none of them.  The only thing I care about is whether bitcoin can hold onto this gain and not fall back into the $8300 range again.  Usually when the price pops like this that's exactly what happens, so we'll see.

Everyone cries manipulation when crap like this goes on and it can't be adequately explained, but can you imagine how risky it would be to try to manipulate the price of bitcoin?  I'm not sure what whale or institution would have the balls to attempt something like that, because they could easily lose--not to mention that their motivation for even trying isn't clear.  So I'm pretty sure this wasn't true market manipulation, but damned if I have a way to tell for sure.

It's hard to define manipulated
Maybe the fall was because a person with a LOT of BTC decided to sell the coins and the market followed, maybe was a company, we'll never know exactly, there are a lot of players in this game and the fall surprised me to, but this rise...I don't know  ???

If you know any whales, ask them! traders with a lot of money can easily manipulate the trading because they easily move prices up or down. the most notable manipulations pump and dump schemes are related to minor altcoins. It’s just simpler to change a price of the unknown small coin with a low price. Bitcoin is manipulated too, but lesser. majority of whales grabbed enough BTC earlier.

Hence it’s not manipulated completely by whales. most of the hard volatility are trader volume. the rest are whales, hedge funds and large investors. they don’t manipulate the price that much, they manipulate it then the traders do the rest of the work. the reason why Bitcoin fell from $20,000, because they whales exited completely, then sold into traders on the down trend. All they had to do was wait. It’s predictable what happens when the whales exit the market, it keeps collapsing as people panic at each level.

Going to have to disagree with you on this one.  The fall didn't surprise me, because btc had gone up past $10,000 too fast in my opinion, which caused the traders who drove the price to that level to sell and take their profits. 

I kind of figured that the bull run wasn't over yet and that btc would resume its rise, but I mean come on...$2000 in a matter of a day?  That's amazing and I was surprised to see it.  I still can't pinpoint what caused it and I doubt I'll ever know, but I think it's probably all that trading on Bakkt.  Wish I could tell what sorts of trades were going on there and who was doing them.  It would be so sweet if we could get that kind of data from them.

I think this is a sign of last minute volatility after a slooping move down. Perhaps the big sellers caused the drop in the first place. This was also seen around this time in 2017.

it's tempting to cry "manipulation" when the price moves against you---we've all done it. but personally, i know better by now.

people think the bitstamp dump must have been a ploy to close shorts or fill longs on bitmex. maybe that's true, but if so, they were playing a very dangerous game. i've seen similar selloff attempts that immediately wicked up and where other exchanges didn't go nearly as low. for example, back in may when bitstamp hit $6178 but coinbase and kraken only hit the $6600s.

sometimes the market absorbs supply and hammers back up; other times fear and panic take over. the mere act of dumping a few thousands coins won't determine one way or the other. the bitstamp dumper may have thought price was headed much lower than $7300.

in other words, we can't tell the difference between a whale selling the bottom and a whale who successfully "manipulated" the market into filling his bids. and tbh it doesn't matter!

It is just a coincident, it is not due to the news of quantum computer, it is because of the manipulation.  If it was the news then price could have plummet way down because Bitcoin is yet to be a quantum computer resistant.  Whales had been doing this kind of stuff for many years and their stash is getting bigger and bigger and it is getting easier for them to dictate the price of Bitcoin. 

there are certain rises that don't really need any explanation in my opinion. the recent drop that we had is one of those cases doesn't need any reason except the drop itself. for example can you explain why price went from $4.1k to $10k all of a sudden earlier this year? my answer is that it went up that  fast because price fell to $3k and it did not belong there.
it was a similar situation here too. price didn't belong in below $9k range so it had to come back up.

IMHO, the price movements depends on how the people/investors react to the speculations and news.
Let's say the sudden pump of Bitcoin from $7,000 to $10,000 was cause by a massive buy out because of the bullish/positive news in crypto space or they just feel like it. The market won't move unless somebody is making it move.
Though, I'm not saying your explanation is wrong. I could also be wrong, but I think that's how the market reacts. 

Yes. The rise and fall didn't really warrant a surprise. The rise was surprising a bit because it rose after just a few hours in contrast to my belief that it would gradually rise though. The last fall happened because of a sudden dump of coins in some exchange that resulted in exceeding the demand needed, and that's why the price adjusted itself normally. On the other hand, the rise could be about the recent news of China or the one about Bakkt, or it couldn't, but the price was way too much and seeing from now, its gradually stabilizing, going back to its average price where the market could fully accept it, for now that is.

OP, I also believe the "rise" was also nothing surprising, but because of another reason. It was not "long overdue", the market is not person that thinks that it is "long overdue". 8)

It was simply the whalecumulators checking the market and liked what they saw. Plebs' collective short-selling on high margin/leverage.

They made "the call", and said,

https://media.makeameme.org/created/pump-it-5b7d74.jpg

the only time a price rise would be supported/sustained is if the cost of mining supports it
if people cannot mine cheap, they simply buy it instead.
those mining refuse to sell at a loss. meaning both buyers and sellers are giving the market a better value where they wont want to sell for less

the cost of mining is still not near $10k but at the most efficienct costs of ~$7.5k meaning about $8k as a minimum sell for profit
so ofcourse the price had every chance of returning to ~$8k
nothing, absolutely nothing indicated the near $10k was sustainable.
the $10k was just speculative, emotional hype froth(mini bubble layer)

Based on the charts, it would have made more sense for the price to make lower lows than to go up the way it did last days. I read an article that a lot of shorts were liquidated, which might explain the irrational buying that occurred.

Only when traders have no option but to buy Bitcoin we see these moves.... it's not that we have had any fundamental development justifying the pump we have been through.

An important indicator of shorters buying was how easily we have sold down from $10.5k to $9k because it didn't make any sense and other traders used that as an opportunity to secure very easy profits.

i think it is mostly about the risk versus reward situation when a manipulation starts. if the reward is high enough it can justify the dangerous game they are playing.
and in most cases they don't really need to dump all the way down to the bottom they need, they usually only need to dump a little below the "stop loss" targets that most bots set (which is easy to determine in the market) and then the bots do the rest for you with their panic sells which will only grow the more they sell.

The "news" is supposedly that China is backing bitcoin. Which seems to be a mistranslation - they've simply passed a law on cryptography and how China wants to be a leader in cryptography, which is a whole other thing to cryptocurrency!

nobody cares about Chinese news anymore whether it is negative or positive. everyone knows that it has never affected the bitcoin price. what used to be effective was the FUD which stopped working a couple of years ago when they repeated this technique so many times that it lost its power.

Many people do believed on that mindset that Chinese government statements was one of the reason why btc price has an astonishing rise lately. Perhaps, you're having good points about the FUD I don't expect it now again risen from long time hibernation. Same scenario, it did bring more people's ride to another deceptive tactics, that merely attracts their aggressiveness.

Yes bitcoin and crypto market are least bothered about what happens in China or any country whether they ban bitcoin or mining but I feel FUD is still working in favor to manipulate they market and negative news are doing the damage and it's our responsibility to educate people to stop believing in all the post I have started my part.

I am not really convinced the drop in the price happened because of those news about quantum computers but while I hope that what it is happening is not because someone is trying to manipulate the market it definitely seems that way from my perspective, we know the volatility of bitcoin has always being high but if you look at how the price began to rise at the beginning of this year you will see a slow and sustained upward movement and that is not what we are seeing now, the movement is too abrupt and this rises questions about its validity.

There will be a major issue in the bitcoin network if China bans bitcoin mining farms and it will effect the network until there is a hash rate difficulty correction, so you cannot say that they cannot do anything to bitcoin but the price manipulation is not because of these news but there are other factors in play to earn profit in a market like crypto where there is no regulatory issues even if there is an institutional manipulation.

Let's not say "manipulated" because that kinda means someone actually made other people do stuff by convincing them something that is not real could be real. But, let's say it was fabricated. As in the real price was never that low but some rich folks just sold their coins and managed to get their hands on cheaper coins thanks to price falling. It was closer to speculation than manipulation really.

I wouldn't be shocked if it was manipulation neither. It is really not a great deal of bother for bitcoin or bitcoin people because we have seen price move up and down so much that it is actually quite alright for me. I mean I have seen bitcoin move from $20k to $3k and I knew it was way above $3k in real price if you ask me and I was capable of holding all my coins (which later became $10k+) so it's fine.

Neither way, people got used to reach when bitcoins price tend to pump and dump where these are always been 2 things on what a market is.
Manipulation or not, sell off would be normal into those ranges way above on what been speculated.Price can dip on we least expected.Even reaching
that 7k price isnt still an assurance that its already the bottom.We cant remove on ones mind not to think that 3k level might happen again.

that's true because in the end the market is going in the direction that the majority of traders think it should go. so when a certain news comes out and they react to it in a certain way, the market can go in that direction faster.
but in these small scales and when the situation with the market is already unstable (being undervalued) the reaction that market shows isn't really to any news in my opinion. it is instead to the market movement itself. meaning when price goes above a certain level the bots and day traders all go crazy and start "panic buying" (similar to panic selling) without even being aware of what is going on in the news because they were all waiting for that "signal". so the price shoots up.

That's good that you finally realize that network hashing power follows price, not vice versa. Although, some miners might mine at a loss for speculative/self-preservation reasons, that's why it seems price follows hashing power.

it was funny to see the two contradictory topics neatly together  :D

https://i.imgur.com/3ecQIjfh.png

I would say that any substantial price movement is manipulated , but the fall surprised me more
this may not seem like your exemplary bull market , but there was no reason for a 25% drop in price - not even negative news or failed expectations
this was the result of a sell out of coins when traders sell them too fast , they do not care to get the best price and are selling here and now
the problem is that even a relatively small volume can cause such a big price movement , imagine what happens if someone dumps or buys tens of thousands of coins in one go

They were manipulated by the market manipulations to start those topics together. The whalecumulators, again dividing the plebs. 8)

that was actually the reason why i started this topic, so good catch by "veleten". it sometimes makes me wonder why people miss certain market movements and simply pass them by as if they were nothing (like the drop which was indeed the strangest thing) and then focus too much on a similar market movement which is in response to the previous move!
so basically they are focusing on the effect and ignoring the cause.

It could be a poorly translated article, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if news outlets and whatnot purposely spread fake bullish information to steer the market into the north direction. It's something we have seen happen for a long time now.

The point of the China news is that they are looking to become a blockchain hub, which might not even include Bitcoin and other crypto currencies at all. Bitcoin stands for freedom, which the Chinese government actively tries to take away from its people. I don't think they're going to open up to Bitcoin knowing that. ::)

It was quite nice not reading much about China in the last year or two, so I hope that this isn't going to be the start of what we went through in 2015/2016 with China dominanting the headlines. Even if the China news isn't actually affecting the price, if enough people believe it does and act to it, the market will move.

May be because we have been for bear market for a quite a while. That is why majority got suprised when the market goes green besides that sudden rise was something unusual some other thought of bull run though. Nevertheless, it was been manipulated by Whales by some news but others claim that is because of China stuff. Anyway let's just hope for pumps after these circumstances.

So what do think should be the real price by now?

I thought months ago that 12k will be its bottom and price should not go below it.
But it did happen. Yes we could say someone or some group manipulated it to buy more.
They are now in profit so maybe they should go away by now or they could just buy again to make bitcoin more valuable.

Don't celebrate too early, it's still franky1 who we're talking about, he will come with some kind  of explanation , of course with the required 100 lines of useless text and try spinning it to look like he said and at the same time he didn;t say that and that even if he was wrong he was actually right and we all don't have a clue how things work.

But I'm genuinely interested how he is going to spin this :
I find thins one pretty damn hard to twist around.

Also, I would like to add something, there are miners who are forced to mine, for which stopping the mining, even if it is not profitable it incurs lower losses. Imagine having rent paid in advance, power contracted in advance at a specific price but with a pretty tough contract that includes heavy penalties. So for them, rather than losing 1000 per day they might just as well continue mining and lose only 300.

Mining has become far more complex nowadays, it's no longer about hobby miners who can simply watch the charts and plug the thing in one day and the next day shut it off and buy bitcoins from an ATM instead of spending electricity.


But of course.
When the price drops because of a statement made by the PBOC, it's obvious manipulation.
When the price rockets because of an interview from Jinping, it's obvious.....NOT manipulation.

I think we would all live longer to enjoy our bitcoins if we would stop following all this back and forth nonsense and put so much tough in it.

Manipulators will never stop manipulating bitcoin price. I suspect that exchange owner itself doing it just like what binance and tron do recently. Binance buy tether worth 300M usd then transfer it tron wallet then tron used that money to setup buy wall on binance exchange. Justing sun and CZ are playing dirty since the beginning so what's more other exchange can do especially on leverage exchange trading. They can team up to big crypto exchange to manipulate BTC price so that they can liquidate the majority position.

I agree with you, there are some movements that are obviously fabricated in order to collect more BTC, causing FUD to crash the price and by lower or simply dump to clean out a huge amount of leveraged traders is too tempting for the whales to resist... and there are huge amounts of BTC held by a few whales... market making at it's highest

Bitcoin price decline from $8300 to $8000, the next target was $7200 within a day, clearly a manipulation to trigger more of sell-off but it seems failed, hence they pump bitcoin after 2 days waiting. So, the rise also manipulated, because the real price should be around $9K.



Which means, the entity who sold bitcoin if the price above the efficiency costs were miners all this time?

I'm not looking at what should be the real price, but more of what could be the lowest lows? Can we still go below $3100? That's the lowest since we last all-time-high so everyone should take that in consideration or can even be the gauge as to how high we can get in the next bull run.

I guess it was really manipulated from behind so that they can continue to accumulate bitcoin at a cheap price. But there's no surprise here, it could be long overdue manipulation after-all.

I agree. The manipulation was evident.
But like I said before, the sudden pump was also manipulated.

Exchanges have small volumes, so any big money makes some difference.

I also expected the price to keep going up after 12k, which would end the recovery phase and bring the price back to the previous ATH by the end of this year.
When I saw the manipulated fall, I turned pessimist, to avoid more surprises.

I think no fall was manipulated, it's just the power of the whales and we have adapted with that.
When a group of whales doing mass selling their bitcoin, the market will shaking for sure and they made people panic and then buy their btc again in dip.
This is already a natural law for crypto that who has big amount of btc can control market movement

I know a LOT of these so called "whales". I posted this in another myopic thread about why and how BTC did this and did that. As I predicted my insight was ignored. It will be ignored here as well. "The only thing people hate more than poetry is the truth". If this helps ONE person understand the truth and stop getting manipulated with the rest of the sheep, I'll be happy. All the sheep in that thread ignored this. I speak from over 30 years of experience on the "inside".


"Just an observation based on 30 + years of being a mortgage backed and Treasuries derivatives trader. Right now BTC is a very non liquid vehicle. It is traded by and followed by a lot of very inexperienced investors and speculators. OP is spot on, except left out the most important piece of his conclusion. The media and social media guppies are extremely gullible and easy to fool and manipulate. We as large institutional traders find so much easy money in  the manipulation of the crypto space namely BTC. The majority of people with money in these assets read, and listen to, and react to this utter "bullcrap" put out there in the media. Most of those stories are deliberate "plants". We call it "Astro Turfing". Large speculators create a very negative fundamental story at or near low points that causes people to sell their holdings and amateur speculators to place shorts in the protocol. All the while we are accumulating massive long positions. The exact opposite is done at the highs. Traders have been establishing short positions in BTC since $ 13,500 ish on down to $9,000.00. It is extremely difficult to buy these shorts back in such large volume let alone establish the opposite long position with the low liquidity. So...we create a narrative by planting stories and postings and Social Media entries etc etc. Then the ducks come quaking. So, we feed them. The same exercise is done in reverse for long positions. I am safe in sharing this here with all of you because truth is, no one will believe me. But, That's the beauty of it. This is done in all markets. It's just easiest in BTC right now. It's been going on in the stock market for decades. A much higher level game. Yesterday's price action was not only very predictable but "set up" as shorts covered their positions and switched to " net long" from $9,000 down to $7,400.00. You would all do well for the time being to buy weakness in the price of BTC. The process is still in play. Then when the "news" is extremely good and price is high, get out. You will be in good company."

to my understanding in any market there is a difference between "real price" and the "bottom". real price is the intrinsic value of the asset that basically indicates its real value. but the current price (which could be higher or lower than real price) is the indication of the market state.
so for example if we say real price is $10 then it can go to $9 but if it does it means it has gone below the intrinsic value and should come back up. and if it goes to $11 it has gone up in a bubble and should come back down.

in case of bitcoin at this time in my opinion $10k is the "real value" and anything below that is undervalue and needs to be corrected.

We have the same theory that the drop was manipulated but I also think that anything which results to sudden pump could also be cause of pure manipulation. Just like what happened recently when BTC pump as high as $10K or more, that's only in a single day and I'm afraid of the possibility that it will dump again. I would rather like to see a constant good price movement that so it would create a strong market and this would result to less volatility, which less risky investing in crypto.

The Hype slowly fades and I expect that to came since for sure many people are just been hyped for the Chinese government statement and provably they sold there coins since some of them earned some percentage of there bough lt coins. But I'm also sure that there's a bounce back of this since remember we have halving coming and many big whales will accumulate since they know the price would rise for that time to come.

Would you recommend getting rid of DCA strategy?
Thanks to this strategy I bought some fractions of BTC above 11k.
I was aiming for a 100% profit at least. Should I aim lower, lets say 20%?
I will not sell anything right now, because the last price I bought was above the current one.

i don't really think anybody who has been around for at least a couple of ups and downs (which usually happen every month) would have a hard time believing this! sometimes it is too obvious what is happening with the way market moves. specially during times when a price move is accompanied by mass media and social media hype. for example during the drop from $6k to $3k we read on the internet that about 5 or 6 countries have banned bitcoin (an obvious lie of course) but it proves how the FUD works.

And I though all corrections are just going downwards.
Good to see some changes in the market. Correct the price if it does fall too deep and somehow increase without even demands and buyers or any reasons at all.
But truly, how come there are more downwards correction than the vice versa.
Why is it that the price of bitcoin looks like it is too much whenever its value is getting higher?

I am a strong believer in Dollar Cost Averaging. Personally I weight purchases to be larger quantities as price moves lower. The only caveat being that your target market is in a legitimate log term bull trend. Which I also strongly believe BTC to be. But I have also used the same approach in exiting longs as the hype and fluff gets overheated. Presently in "accumulation mode" Or DCA as you put it. The view is that today's BTC is for all intents and purposes the same BTC we've had for 4-5 years now. Same scale, same lack of use cases and same slowness. It also get's very expensive and very inefficient in high volume metrics. So it's overall price band is $2,000 - $19,000. Fair Value lies somewhere in between but that is not static. I assess current fundamentals and adjust "range expectation" according to overall atmosphere. We can be reasonably sure though that it is not worth north of $15,000 and it's very cheap below $7,000 in current fundamentals. Yes this can change in a heart beat but as a general rule this approach works.

you said it yourself---this is a low volume, low liquidity market. how do you distinguish between big money moving the market by virtue of illiquidity, and manipulation?

maybe a whale sold to USD on coinbase pro over the past couple months, and panic bought when he saw the market moving into the $8000s again, then the rest of the market followed. is that manipulation? or just a lot of panic buying into thin order books?

It's not going to go up that fast, mainly so because of how we're facing significant declines during the december month. I expect a wave up, which I'll sell into mid to end november, then buy back somewhere in the first months of the new year. It's not likely that the market is going to bahave differently this time, and of course expect tax sales to happen.

People speculating on a visit of the ath of $20,000 before the end of the year will be very disappointed, and they have only themselves to blame for.

Yes, the price activity is bullish currently, but that doesn't imply that we're going to break through the $14,000 level just yet. Open up the carts and look at where this year's bull run peaked out. You'll see that it respected the highest monthly close in the history of Bitcoin. We'll need more than a few months to chew through the selling around that level.

Manipulated says to me something like fraud or corruption, possibly undisclosed fractional reserves which might be ok in FIAT but would be news on markets here.    I dont think it was any of those things, somebody(s) who had Bitcoin to sell put it into the market and it caused others to sell also.    It might also be some who sold at the start of the move then made the move to buy back what they had sold for the now lower price, this kind of activity would be normal.  Bitcoin would fit in with just about every other market if thats what caused the moves because people are always trying to remove weak hands from the market.  Its the fault of the speculators if they either cannot hold because they were on leverage and a small deposit or they choose to have a tight stop loss on position, this is playground stuff and games happen in open free markets.
   I wont be that surprised if people keep selling off on price near 10k, but they are taking a risk there because 10k by itself isnt important.   Risk vs profit sounds just fair trade, we have to let people decide prices however suits them best.    BTC is really difficult compared to FOREX or many markets because it doesn't pause for the night or weekends but possibly that gives it an extra and advantage over the conventional market price systems.

I keep thinking maybe its not Bitcoin which is the manipulated one, perhaps we now live in a time of volatility but they delivered so many sleeping pills to dollar based markets to keep things calm nobody notices but we see the jumps and drops on the front line right here.

Whales, manipulation, social media FUDs seem the main reason for bitcoin's extreme volatility.
It can't reach a higher market capitalization as long as people don't recognize the fundamental technology of bitcoin being an alternative online payment without any government interference.
Bitcoin as an object of manipulation by whales and traders, in this case, the real price of bitcoin should be measured based on mining costs efficiency, which is above $7500 nowadays.

I couldn't agree more. A bit of a rudderless boat for now. So for me the near term probability is as you say. But, if we're talking about a 5 year horizon, I'm confident that we will look back on these levels and shake our heads.Seems analogous to early internet development. Truth be told, there are developers, coders and people dedicated to the transactional side of this amazing protocol, that don't look at or care about the price. It is their contributions that will drive it to much higher levels. BTC WILL change and it will be for the better. It's the real deal.

you never know. december 2011, 2016, and 2017 were very bullish months. q1 2013 and 2017 uptrended pretty hard as well.

i think we were all pretty surprised by the way the market ripped through $6k and $10k earlier this year. maybe something like that could happen again. i'm not expecting it but i'm also keeping an open mind.

Yes, almost every year the last month's of the year turns bullish. To what extent this is going to make change in the market can be known based on the growth carried forward to the falling year. This year there is more chances for the growth to take place by the end month and carried to 2020 as it is a big year for bitcoin due to the halving.

From an institutional trading perspective, we are looking at the halving as providing 2 significant opportunities. 1) As we are currently in accumulation mode, ( buying significant lots of BTC on any exaggerated weakness ) with the expectation of some type of " Pre-Halving Rally '. We do not expect this rally to be overly powerful. Hopefully above $10,000.00 to $12,000.00. 2) Between 10k-12k longs will be liquidated and between 12k and 14k shorts will be established. Likely the "Pre-halving" rally will catch many BTC buyers/holders off-guard as they expect too much from it. Just like LTC, they will liquidate on weakness, Miners will sell massive positions to pay their expenses and many poorly managed mining farms will submarine. Difficulty will plunge. THEN will be the opportunity of a lifetime.

Caveat Emptor; This prognostication is based on current fundamentals and metrics. Like the previous poster stated. This could change. If there is a breakthrough in Lightning Network or use cases, ie; Amazon accepts BTC as a means of payment, then we will adjust. For now though...this is the plan.

If we accept that theory about price and market manipulation I would really like to know who has such power to manipulate the price. And don't say that whales did that.
Also, if Bitcoin base is decentralization, independency and freedom how come that the price is manipulated all the time? Then there is really no big difference compared to fiat.

I will offer this. I believe the "manipulation" mantra is over exaggerated. It's just that when fundamentals are neutral to stagnant, and the asset is iliquid, it lends itself to short term movement within certain ranges. BTC is in exactly that scenario now. Add to that the fact that there is so much bad information out there and things can be circulated without any vetting or verification. We live in a society where far too many people believe everything they read on the computer or hear in the news and believe it. Most of it is complete garbage. It becomes easier to "Astro Turf " the playing field and create False information, buzz and fear. Large institutional money recognizes this and takes full advantage of it. Of course. Once BTC catches more use cases, rapid growth and larger user base, this becomes increasingly more difficult. IMHO.

I have always said it, $10k is the real price of bitcoin for the longest time, we are not ready for anything above just yet and we are not really liking the price when it falls. Anytime bitcoin goes under $10k there are people who start to accumulate and buy more, anytime it goes up there are people who sell and get out of the market (or at least wait until it falls) so right now 10kish prices are the real prices, sure $9k works but $11k works too, what I mean is anything under $8k (really below 8000 not 8300 or whatever those still work) and anything over $12k, those prices are risky for now which is why I feel like $10k works best.

Only recently we have seen under $8k and we have seen people go crazy when it went under $8k, we bought so much that price went back to over $9k.

There are a lot of questions here from this one. Why and who would manipulate the price of Bitcoin to drop? Not to sound crazy... But could it be a government trying to push people out of BTC and ruin the markets?

I've always thought that if Bitcoin was ever to hit below 3k again, we'd be fucked, I reckon a lot of people would pull out and completely give up on it (except the enthusiastic one).

Prices are stable again. 10k BTC is where it's at!

You mean let's forget China huge population and their Chinese President Xi JinPing who has comment that their country should "seize the opportunity" of bitcoin's blockchain technology because his call was just a drama in order for the market to be manipulated? China is known supporter of Bitcoin its just seem that they just want to control it in the past years but failed but now if you will not appreciate them as the reason of behind bitcoin's sudden rally because you believe that later on they will dump it then its up to you because every body is entitled to their own opinion.

No, It's not gonna happen, either btc will hit $3k or below again or people walking away from crypto market. Either of the both won't gonna happen. Let's say the price of btc is back down again at $3k I dont think people would turn their back away from accumulating more btc. People today is becoming smarter learning from their past mistakes. Btc wont just easily die, not atleast all of the pieces are mined or it might become stable. We never know.