Bitcoin Forum

http://blockchained.com/stuff/bid_wall_2b.png

the red doodle marks where I noticed the 20k btc askwall

now somebody bought ~10k btc 11 hours later

I don't see anywhere a 10K volume spike.

By the way - a propos 'the manipulator' - I also have, a somehow smaller, but still visible, ask wall and I certainly will move it up if the price slowly get's close to it.  I follow a simple volatility reducing strategy.  Does that make me 'the manipulator'?  What really makes a player 'the manipulator' and how many 'the manipulators' can be there?

When I see "the manipulator", I think of the Erbie Monster that supposed lived in the lake at my boy scout camp.  He was a boogeyman, the bad guy in all the stories, and as we got older, we started blaming him for missing socks, too.

Noooo! Price is going down.  Below $3.  I hope someone steps in and saves us from these massive sells!

Or not.

the 10k were not a spike but increased volume for a longer period... the dark green price chart at the bottom of the image.

agreed, manipulator may not be the best name. big player?

still, I consider walls of multiple 10k btc impressive. even if they are pulled out / moved once they get hit they sure can drive market momentum


now there is quite a spike and the askwall is gone. luckily someone caught the drop. did the wall just switch sides?

damn, I need to implement an order book graph for my site

I just take screenshots a few times a day, but an animation of the change in

And speaking of order books, the bid side on Mt.Gox has been getting significantly deeper the past 2-3 days, and is now at 118,000 btc for $2.53. Is this real demand, or is this The Manipulator getting more subtle manipulation by placing lots of smaller bids?

I've been doing the same thing with the depth charts on bitcoincharts (saving the chart image a few times a day).  After a few weeks I hope to make a gif of all the images just to get a idea of how the order book ebs and flows.  It'd be nice if there was a slick looking historic depth chart.  

Yes, the bid volume is getting quite high.  Down to $1.50 there are as many bitcoins demanded as there are up for sale on the whole ask side of the order book right now.  This is stating the obvious, but soon either somebody is going to kickstart things by liquidating a large position, or somebody is going to induce a relatively large step up (possibly up to ~$4.00).

I remain bearish overall, but I think the odds are in favor or the latter over the former.  If for no other reason that the past few large liquidations haven't induced further downward movement, and instead the price has either gone up after them or remained relatively stable.  I take that as a sign of stronger buying pressure for the time being.  It's only a matter of time before somebody with enough money thinking the same thing decides to grab what they believe is low hanging fruit.

proudhon bullish!  A Christmas miracle!

Now, now.  Only for the short term.  And I still think there's a good chance somebody with a lot of bitcoins will rather decide they want cash instead, and there's plenty of it right now.

History repeats (http://i1.imageban.ru/out/2011/12/16/ca14a2df2537d61e2887e1b071cfc247.jpg) itself ...Magic triangle ... Who wants to down - it's time to "kick the bucket with water," Look (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54704.0)
no ... we all still down ..... :-( I do not see any manipulator action

Sorry, I don't understand.

I'm honestly quite surprised at how much selling is going on right now considering how large the bid volume has grown over the past few days.

I guess many people thought that the second triangle will be broken up too ..

Great to hear you making sense again  ;D


There are suckers born every day.

There's a risk that a big player is jacking up bid orders, and will clear out all bids down to $3.10 or $3.00 yet again.  Since they might not have withdrawn the cash from Mt. Gox since the last clean-out, they could have a lot of cash there to prop up the bid side.

Even so... still damn impressive to see 50k btc/$154k USD needed to drop the price back to $3.00.  The entire order book was 50k btc as little as two months ago.

Remember back when bid orders were always fake, and sell orders were always real?  It seems to have reversed now.

nice build up, better pull my shorts

$4 by Christmas, anyone?

Could have also been people closing their shorts.  Much of the selling yesterday seemed like bot selling, with identical amounts being sold every 30 seconds.  I saw a sell order for 2.28131148 happen dozens of times yesterday.  Might this be bitcoinica?

I think there's a good chance that will happen.  As I said earlier, I think there's just as good a chance at it going the other direction, at least for a time. I think it's going to come down to which big player makes the first move.  That's pretty obvious, though.  

It'll be fun to watch, as I'm sure there'll be a lot of activity from a few big players once things get going one way or another.  What's funny is that in other markets the amount of money that moves around here on heavy volume days is laughably tiny.  If the bitcoin exchange market were ever to see several well funded individuals or groups competing the price could get out of control very quickly.  Of course, I think the odds of that happening are tiny.

This is starting to look huge.... I don't think I've ever seen 120k bitcoins on the bid side on mtgoxlive!  The ask side looks flat compared to that giant wave.

edit: Comparison of the depths:
20k BTC to 3.38, 20k BTC to 3.10
20k more to 3.75, 20k more to 3.00

Didn't we have a huge bid wall sitting there right before the last "crash" to $2?

No... we had a small bid wall, I think it was only 10k BTC.
We DEFINITELY didn't have this massive depth at any point in Bitcoin's history, I think.  120k BTC visible on mtgoxlive is a record, at least for me.

Nope, this is what it looked like on Nov. 13th right before the crash from $3 to $2:
https://i.imgur.com/Z6VzT.png

Then during the crash, someone instantly and dramatically popped up a huge bidwall at one point:
https://i.imgur.com/2Y65X.png
So yeah, one big player has a lot of cash, and all the bids could be the same big player subtlely building up the bid orders.  I don't think that's the case, but I wouldn't doubt that half the bid orders is this same big player.

wow... see, people, there is definitely a single Manipulator (or a group of people under one leader, acting together)

...
Do you deny that there is a person with deep pockets playing the market?
Do you deny that his moves cause volatility?
Do you deny that the volatility his moves cause is not limited to only his initial sell/buy?
Do you deny that, potentially, this could make money for the Manipulator?

We may have never seen 120k bitcoins demanded, but we've definitely seen more money on the bid side of things.  When the price was higher just a couple months ago there was a period of time when the bids outnumbered the asks by a lot and there was something like $700,000 of visible bid orders on MtGoxLive.  Versus ~$350,000 visible bid orders on MtGoxLive right now.

Yeah.. we've definitely seen some decisive moves in the opposite direction to that which would be intuitively predicted by looking at the bid/ask curves.
While I'd take a punt that the current bid dominance will provide a little upwards movement in the next few weeks, I wouldn't bet big on it.

...And this is why we talk about the manipulator :)