Bitcoin Forum

Something fishy is going on right now

Thanks for the graphics  ;D

We need em decentralized exchanges...

Like this?

http://multigateway.org/

big orders placed then removed just before prices hit them is common practice trading technique. basically a fake out to fool people into thinking price will turn at those points. helps with stop loss hunting. the faker is looking to get better prices on their order.

ofc could just be someone moving their larger order price cos theyre indecisive ;p

No I'm not talking about playing with the order book. I mean centralized exchanges doing fake transactions with fake bitcoins and dollars to manipulate the market aka similiar what MT GOX was doing.

I could buy into that possibility.  I heard speculation that it might be due in part to Bitstamp trying to rebuy cheap coins to compensate for the stolen money owed?  If true, that could account for the sharp 24 hour decline, but still does not detract from the fact that it's been a half year bear market.   But certainly a possibility.

Could someone explain to me how, technically, and exchange coud manipulate the prices by putting fake orders?
I can see how to fake the volume, but the price...


Even if Bitstamp finds a way to manipulate the price on their exchnage, how would they manipulate it elsewhere?

I'm not even quite sure it's entirely possible, to be brutally honest.

But maybe the fact that they're still one of the top exchanges in terms of volume means that their own personal btc price is held in high regards by market traders.

It's almost like the mt. gox debacle...everyone was referencing their prices as one of the top exchanges, which never made sense because they were either artificially much higher or much lower than the rest (which screams manipulation).

Certainly not.
The market works both on global and local incentives. Let me take a couple of examples:

1. If an exchange has high entry and exit fees but low trading fees. There is an incentive, once you're in, to stay in and do your trading there. If the price moves on other platforms, arbitrage should happen, unless the arbitrage itself costs more in entry and exit fees than the amount of profit it can generate. That's called spread.

2. If people on an exchange lose faith in it, for example because it takes a long time to handle withdrawals, then people will tend to sell their bitcoins on that exchange and try to cash out. That would drive the price down locally, without affecting the global price. That's actually what happened with Mt. Gox, and many people not understanding this phenomenon actually went there in the hope of buying cheap bitcoins -which they did- only to find out they could not withdraw them.

Pfft
forget nxt. not even worth they hype they are trying to create

Care to develop?

Can you please elaborate? Evidence? Speculation? Theories etc? This isn't the first crash and wont be the last so I just think its bitcoin being what bitcoin is: unpredictable.

Anything of particular interest? For me, it's the same like what we saw a week ago. If you are going highlight a sudden turnaround, I'm all ears. Otherwise, if you are going to tell me there is going to be another drop, I've seen enough.

Which exchange are you talking about? I know there's a bunch of trading bots executing micro transactions on bitstamp because of the temporary no-fee trading, but other than that I don't see anything else fishy...

pretty simple actually DoM P ... like a tail wagging the dog ... these things can be transferred from exchange to exchange very easily its the nature of digital currency actually ... and all it takes is 1 broke exchange "leading" the market with software and false money and lies and all of the other traders on all other exchanges follow suit in attempt to arbitrage to make money on the "leader" exchange so lets say for a simplified example im trading on an exchange with a price of 100 and ive got fiat money on that exchange and its a "legitimate" exchange and theres another "false" exchange thats at 103 and they are manipulating the price to make it 103 by using fiat money that does not actually exist to "buy" bitcoins off of their own exchange and drive the price up artificially ... well ill buy every bitcoin i can at 100 off the legitimate exchange (and in the process drive the "real" price up) so i can sell on the false exchange offering 103 (since i as a trader dont know which is which) so now ive spent my real money on the real exchange at a price of 100 and sent my bitcoins to the exchange offering 103 and it looks like ive turned 100 into 103 (x however many btc you bought/sent) so yay but ... ultimately ive given my fiat money to the legitimate exchange in return for btc then ive sent and sold those btc to the false exchange for what appears to be a greater amount of fiat money ... and since most everyone will not attempt to cash out their fiat money from the false exchange immediately but instead hold money there to attempt to do additional trades in the future what winds up happening is this for the false exchange - you create hundreds and thousands of accounts on the fake exchange that hold hundreds or thousands of fake dollars which add up to be millions and millions of fiat dollars owed which will never be paid out (because this fiat money thats being spent on the btc does not actually exist in the first place on this false exchange) ... now if someone does want to actually cash out their fiat from the broke false exchange well no problem theyve still got some fiat flowing in from people and they can sell bitcoins on other exchanges to cover their withdrawals they dont want to happen ... then at some point they actually run out of all reserves of actual fiat money or simply reach a huge enough amount of bitcoin to call it quits , they shut down , often claiming they were hacked or had some catastrophic hardware failure , but , and this is key - they still have the thousands and thousands of btc they "bought" with the fake money they injected into their own false exchange ... this is functionally what mt gox did ... they led the market for 2 months and jacked the price from less than 100 to almost 1200 by making purchase after purchase of bitcoins with fake accounts with fake injected money and in the end they didnt give anyone their owed fiat and ran off with everyones bitcoin while simultaneously leading the real price up ... now let's say you want to do this in reverse this is also possible to do ... all you have to do is use fake btc instead of fake fiat and be the leader with the lowest price instead of the highest price ... in this case people are encouraged to send real fiat to your false exchange since you have the lowest price ... and it just works in reverse as already laid out except in this case you have to call it quits when you run out of actual btc to cover withdrawals instead of running out of actual fiat to cover withdrawals but the effect is essentially the same ... shut down with thousands of accounts holding a bunch of fake btc while running off with a real pile of fiat currency (already transferred to an offshore account) ... hope this helps explain how exchanges are able to both manipulate their internal prices and volume while also affecting the real price of bitcoin across other exchanges and in the end rob all of their customers ... btw can i have a job goldman sachs ? ? ?

I'm sorry, but that just doesn't explain anything.

Firstly, you're accusing Mt Gox to be doing stuff that they were not doing. The still ongoing investigation shows something quite different.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/police-suspect-mt-gox-bitcoin-theft-was-an-inside-job/
--> Bitcoin theft, not bitcoin scam.

Secondly, you suggest that there would be such a fake exchange today, which I bet you cannot prove.
What you describe is actually extremely hard to pull off.
People come and go, unlike what you say. In the example you give, it would required only 1 out of 33 bitcoins to be withdrawn from that exchange for it to start running on fractional reserves.
Such an exchange couldn't run a month before being discovered.

Thridly, to get this done the way you say, the volatility needs to be low. In periods like today, the volatility within an exchange can be higher that 30% a day. That would kill your idea of a scam in a minute. (Today, I saw the price on Bitstamp go from $159 to $195 in less than 10 minutes).
The 3 little percents you were mentioning would be swept out of the way real fast. And making more of a difference would draw attention.

Fourthly, 3% isn't enough for manipulating the prices on a market with such a volatility. And wouldn't explain what is happening now.


So... Still waiting for something more believable, sorry.

I'm sure it was an inside job and it wouldn't surprise me if Karpales himself was behind it, but I still also belive fake trades were going on (again maybe this was also something to do with Mark).

I'm sure he means manipulators, which can also be exchange owners!

Dont tell me you dont see manipulation going here.....

Remember kids, fiat moves alot slower than btc. Its alot easier to manipulate market by trigger sell first

Arbitrage would balance out the other exchanges I'm sure if this were the case. Though, I am not sure this is actually going on at Bitstamp.

I doubt that. Bitstamp would be arbitraged.
For example, yesterday, Bitstamp had about 10% of the world's volume of exchange.
If it had done that, its set prices would have been swept by the volume of the other exchanges.

We can speculate as much as we want, we will probably never know, what the real reason was.

It might even be real trading going on, but I did see a corelation between times when the Chinese and Russian people sleep and when they wake up.

Lots of banning of Bitcoin websites in Russia and some talks about banning technology which use cryptography in the UK are having an affect in sentiments towards the furure of the currency in these countries.

Speculators will get jumpy when they see these type of articles in the media and it might trigger a mass panic sell.

This creates a opportunity for the real investors and the people who really know and understand the technology to buy cheaper coins and when they hoard/hodl these coins, the price will go up again.  ;D 

UK will ban bitcoin this year. Russia announced it since September 2014 that they will ban and they just did it 3 days ago. :)

If you take a look to the comments from that time, you will notice the same attitude : "it is not possible, these are BS". Well, it was possible.

Bitcoin will be banned or very strict regulations in Europe and USA very very soon. There is an ongoing investigation regarding to all the US exchangers and you will many of them facing charges... Yes, the US exchangers like CoinBase, BitPay, Kraken will be closed

It's not about panic. it is reality. I know the Bitcoin fanatics and those who are earning a lot of money from it, will say "NO, Bitcoin will survive".
Yes, it will survive as technology but not as a payment system.

What exchange website are you talking about right now and how people can make fake transaction to be honest Idon't get it
there is either Off-chain transaction (which won't show on the blockchain) or On-chain (which shows) , sending Bitcoins that dosen't exists and getting fake TX ID's is impossible. or .. they are sending their coins here and there ?  ???

Bitstamp like another 2-3 big exchangers are manipulating the market as they want. You have to blind to not see that but many of you like it. You are speculators and it is OK. You forget one thing. The average people, those who wanted to test Bitcoin, those who said"let's give it a try", already sold their Bitcoin and they will never come back.

You have to find newcomers to put money into system. Without newcomers, Bitcoin is dead. it's just a matter of time until a big exchanger like BTC China or Bifinex will start withdrawing Bitcoin to dollars; because in the end, it's just a matter of money not Bitcoin shit. :)

Then, we will see how much this Bitcoin is worthing.

SO Huobi was hacked today. Seems to be next GOX is coming ???

well, they were "hacked" via Egopay couple of days ago. They lost a lot of money there.....and it is possible that all their Bitcoin to be stolen :)

The price of BTC is ALWAYS, ALWAYS being manipulated by the big exchanges, especially BTC-E and Bitstamp!

question: where is BTC-E based? what's their phone number? :)

I know, you cannot answer because you don't know. Don't you find VERY odd that people are sending money to unknown companies?
They sent money and lost money with MT Gox which had a real office in Japan but at least they had one.

Can you imagine that BTC-e is one of the biggest Bitcoin exchangers even it is a ghost company?  ;D

These things say a lot about this market.

This means that btc-e is providing their customers with enough privacy that no one (or very few people) know where they are located so money and information cannot be seized.

People trust btc-e because they have acted honestly so far. As you pointed out just because you know the identity of the operator of an exchange does not mean that your money will be safe at the exchange.

Just because you don't know the identity of an exchange doesn't mean that they are faking their trading volume

All the exchangers are faking the transactions. No doubt about that.

What are you talking about "money and information cannot be seized" ? I hope you are joking :)
BTC-e owns a bank account and that bank account is public. Their clients are not paying them in cash :)

BTC-e owns have BIG banks accounts. They are not keeping the money under bed so they can be seized.

I would disagree with this. The exchanges have an incentive to make their markets as fair as possible so more people will trade on them which would result in more trading commissions for them

Exactly.  The SuperNET and its core coins already have decentralized exchanges and it's growing daily.  Coins like BTCD, Vericoin, NXT, and SuperNET all receive a permanent revenue stream from the transactions.  Big things are coming...

Interested to see how the launch of decentralized exchange affect the paradigm shift away from these centralized ones.

http://www.coinffeine.com/

https://bitsquare.io/

Looks like for Bitcoin and Crypto, 2015 will be the dawn of truly decntralized P2P exchanges.

Easy, take the coins from cold storage and sell them on the other exchanges, sell fake database coins on their own exchange and keep enough real coin on hand for withdrawals and hope there isn't a bank run before you buy back the cheap coins after the panic crash.

If you're accusing an exchange of wrongdoing, please name it.
Actually, I guess an exchange could do it not to manipulate the price of BTC but simply to look bigger.

correct. you have to be a child to think that the big exchangers are not related somehow and that they do not take advantage. they are a gang and there are too much money on table. they will push the limits as much as possible, they will earn a lot of money and then.... "who cares?!" :)

I have read a post here "The exchanges have an incentive to make their markets as fair as possible so more people will trade on them which would result in more trading commissions for them"

Tell that to MT Gox's victims. Remeber, MTGox was the BIGGEST exchanger ; around of 70% from market. "You" knew his face, you knew his identity, his office, bank account and "you" were scammed.

Imagine, that BTC-e (it's a random choice) has no face, no office, no identity...and you keep sending money to "them". After BTC-e will ran with your funds, you will start screaming : thief! ....even you knew from beginning what you are doing. Is it not a VERY strange community here? :)

This would rely on other people continuing to participate in any selloff that would occur as a result of this. What would happen if a panic selloff does not occur, but instead people take the massive sale as an opportunity to buy cheap coins?

All the big exchangers. Bitfinex is one of them :   https://twitter.com/DoctorBitcoin/status/557526205709037568

I see most of the discussion revolving around bitstamp. So probablt thats what the op is talking about.

Thanks for info. I certainly disapprove, but I sure understand.

I sometimes wonder if all the hacked exchanges are just an easy way to siphon some coins out and label them 'lost' while avoiding police investigations.

how do you disapprove? only with words or without using anymore a such exchanger? :)

you live in other world... I recommend you to stay away of BTC. you are just a victim for "sharks". Bitcoin is not a heaven where there are angel singing. Bitcoin is a manipulated market, controlled by exchangers.

They create the price, the so called demand and in the end, the fools will pay   :)

you will be like that:

https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mememaker.net%2Fstatic%2Fimages%2Fmemes%2F2739997.jpg&t=548&c=EsGYLFDYxmamrQ

the "exchangers and their shareholders" like that :

http://s28.postimg.org/8uuzg1vn1/download.jpg

where are these fake transactions? not doubting but would like to see them

an example can be  this : http://www.coindesk.com/chinese-bitcoin-exchange-okcoin-accused-faking-trading-data/

That's why these exchanges are launching:

https://blog.gemini.com/welcome-to-gemini/

http://blog.coinbase.com/post/109202118547/coinbase-launches-first-regulated-bitcoin-exchange

To legitimize Bitcoin exchanges, and insure against these type of overseas unregulated exchanges.