Bitcoin Forum

I have been holding and waiting for a good opportunity to buy more BTC, but recently started to realize that the value of BTC might not necessarily rise like it did last year.  The value does not have to go very high for "whales" to make money.  They just need to get in and out at the right time.

So is it just me or does it seem like the recent swings in BTC price are being controlled so that people can still make money while keeping the value down?

You mean controlled by large bitcoin holders? (Those with a large bitcoin balance)

Yeah by people why know they can make a quick profit by pumping and dumping, and are not concerned with the price rising to new highs

It is very possible that this is happening... Is there any way to track the transactions to see if there are people doing this?

i'm pretty sure whales would be more than happy to have the prices even higher.

Also, the bitcoin price is following the longterm trend like a charm, so what are you even talking about?

yes it matters, unless they don't care about losing money.  I have never met someone who doesn't care of the value of their investment.

Whales can influence the market with large buys or dumps and also buy/sell walls. They might get some insider info from exchanges too.

They could just be squeezing the last bit of profit from their investments.

Whales can be more like hedge funds as well, not only ordinary 'buy that thing' investment funds.
Hedge funds can make money by shorting on downtrends freely, so they may or may not care, according to their strategy.

My opinion:
When a stock rises and you can manipulate it you can make a lot of little profits on the way up by forcing it to collapse by selling.
Buy walls, sell walls forcing the market to become volatile and predictable for the whale manipulating is.
This way a whale can make multiple times the money on a rising market.
When we get to da moon the whale will be on mars :D

I am sure that the Bitcoin whales would rather the market expanded, but since it is declining and liquidity is draining away from the market, obviously many whale entities are going to continue to excerise their market clout to extract as much fiat from the declining market as possible, and that means pump n dump.

Couldnt they make more money in the long run if the price of bitcoin continued to rise? They could pump and dump as much as they want even if the price sits at $1000/BTC right?

Yes indeed. But for Bitcoin to get up to $1000, there has to be enough buying pressure in the market to soak up all the Bitcoins that are for sale between this price and $1000. Where is the interest in Bitcoin going to come from? Is a whale going to use his wealth to ramp the price up to $1000 being lumbered with all those expensive coins only for the organic market forces to bid spot price right back down leaving the whale seriously underwater?

Whales will try and pump the price as high as is required in order to maximise their profits. Selling at a high as possible price is how the best profits are made.

Couldnt the bitcoin price being driven up also put more buyers in the market for BTC?

of course it does. Lower btc price allows them to buy them in at a cheap

Depends. ... if they are holding it .... like the winklevoss brothers.

Yes, but clearly only up to a point. Obviously there are limits to how high a price can be driven before a saturation point is met.

How high do you think the saturation point is for bitcoin?

With all factors taken into consideration (demand, supply, hoarding, fake volume, pumping, dumping, hacking,):

It was $1200.

It is currently $496.

In the future it will trend much lower until or unless some kind of X-Factor has kicked in and takes it to the next level.

The two most recent Bitcoin bubbles have all involved it being used as a medium for capital flight. I expect more of the same at some point down the line. Exactly when, I couldn't possibly say.

Do you believe bitcoin will ever reach $10,000+ per?

You should probably know that mat is not the best person to ask for advice. He had single digit coins, snorted them up his nose through the silk road and didn't buy in till 700 or something like that. He is also a self-admitted shit trader and claims no longer to care about bitcoin.

of course the value matters because at the end of the day even a lot of wealthy people feel poor.  The increases and decreases in prices just carry less weight as btc holdings substantiate a smaller and smaller percentage of overall net worth...

What does your signature say Ibian?

"there is no bubble"

Did you have that signature when Bitcoin was at $1200?

A) yes he did.

Would you have advised a newcomer to be buying in all the way down from $1200

A) yes he would.

Would a new-comer to Bitcomer to Bitcoin therefore be seriously underwater had he listened to your advice anytime in the past 5 months?

A) yes they would.

And what about newcomers who listened to me when I told them not to buy in at $800, $700, $600 $500? They would still have their heads well above water right?

A) Ask bitcoinsrus who was practically commanded to buy 'cheap' coins @$820 by a big pile of Bitcoin Nutters on here only for me to stress firmly that he shouldn't.

Yeah...i am a shiote trader. I have even been stating that Bitcoin was overdue a counter trend rally up to $540 (check my post history) for quite some time yet still manage to get wiped out chasing a missed short opportunity. Nobody should ever copy my trades, not ever..... Being a good trader is 85% to do with being the right personality type and that type just isn't me...........But my ability to call a general trend has been pretty good up until now. Given enough time and even my last ever short trade would have come good...if I hadn't exited it with a 50% loss.....if it wouldn't have been 100% liquidised due to Bitcoin going 35 cents beyond it's liquidisation price at the very top of the price spike.

Sorry Ibian old bean, but $200 range it will be. Bitcoin takes these near vertical counter trend price spikes, rises 40% within a few days and then we find time and time again that there is no demand for Bitcoin at these levels cos the only real demand for Bitcoin is speculative demand. If people can't make money from it then they don't buy it and start selling it. Perhaps you should sell yours? After all, how fucking stupid would you feel if you are still holding in $200 range when you could have sold in $1100 range? That would constitute a massive loss in my books no matter what price I bought those coins at.

But dont you care at all about bitcoins advancement as a currency? Or are you purely an investor/trader?

I used to and even invested £500 once in Bitcoin way back in 2011. Without caring if I lost the money (a small amount compared to what I was piling into gold n silver at the time) but just doing it to provide the market with liquidity and 'support' the cause. Unfortunately for me, all those coins ended up on Silk Road, as did countless other single digit coins. I never bought my first speculative BTC until late Nov 2013....not entirely out of stupidity as I work offshore for weeks at a time and often can't participate in obvious bull runs etc.

These days I take a much more cynical view of Bitcoin. I suspect that Bitcoin was created by the NSA and intended as a means of facilitating capital flight out of lesser nation's economies. Even if I am wrong and the received wisdom of Bitcoin being created by a lone libertarian cyber-anarchist is correct, Bitcoin has turned into a great big blood thirsty andd highly manipulated cut throat market that wants to feast on your hard earned fiat.

So no, I don't 'care' about Bitcoin or it's development as a unit of exchange. It is a market like any other in which an individual may enrich himself, or impoverish himself. Right now, the odds are stacked far higher on investors losing money. That is the nature of bear markets where liquidity is leaving the market as opposed to bull markets where liquidity is pouring in, and Bitcoin is just as vicious in its retreat as it was voracious in its advance.

Well i guess you have your reasons...But Do you think, realistically, that bitcoin will ever succeed as a currency? (Not caring if it does, just thinking if it will)

No.

But I think it will have it's moment in the sun as a means of emergency capital flight and will burn much more brightly than it ever did before. Saying exactly when or how this will happen though is more a geo-political area than a financial or technical area.

Ultimately I think Bitcoin will implode taking billions of wealth with it. Until then it will have it's 'uses' and will continue to enrich some people and impoverish others. With that said, I do think that crypto currency is here to stay but that none of the present applicants need reapply. Think of the early days of the internet (since it was before you were born you may struggle with that). Today we have Google and Facebook who are undeniably the two most prominent and instantly recognisable internet brands. In the early days, neither of those two even existed. Both of these took concepts that were already firmly established (search engines and social networking), but just done them a whole lot better. Same thing is bound to happen in crypto currencies.

Nope, very bad analogy, shows that you still don't understand what bitcoin is. Today we have tcp/ip, just as we had it back in 1990. Supporting network of tcp/ip communicating devices have grown tremendously since then, but the protocol is still the same. Google and Facebook are just some of the currently popular applications on top of that. Will there be a whole application layer on top of bitcoin network? Absolutely. Does it mean bitcoin network will be thrown away? Not faster than ipv4, which is being replaced with ipv6 for 20 years now. Any change that requires replacing hardware infrastructure worldwide is hard and is done only out of absolute necessity. I don't see such a necessity with bitcoin (yet?).

I don't need to understand 'what Bitcoin is' to know that any kind of technology, or utilisation of technology is always liable to be improved upon with early versions of things nearly always becoming redundant due to improvements in newer upgraded versions of a technology and/or the original technology running into unforseeable problems.

Failing for some X-Factor involving emergency capital flight, Bitcoin is going to $200 range. No doubt it will spike down here strongly and rebound back again to test the long term down trend as we have seen many times before. If demand for Bitcoin fails to take it over and beyond the long term down trend as currently seems to be the case once again at $540, then who is to say at what price level Bitcoin must trend or crash down to before organic demand picks up again. Now, without knowing a whole lot about it, I have read that the average cost of mining 1 BTC is somewhere around $300. If Bitcoin spends any length of time beneath this price level then the miners must surely start to switch of their rigs in droves, and with that down goes a great chunk of the Bitcoin network. Unless I am missing something, the whole system could come to a painstaking grinding halt and such a situation would spell out the need for a serious reappraisal of the way in which the Bitcoin system is structured and would have even the most hard bitten of Bitcoin investors cashing out in droves.

If I were a bankster wanting to destroy Bitcoin, I would make sure that exactly this happened. I could do this, and I could profit from doing it.

If I were a bankster wanting my establishment house to take a controlling stake in Bitcoin, I could do this, I could profit in doing it, and I could scoop up a million or two of BTC at unthinkable rock bottom prices before ramping the price back up to levels where the miners could turn their rigs back on and profitably mine.

I would suggest that a great many forseeable and unforseeable obstacles lie in Bitcoin's path and there is absolutely no guarantee that they will all be overcome without the need for some kind of crypto rethink.

Your problem is that you only think short term mat. I'm a shit trader too, so I don't do it. But I am not a shit investor.

Fundamentals say that the price has to go up over the long term, and history shows the pattern it follows in doing so. Once we break into the thousands we will never go below 1200 again, which means that anything below that is cheap. It doesn't matter if it takes a month or two years before we break out of the current phase. The longer it takes the more quad-digit coins I will end up with.

I know.

The difference between me and you is that I started buying Bitcoin in the midst of a blatantly speculative bubble. Had I just bought and held with the amount of money I went in with, I would right now, be considerably deeper underwater than the entirety of what I just loss in my worst ever and very last leveraged short trade, without having taken a single penny of profit. Unlike yourself, I have had to keep on my toes and I have been rewarded for doing so, although much of that reward was dashed against rocks over the past few days.

Calling trades is easy, until you are actually using real and significant amounts of your own funds, and worse still, are leveraged up to the eyeballs. I have proven to myself that I don't have the psychology or hard mental discipline that it takes to do it and now I expect to be tormented further as Bitcoin grinds right back down to my short sell 'buy-in' in level. I shall however keep my eye on Bitcoin with an investors mentality as opposed to that of a trader. My talent is definitely in taking a simple long position and knowing when the wind is about to start blowing against me.

And I wouldn't be so confident in your quad-digit coins. For that to happen, you are relying on this bear market finally playing out and Bitcoin finally creeping out from under the weight of the long term trend line in a steady, measured, and sustainable manner, as opposed to the manic, totally unsustainable, and probably manipulated vertical break-outs that we have been seeing. Bitcoin has to do this at price level that doesn't greatly harm the functioning of the P2P network. Thereafter, you will be basically relying on Bitcoin being used once again as a form of capital flight, preferably a form of emergency capital flight as this is when the most capital will be pile into Bitcoin completely insensitive to the price level.

Bitcoin could go back to quad digits and then some, or it could collapse completely.

Dude I started buying at 135, all the way up to 1130 and all the way down to where we are. I'm currently something like 30% down. Doesn't matter, still buying whenever I have any kind of spare monopoly money. The long term is what counts. And I'm not relying on any of that stuff, the only thing I rely on is elementary mathematics: Limited supply means the price goes up as demand increases, and demand is increasing.

This is completely wrong. The cost includes mainly the hardware cost. Once you have the hardware, turning it off is the most idiotic thing a miner could do. So scratch that conclusion from your mind :) Miners might stop selling if the price goes too low because they need to get back invested dollars, that is the only thing that would happen with (theoretic) low prices. Current price of bitcoin to make asic mining not profitable electricity-wise is about 30$.

You other ideas about bankers taking control over bitcoin etc were also fun to discuss in 2010. Now, there is no such danger (try to buy one million coins at these prices, good luck), we moved to a higher level, government regulation level. Once bitcoin takes another baby step, that won't be a problem as well, because it will move to a completely distributed acquiring network by 2015.

Can't argue with your point regarding miners as I don't know enough about it.

Regarding bankers/financial pirates not taking over Bitcoin, With a market cap of around $6 Billion, Bitcoin is still very much a penny stock in the grander scheme of things. Any establishment financial house could grab as much of it as they wanted at any price that they wanted. If they were to take an interest in it however, the most likely price that they took the lino share of their stake in Bitcoin would be at a very very low price and they have both the expertise and the funds to ensure that the market was depressed low enough as to be to their liking. This sort of thing goes on in the finance world all the time. I find it amusing that you somehow think that Bitcoin is immune.

If any government really wanted to destroy Bitcoin, they could crash the price to single digits for the price of a few dozen cruise missiles.

Bitcoin is not going to 'beat the bankers'. Not ever.

you need to think as a market maker ( those guys who match buy/sell orders ... ) so, imagine that you are an exchanger and Mister Nakamoto knock your door and say I want to sell my coins ... what would you do with such big order ?

It is not immune, this is something we see now afterall, but you can not buy large quantities no matter how hard you try. There's only so much gullible people you can take coins from, and they tend to not have much. 10, 20 thousand total? Possible, but anything resembling a controlling market share would be hard and would cause a rally to new highs. See, no large holder would sell you coins at this prices where we sit now, no matter how much you scare them :) So your only option is taking it from some monkey like Karpeles.

Lesson learned! never ever ever short with leverage Bitcoin! ever!

So you are thinking that bitcoin is the universal currency created by the New World Order?

Perhaps a prototype of such a currency. A pilot scheme perhaps whose ultimate implementation is aimed towards facilitating capital flight from economies that the US dominated West are wanting to or happy to see being crushed.

Putting the tinfoil hat to one side however, what is a more likely scenario?

Bitcoin, the ingenious and uncrackable decentralised digital currency using cryptographic algorithms developed by US intelligence is invented by:

a) A team of coding and cryptographic specialists, pooled together under one roof with unlimited resources thrown at them to develop and perfect the technology over many years.
b) Some lone working Japanese American model train geek who got tired of paying international wire fees when ordering toy trains from the UK, so came up with Bitcoin in his spare time, presumably.

For me, the unquestionably more likely scenario has me reaching back for that tin foil hat.

Not to play devil's advocate or anything, but if that truly is the case, wouldn't you want to be on the right side of this then and stock up on as many BTC as possible?

Lots can happen in between A, B, and C, and nothing is a foregone conclusion. The USA thought they could sponsor a 'revolution' in Ukraine getting a pro NATO government into power who would then go about booting the Russian Navy out of Crimea thus nullifying the Russian Navy.......turns out they couldn't. Even for the most powerful things don't always go to plan. Nothing is certain with Bitcoin. For example, who is to say the price won't be depressed right back down to double digits as Wall St take their positions, or even due to the machinations, manipulation and vandalism of less high profile financial bandits?

Because it's not possible. We saw what happened with the $100 spike, it was back up in minutes. Even with satoshis stash dumped on the market it would be a matter of maybe weeks before we were back up near normal levels, and then your grand conspirators would be out of their stash. It's simply not realistic.

There is a HUGE BTC price bubble. Yes, a whale can easily manipulate BTC. All it takes is having enough money.

There is a huge pile of unfunded liabilities in the US and in the EU; the USD bubble will pop

Bitcoin is efficient to store wealth and transfer money among other things; the 6Billions USD market cap isn't that big in that regard

While this is possible, it is not very probable.  All the belief in the bitcoin protocol would have to evaporate for prices to collapse that far again.  If Wall Street Injected a big stake like you said, their injection alone would keep BTC prices above the double digits.  Once Wall Street is publicly invested in BTC it gives it much more validity in a lot of people's eyes as well.