Bitcoin Forum

Has anyone calculated how much money it would take to shift the Bitcoin price with 1% in any direction? <up or down>? Can one of the Bitcoin whales comment on that?

I know you have to do this on several exchanges to have a better affect, but I am just curious. We have seen some pretty huge spikes and dumps lately and I am just curious to know what kind of money are needed to manipulate the price.

Let's just have a friendly discussion without going into too much detail and reveal how easy or difficult this is and how much it will cost to do that. < $1000 spikes in the price in one day, must take a lot of money? >

I'm trying to think of possible ways to calculate this, but I can't come up with anything. I think it hasn't only got to do with how much money you have, but also with how much influence you have in different exchanges. But how many exchanges do you have to influence to trigger a pseudo-panic, propelling people to sell? And how do you coordinate the timing? The financial aspect of this question is one thing, but I can't wrap my head around the logistics of this as well.

It might be hard if a corporation could team up with many corporation, then it would be possible they can control the price. But even so, money wont go to just one entity. Even if a country would invest in bitcoin, it is not easy for them to control the price just by mere possession of thousands of bitcoin.

we talk about small market  about 160k BTC so you need 1-3k bitcoin and can move price up/down .

it is about 10,000,000$ or 30,000,000$

A few billion US dollars for sure,but it`s not about how much money you have to put into this.The important thing is to spread rumors around the majority of the cryptocurrency traders about the future bitcoin price.
The people just have to believe that the price will hit the moon next week,and they will start buying.
Anyway,it`s not that easy to manipulate the market like 2-3 years ago.

The bitcoin market is speculative so I doubt this can ever be answered. What we know for sure is that slightly sharp drops can trigger a chain of people dumping.

It's too risky we never know how many people are going to throw their money at the Exchange.
this causes the value of Bitcoin difficult to determine. I believe there are people who do that there, manipulating the price with their money.

The logistics are the actual problem of figuring this out in any applicable way. Otherwise you'd just snag up or release 1% of the supply and get a proportional price response. Once you have to take multiple market places with different order books etc. into account things get out of hand very quickly though.

Has anybody actually worked this out in public? I'm sure some people or funds have done experiments on top of theorizing...

I bet that some banks and biggest exchanges already tried to calculate it. However bitcoin is veeery wild and young market so it's unlikely that someone got the right equation.

I see no point in trying to manipulate the price of bitcoin within 1%
Its price changes during the day by 5-10% and this is not the limit. Therefore, if you want to slightly influence, you will not be able to appreciate it.

Nowadays, you need a lot. Probably you would be spending millions of dollars just to do it without losing money. You would have to buy and sell bitcoins not only in just one exchange but in multiple ones just to move the price by yourself. It's not impossible to do, since likely there are hundreds of companies that have that much money to do so. Heck, even a medium sized bank can even buy all bitcoins right now.

I would be surprised if million dollar orders even dented the market at this point...

There's is no mathematical formula that can give answer to this question, because it always depends on Bitcoin's market depth. If you are familiar with trading, you know that order book structure looks like slopes with "walls" - so this means that it might be easy to move the price by 1%, but moving it by 20% would require much more than just 20 times the amount of moving it by 1%. But it is also more complicated than that, because orders can be cancelled at any time or the new ones can be placed instantly, and it can make it harder or easier to manipulate the price. Price manipulators often employ additional tactics like spreading FUD, false rumors, using shills and so on.

oh, you live in a world where people have 100x more money than what you wrote. It's not like one man has 1% and can manipilate, there is a need of cooperation and a lot of dirty work. Just imagine, any poor country has possibility to become 100x rich by buying and manipulating but nothing is hidden, no one gives possibility one man to do everything on his/her own, it's big and wide business.

This makes sense, but there should be some "magic" some of money that would be needed to manipulate any commodity or market, depending on it's size. A few years ago {2014} a trader called BearWhale, sold 30,000 Bitcoin all at once at a price of $300 per coin (or $9 million in total) and this halted all progress. We had to break down that wall, to progress further.

So there are some "magic" numbers to work with, if you plan to disrupt trade or to halt growth and to manipulate the Bitcoin price. ^smile^

 https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-whales-and-how-they-make-market-waves/

I think this is going to be difficult, as it will take you to operate in all the major exchange before you can achieve that. Those that has big investment in bitcoin do always come together before you see a huge dump like what happened yesterday! The whales know there game and is not as you may think that they operate. Manipulate bitcoin as you know is what is discouraged big investors to invest in bitcoin because they will find it difficult as the whales are always there to manipulating the price to their favor.

I don’t think this has anything to do with how much people are Investing into the cryptocurrency, I believe it has to do with the devs and the people in charge of the blockchain. They can set it at any price as far as investments are coming in.

Just take a look at Ethereum and BCH, that will explain everything to you. BCH has the highest price rate but a lower market cap, while Ethereum has a bigger market cap and a low price rate. The decision is made by the devs. That’s it!

That's a good question. To move the price 1% downwards: adding buy orders on exchanges (price * quantity) from the highest buy order, to the buy order 1% below current price, could yield a decent estimate. That sum averaged across whichever exchanges factor into the "current bitcoin price".

To move the price 1% upwards: it would be the inverse opposite. Adding sell orders (price * quantity) from the lowest price to 1% above the current price would yield a decent estimate.

Yes that is right that with the passage of time now it is becoming difficult to manipulate the price of bitcoin. I think it was more easy when the bitcoin users were not so much in number now now as people are entering in the world of bitcoin and they are also investing good amount of their money there. Therefore i think it is now not so easy to manipulate the price of bitcoin.

It needs to be less than that with a market cap of 184 billion dollars the 1% of that is 1.84 billion dollars, obviously if you have that you can manipulate the direction of the market up or down but in my opinion you only need a few hundred millions to create a downtrend or uptrend and after that traders and speculators will do the rest.

You need a lot of money to manipulate the price of bitcoins. Hence difficult and only billionaires just do it. Similar to BCH that Roger Ver's price is successfully pumped. He sold his bitcoins so that the BCH would increase the price so we have seen recently the rapid rise. Of course, when he earns. Surely many people will be affected.

manipulating the bitcoin market by 1% does not make sense and totally worthless at all. you cant get any incentives just by doing this kind of insane idea and you would'nt really notice if your manipulation is a succes or not due the fact that its only 1%.



lol, op is talking about 1% only and not the whole market. there's nothing difficult about it and you can still do it even if your not a millionaire.

I think you should have money equally 5% price of totally Bitcoin to manupulate Bitcoin's price 1%.

You can't move Bitcoin by 1% without several millions. The volume is way too high for that.

I think the main problem with such a case would be that it is very hard to say whether you succeeded to manipulate the price 1% or it just accidentally did it, for 1% is not a change at all. Well, let's try doing what you want. To calculate the needed money globally is definitely too hard. There are too many exchanges and some are too strong for somebody to make a difference there. So, let's choose an exchange that has a really small amount of btc and then try to count the needed money locally as well. Okay, TOPBTC seems like a good exchange for this purpose. In the pair LTC/BTC  the trading volume is roughly $1.5k. I guess if you first buy litecoins on $800 and then transfer them to this exchange and set the price to sell all of them at once for some specific price, you are likely to make the price change. So, you just need to have more than a half of trading volume in USD to do that.

Sometimes a news is enough to influence the price. And i believe there is no one to one relationship between the invested dollars and the price of the bitcoin since there is a lot of speculative action going on which is severely influencing the current price. So it is very hard to give direct answer to your question.

Sometimes you do not even need news, I have seen the price of bitcoin going down because some people began to spread FUD all over the forum and people believe it, the worst FUD is the one that is mixed with some truth, this creates confusion among investors and worst of all it creates panic as well.

I think it is impossible to find out how it works manipulating bitcoin even in one percent and i think it's need a lot of money to do the manipulation of bitcoin in a nice way.

Thus is one of the reasons why I don't like to believe in whales even though I know there would be some form of existence of their activities but to calculate how much they have to put in a lot of money but whales don't intend to effect a 1% change in price whether to increase or reduce rather higher percentage is hat matters today the price of bitcoin has increased minimum 97% over the last few months and at lease say 30% could be attributed to the whales. How much money would be needed, I don't know.

Well you could move it by 1% on a single exchange, but to move the whole market by 1% u would definitely need at least tens of millions of dollars.

I'm pretty sure you'd need at least a few billions, staggered across all major exchanges.

It seems to me that even in this case, the price may remain at the same level. There is still such a thing as demand. If the demand exceeds the offer all coins that you sell will be immediately to buy out other investors. Your investment they can easily compensate your sales. My opinion is that bitcoin itself regulates its price and it is difficult to destabilize.

Well you could look at a graph with say 5 minute candles and look for the candles where there was a 1% swing and then look at the volume that was traded then. I would guess a couple million at least. But that doesn't include the fact that if you put some well placed offers very few may actually get filled but you may be able to influence the market to think there is resistance and the price rise or fall accordingly so with that I would say 500k perhaps.

Back then we saw bitcoin absorb a 30000 BTC massive dump without major problems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uX_bB_4VJk

Nowadays the liquidity is so big that you would need a ton of money to create a manipulation worth paying attention to, and that is exactly what governments are doing. Tey are scaring noobs away, and taking their cheap BTC on each dip. They don't want people to be holding BTC on it reaches $1MM a coin.

The evidence points that this is not the case, if bitcoin was self regulating then satoshi should have create some measures in the code for that to happen and that is not the case, bitcoin is subject to the old principle of supply and demand and that makes bitcoin easy to manipulate.

The price goes up via supply and demand. In this case the supply includes BTC owners who are willing to sell. If people want to buy but no one wants to sell then the price will rise.

There is no way of saying if x dollars come in then the price rises y percent.

With the increasing price of bitcoin it is now becoming difficult to manipulate the price of bitcoin so easily. I think it will require a huge amount of money even if a person want to manipulate the price of bitcoin up to 0.1%., and in future we can expect that it will become more difficult because of the increasing price of bitcoin. I am sure that the current increase in the price of bitcoin is only because of the increasing demand of bitcoin.

i'm not expert but actually it think when i watch carefully at pending order at my local exchanger this is not too difficult and not need too much money
as long as no other whales make opposite pending order position
for example, when current price is 13k USD and you want to make price move 1% to 13.013k you just buy litle by litle and set pending ordey buy on your target price
CMIIW

That is a possibility but at the same time if governments of the world do that that will only push the price of bitcoin even higher, and that will make the whales incredibly rich, so rich that their richness could in fact rival governments, think about that, so I have my doubts that is happening.

Last night I dumped a bunch of Bitcoin Gold and I definitely moved the price by more than 1%. However, it was only on that exchange and it was only temporary.

I learned two things:
1. Even after the price drops from dumping, it can go right back up.
2. Dumping definitely lowers the price for you, but not necessarily for anyone else.