Bitcoin Forum

A week or two ago when Bitcoin went up to the $3 mark, many here said it was "artificially caused" by the massive "fake" bid wall of "the manipulator." Well, that bid wall wasn't fake - it was filled.

But here we are at $3 again... so what's the excuse this time?

Sheer market destruction, to $1 we go.  RUN for your life!

:) who knows

This is the most genuine a climb as I've seen...

The manipulator ate up all of the "real" sells when the "artifical" bidwall got sold through. This "artificially" depleted the appetite for selling allowing the new buyers to move there bids up because of the lull in sells caused by the manipulator's 45k bidwall getting eaten.

Another way to put it is that there was over 100k USD dangling just outside the bitcoin economy. Someone reached out and pulled that money in, so now the market is worth 100k more.

The calm before the storm hits next weekend... perhaps the weekend after that. I'm inclined to think that those holding and waiting for the price to increase are going to do their monthly cash out a little earlier than in November, just in time for the holiday break.

Yikes there's going to be a storm!? This coming weekend or next? What price will it go to?

All the dollars of the big buywall are bitcoins now - or in other words someone must hold or accept tough losses!

About the next movements I am as puzzeled as the next guy. I currently hold only very limited coins and wouldn't
be too surprised if we see a little drop back to 2.85. At then I will buy again.

yes I agree the last climbs seemed really really genuine.

If there still is a manipulator out there he is either in sleep mode or has learned to not have obvious steep walls.

@Dan the man:  I like this explanation

Basic question is the economic situation of the bitcoin users: Do they have enough cash to hold their bitcoins or must they eat it?
Or do they believe to know better investments and it is only about money then share your thoughts  ;D

This isn't quite true... the dollars and bitcoins existed prior, they just switched hands. Group A had dollars, Group B had bitcoins, and now the groups are different, but the same money exists.

Yes the money has changed hands and it per se not destroyed or anything like it.

What I think is that the big buywall of 65k that changed hands could not be reconverted to same value at current marketdepth
without realizing a loss.

It just looks like there's a big sell off around the middle of the month on a pretty regular basis. People are suggesting that the manipulator had all his fake ask walls bought up, but I'm not so sure. I'd say it's entirely possible that *a* manipulator (e.g. there's more than one) bought a bunch of BTC from some other manipulator, at around... what was it, $2.80, give or take? So if price climbs up to $3.15 with a sufficiently large number of buyers, they could cash out and make a nice little 10% profit off their move. Even more likely is that there was a lot of BTC purchased below $2.40 last month, so for those who purchased they could make close to a 50% increase.

Note that I'm not bearish or bullish really; it appears after the bubble and correction that we're going to hang out in the $2 to $3 range (or $2 to $3.50) for a while, waiting for the next big bubble. In the meantime, we'll bounce around in that range quite a bit, month to month. Or maybe not, but I'm not betting we're ready for a slow steady climb just yet. Guess we'll see how our bets play out in the next few weeks, and Dan can update his "wrong and right" thread. :-)

The amount of fortune teller in this section is off the wall.

I would have never imagined where they hang out.

 ;D

Hey, it's called "speculation" for a reason. Maybe we should have a sub-subforum called "prognostications" though? LOL

Someone fiddled around, took some cash, but in the end sold a lot of bitcoins.

It took a while for the economy to "digest" these bitcoins and bring it back to the real value of $3. Fortunately I see this as a re-stabilization of the currency, which makes it more suitable for merchants. As a merchant myself I don't like having to check what mtgox says all the time (I am geeky and set up a script, but still...). I would rather just be able to say, ok, take $ and divide by 3, and that should be good for a long time.

When the "manipulator" dumped a lot of bitcoins, a lot of people nibbled them up. This is good because the more spread out bitcoins are in people's hands the more stable they become (barring any panic or mania). When all of the early adopters cash out we shouldn't have any more single actor swings.

Then maybe all the speculators can go home and we can have a nice boring currency that is free from outside interference. MtGox will close its doors, and I can go in any fast food joint in the world, swipe my phone and get a burger.

I have big, yet humble dreams

robkohr: uhm, no offense, but I think you got it wrong.

Speculators stabilize the price! If they all go home, it will start swinging again, possibly very much! the stabilization has not been working perfectly because everything is new and the initial distribution of coins was not exactly natural.

Imagine someone buying in with 1M USD in a hurry, for whatever reason. You better have speculators ready to dampen the spike, or you, as a merchant, will have a lot of "fun" trying to do your work normally. The same goes for an early adopter cashing out; without speculators, the price would have been hammered far below 1 USD on that 300k BTC volume day.

BTW, it's strange tactics to go onto a speculation forum and state that speculators are useless. ;)

It was a homework assignment.

There's nothing fake about it.  Someone's using a very real bid wall to artificially shove the market around.  The motive is still unclear.

The 10,000btc 'selling' wall at $3.05 seems to be his next move. Someone wants to force the price down. If it could move naturally above this it already would have reached 3.10 at least. All the upward pressure is just bouncing off the wall.
It's a good time to sell at $3.02/$3.03 though.
Someone needs to put a big bidding wall at $2.90 and we may see some stability for a while

Edit - or maybe it's just someone waiting for the big player to come in and buy their bitcoins

Maybe it's the guy who unintentionally bought 45000 bitcoins trying to get rid of a few at a profit.

I think someone is manipulating the manipulator

In any event I feel it's just a matter of time when we can say goodbye to prices below $3. Maybe this month, maybe the next, but that time is coming. My tip for people who are waiting for the price to go to the mid $2 area again, don't wait too long.

It's an odd thing to do with the price clearly moving up - he can't want the price to move too low as he has at least 10,000btc that presumably he want's to make a tidy profit on. Perhaps he's just buying up as many bitcoins below $3.05 before he removes the 'wall' (can you even have a selling wall? - seems bizarre to me)

I like how many market specialists are on this forum. And when price goes in different direction than they expected, they are speaking about "manipulator". Just because they cannot understand that market will do whatever it want, not what they think it should.

It's still interesting to watch though - there is a notion that somehow bitcoin is the people's currency. But actually it's controlled by whoever has the most money (just like everything else)

Yes, of course. Bitcoin is pure capitalism. Money vote.

If you ask me, it's someone who wants out before it crashes again.  I just wonder if its someone who wants out, or if they are selling to rebuy later. 

BadBear, I think so, too. Somebody crashed the market because was affraid of market crash.

the motive is one thing that is pretty clear to me: get rich quick

could you post one of your order book history graphics again? maybe some explanations too, they are kinda had to read.

That's not certain.  It could be some millionaire who wants to stabilize value to bolster confidence in the currency.

Even if you assume it's to get rich quick, "How" is the big question.  The strategy isn't obvious to me.


Sure, here's most of November, 30m resolution from $1.00-$4.00, ticks every $0.50:

https://i.imgur.com/H26FQ.png (http://imgur.com/H26FQ)

I don't have time to analyze it, but let me know if you want any detail charts.

Unfortunately MtGox screwed their SSL cert when the big clock ran out and my script quit getting data.  So I don't have anything for December yet.  It's fixed now, but if anyone else happens to have a copy of the data from 12/1 through 12/7 I'll import it and make some charts.

Bid 2.25 5799.83
Bid 2.3 3963.66
Bid 2.35 1568.29
Bid 2.4 5524.51
Bid 2.45 1715.29
Bid 2.5 13825.13
Bid 2.55 10921.5
Bid 2.6 7953.12
Bid 2.65 9357.33
Bid 2.7 5274.7
Bid 2.75 3038.33
Bid 2.8 4581.92
Bid 2.85 3018.22
Bid 2.9 4825.08
Bid 2.95 4761.29


Guys, manipulator is still in. This is the basic bid walls the manipulator uses without his massive bid wall. I think he knows that putting a massive bid wall just allows someone who wants to dump coins use it as an opportunity to dump them without pushing the market down that much.

You can see that he usually puts about 4,000 to 5,000 bitcoin mini bidwalls when trying to push up the price.

When the manipulator pulls out, the bid walls are usually like 300-1000 in size. I had many posts showing exactly when the manipulator pulls out, and how it looks before and after.

Please look at my post here some months back before the manipulator went into the market. Look how weak demand is.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47185.msg578698#msg578698

Bid 2.3  290.33
Bid 2.35 767.66
Bid 2.4  371.09
Bid 2.45 92.54
Bid 2.5  4134.71
Bid 2.55 455.03
Bid 2.6  564.83
Bid 2.65 2143.07
Bid 2.7  1357.9
Bid 2.75 1758.15
Bid 2.8  2524.34
Bid 2.85 135.71
Bid 2.9  858.04
Bid 2.95 104.64
Bid 3  8770.97
 

I think the bid/ask wall activity is by a well-funded (and heavy-handed, with big balls) aggressive type of market maker (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker).  Having a large portion of the funds in a market doesn't make one a manipulator.  Bid activity may be automated, that is fine.  Its still real.

Wash trading (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_trade), on the other hand, is manipulation.

I don't do that.

thanks for the chart.

It could be a group of very early adopters. Stabilize bitcoin and get rich goes hand in hand for them.

Strategy? From looking at the chart it might work like this:

1) slowly and secretly buy coins
2) put in very visible big bid wall
3) wait for price to rise because of bid wall
4) sell previously bought coins
5) take away bid wall
(4 & 5 make price drop)
repeat

This is overstating it. With a lot of coins/dollars, one can push the market for a moment, yes. But even more than for others, there's no easy way out for someone moving a lot of funds, and a wrong decision will be extremely expensive.

That's why I like Bitcoin. It's controlled by nobody; one can only try to act in a sane way. There's no magical loophole for rich people such as bribing officials or using special laws with difficult requirements.

So, I strongly disagree. Bitcoin is NOT just like everything else.

guys, I'm no trading genius, but if there is a "manipulator" that makes moves that are so obvious, how come nobody takes advantage of it and piggy backs the "manipulator"?

I think some of us [raises hand] are trying to do just that, but it takes patience. You can't really be a day trader and piggy back the manipulator.

The moves we see aren't straightforward profit strategies.  He may be:

a) making counter-moves that we can't see (small but frequent sales, or quick sniping of others' large limit orders);
b) playing a long game, building up market sentiment until he can sell off hard into it;
c) playing a long game, building up public trust in Bitcoin until he can achieve his real goals elsewhere;
d) speculating;
e) an idiot;
f) several or all of the above.

Market-making, arbitrage, technical trading, etc, all still work fine regardless of what he's up to.  The only group that has a stake in what he's doing are the speculators, which is why this is on the Speculation board.  If they can figure out his motive or strategy for the moves in (a), they can make money by leading.  If he's smart and greedy (a + b), he can make lots of obvious moves now to train them, then subtly change strategies right when they think they have it figured out and take their money.  If he's smart and altruistic (a + c), they can make some money while furthering his goals.  If they bet on (d), they only make money if they're right AND he's right; it's better to speculate based on your own research.  If it's (e), everyone loses.

Following blindly without understanding the strategy and knowing how to make the less obvious moves will just make you (d + e).

I've seen a) performed by his/a bot.  There was a constant bid of 147BTC appearing and disappearing at a regular interval.  The bot throws it up to trigger other bots or people to sell into it and immediately pulls out.

Somebody just snatched up all the coins at $3.

Saw it live! ;D
Time to take a ride on the space elevator.

I don't know about that.  It is fun to watch large (or large-ish) transactions.

WE GOING UP GENTLEMEN!  ;D

Not without a fight, it looks like.

Dom't be so impatient. After a bust, there is usually a phase of doubt and uncertainty before things go on. Let some time pass, and move slowly for now. I think the "sell-off, counter rally" rhythm is being purged currently. That was pretty strong, so give the market a moment to reorganise.

people do not seem to be listening  ;) :P

The longer I watch, the more it looks like (b).

He's basically catching all the pullbacks and letting the rallies run.  Right now he's basically out, just letting the current bout of optimism run its course; expect to see a big wall appear and catch any major corrections, but for the moment there's enough real depth to keep things afloat on their own.

So where we stand today:  First order technicals look great; fundamentals are still crap.  He's getting what he wants: Welcome to bubble 2.0.

Sell 'em if you got 'em.