Bitcoin Forum

This ever increasingly narrow price band is being manipulated into existence. I have watched the price action on the 1 minute charts for long enough, and witnessed the mountains grow up on the Bid/Ask walls without much movement ever occurring to be sure of that.

At first I was thinking that the price was being held up to allow large cash outs. But perhaps this enforced stability is in preparation for the DPR auctions or something else along the lines of attracting investors to an ultra risky and volatile asset; "See look, its safe! Pile in guys!"

P.S. If anyone wants to come on here and tell me that this is merely the hidden hand of the free market at work, proving that $800 is the new $120, then I would like to politely inform any such person in advance, that they are a idiot.

This. Also to reasure existing holders that they did not do anything stupid. The large holders want to get rid of the pump and dumping.

Spot on.

Well tell them to get on with it already! I need to buy me some cheap coinz!

+1. I'm impressed with how the large holders have been able to stabilize the market several times now and still have plenty of powder left to do so in the future.

I really think you have a valid point, but after seeing the large amount of bots in BTC-E, over the last few weeks I think the predictability and repeatability of bot trade is keeping the market very stable.  The bots are trading at $10-15 increments all day, and it is over and over and over.  Makes it hard to really rally, and get some big momentum going up or down.  Just a thought, I think as trading continues you will eventually see more bots than humans in the trading markets..

What are your thoughts on the subject?

Regards,

CH 

Another huge cash out (500 BTC) that drove market from $808 to $804 within a 1 minute period.

from china to wall street. that's what's going on deep in the fog.

That's not huge, but medium IMO. If a clear downtrend will become obvious, then we'll see huge cash-outs.
Bitcoin whales have to be sure of a large drop when they dump, so they can buy back much cheaper.

Well, the bots are trading with real money. The only way they can keep the prices within a tight range are if they are backed by huge amounts of buffer money on both the buy and sell sides. The market will get out of the range when one of the two sides is exhausted. For example say the buffer is BTC 1M / USD 1B in size. If the natural demand for btc exceeds 1M, the whale will no longer be able to keep the price down.

There may be second order effects on market sentiment that I'm not able to figure out, but bottom line, I'm sure the players concerned are powerful but only up to a limit. They can't keep this up for too long...

Right now it seems that the purpose of this is cashing out at a stable and held up price. It´s not only walls on both sides,
every time the bid side gets filled on Stamp, somebody dumps a few houndred coins.

But how would this work? Say you were sitting on 100k BTC and wanted to cash out. You could soak up all bids as they came in, but what would you do with other incoming sells? If you undersell them, you drive the price down. If you try to keep the price high by buying back in, you dont get to cash out.

You keep the price high by building bid walls and buyin 50-100 Coins from your own asks to simulate a stable price with enough demand.

Lmao take a step back, manipulation don't matter. Whales try to manipulate market->Market conforms to manipulation ->Whales conform to market.

To put it in simple terms.

Market Psychology + Manipulation = Manipulated Psychology
Manipulated Psychology + Manipulation = Manipulated Psychology.

To solve for Market Psychology, set both equations equal to each other.
Market Psychology + Manipulation = Manipulation Psychology  + Manipulation.
- Manipulation                                                                    -  Manipulation
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Market Psychology = Manipulation Psychology.


They are one in the same. Don't give me that troll shit. Regardless of how illogical it sounds, it makes complete sense and you know it. Welcome to life.

check out the chart from Jan 9th and you see it narrow down to a mid point

Jan9th is when btc-e gave a big discount for whales on tx fees.   so they were able to shake all the loose money out and now just sitting with themselves.

perhaps when everyone has the same rates again Feb 1st things will move a bit more freely... or not..  I am in the camp that Coinbase is running things anyway and want stable price for their merchant/user fee churn

are they??  where are their fillings?  weekly reports? are they regulated at all?  3rd party auditor sign off?

perhaps bitstamp and coinbase are just playing with a stacked hand (big pockets) and btc-e may or may not be fudging...  but gox and the china exchanges are probably suspect more than anything

The only proof is that real people's buy and sell orders are being filled. You can't do that with imaginary bitcoins or dollars.

Of course I haven't actually withdrawn funds from stamp lately. Hmm...

Back in 2011 "the manipulator" threads were far better.

I'm thinking there's a cabal of benevolent bitcoin zillionnaires behind this. One of the criticisms of bitcoin has been its extreme volatility. This can intimidate individual buyers, and more importantly businesses. So what does the Satoshi Nakamoto troika do? It starts putting up buy AND sell walls to keep the price at this level for as long as possible. This builds up confidence, gets more adoption, and basically sets the snowball rolling...
[/quote]

I think this is spot on. Bitcoin whales aren't wallstreet whales, from what I understand they haven't cashed out, despite being worth hundreds of millions, and the initial paper released by Satoshi reads to me more like a technical manifesto.

All this trading and speculation, although fun, really does hurt Bitcoin as a payment system. The number one objection (after the illicit market dropping out) by consumers and vendors is the volatility. I might be mistaken, but price right now is controlled by the exchanges. The exchanges are easily manipulated by smaller users and by natural market forces.  Not to mention there are so many posts suspecting the exchanges themselves being deceitful.

Until we have a few solid exchanges we have complete trust in, which have 50-100k coins on both sides where we can reliably withdraw our fiat. I think this is a great move and will only help Bitcoin.

Being a miner, I want to see stable growth in the market. And anyone who things that someone with 100k coins, when total buy/sell options total 15k on either side is lying to themselves lol...

Apart from three periods of extreme volatility, totaling ~10 months in the past four years, bitcoin price has been amazingly stable, no matter what sensationalist heads from magazines want you to believe. I.e, for most of the time, it's like that, boring. It found its current level, and until fundamentals change, it will be around. No mystery, no tin foil, just an equilibrium where all sellers sold and all buyers bought, pressure normalized and normal exchanges are taking place.

It is a surprisingly high level, too, I was expecting it to settle at least around $650, but my guess is as good as anybody's, i.e. not good at all. What I'm saying, we never had a settled price so close to the ATH before. It was 10% in 2011, then 37% in 2013, now something like 70%. Maturing fast? If this range of 800-1100 holds for another month.

The mysterious "manipulator" is back then. He/she must sure love bitcoin. This must be costing millions of dollars a day.  ::)
As mentioned above, bitcoin has always had long periods of stability. You don't hear much about it because it's boring.

Withdrew 400$ from Bitstamp just yesterday, went smooth and took one day with a SEPA transfer.

I think people would like to know about $4,000 or $40,000 liquidity moves

Oh no!  It's cuddlefish and his #bitcoin-cabal!

Imagine if you are a whale, you can set a rock solid sell wall at say 830, cause a rush, and have a rock solid buy wall to meet the panic at 820. do that all day and your stash grows, stability increases, and everyone wins but the scalpers.
I think that is a responsible thing to do if you own a lot of bitcoins, back your own currency.
of coarse, if it remains this stable for much longer, the money transfer system will become very profitable, and therefore attract more investors and then we start over again.

I miss those  :'(

Could anyone provide a link? Thanks

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53654.msg639522#msg639522

Wow. OP is still saying the same shit. Thanks for that.

Missed probably one of the greatest opportunitys in his lifetime to get very very wealthy. Arguing about 2 or 3 $ bitcoins ha! No wonder he hates BTC. Lesson should be learned by looking at Edward. Living your life full of regret SMH

A dip into the bowels of old BitcoinTalk threads always helps put things in perspective.

Agreed. My memory doesn't do it justice.

OP? Really?

The mistake of that OP, back in 2011, not the same as the OP in this thread, was that he didn't
understand where the bottom was. Mid November 2011, after a long bear market, the price dropped
from 32$ (in June) to 2$, and that 2$ was strong support, proved by the huge volume.
By comparison with 2011, the current bubble is like late June, early July, when price was relatively stable 13$ - 17$.

I remember that time when we first bounced off $2 for real, and everyone was buying. I really laughed at Edward while running to the bank to do a wire to mtgox (too small of a wire, in retrospective, but anyway, served much better than believing in "TEH MANIPULATOR").

IF bitcoin is going to be used as a payment option by retailers then the price will become managed by the payment processors. The processors will be forced to trade the market and manage large positions because selling  entire lots in one shot would obviously be counter productive. In fact if you have a huge amount of bitcoin and fiat on the exchanges then "manipulating" the price would be a profitable venture.

Yep, sounds plausible.

Any entity with a specific interest and deep enough pockets both in terms of USD and BTC, could have teams of experts and robots ride these markets like a bitch, with the aim of holding Bitcoin at a specific price range, and sucking up Joe Bloggs' usd and btc to fund the times when they need to take a sizeable hit in order to keep the ship afloat.

Ever since the liquidity issues between Bitstamp and Bitfinex were worked out, volatility has plummeted.  If Mt.Gox finally took a little lead pill to cure its disease, >95% of the fiat/crypto market cap would be a liquid market, and most of the pathological catastrophes would be ended.   The swaps on BFX have done price discovery an amazing service.

In the past month volume has bee relatively low.

I suspect early adopters are artificially keeping the price below $1000USD/coin.

This will cost them Bitcoin, but may not be a bad thing in the long-run. One of the criticisms of Bitcoin is that the early adopters control too much of the wealth.

By keeping the price stable; they can encourage Bitcoin adoption and spread coins around (reducing coin concentration) at the same time. In FIAT terms, how much they can buy with their Bitcoins may end up being about the same anyway.

Indeed.  Zanglebert from the forum said it like this:

"To keep your coins, you must lose your coins." 

This is hardly a criticism of bitcoin.  It is more a criticism of the people who repeat it:  It shows that they are deluded by envy.  So deluded by venial envy that they are willing to cut off their nose to spite their face.

wallstreet coming in. they will pump after they take the position they want, not before.

I withdraw 4 figure amounts monthly and never have a problem

Since when has this been possible?

(Routing Bitfinex leveraged positions with all its trading options through the much deeper Ask/Bid walls on Stamp)

I have no doubt that massive selling could drive the price down, however, this isn't a stock, all holders that I know would buy on the way down non-stop until every penny they had was gone. So how much power do these manipulators actually have??

I can only envision a disaster scenario where satoshi, the FBI, and maybe a couple of others in the top 25 relinquished all of their coins over a 6 month period, causing the price to tumble past all possible support and sucking every saving dollar out of every person on this forum and the rest of the geek world. But then why would they do that unless they were intentionally trying to kill bitcoin.

an* idiot

The simple fact is that we are "manipulating" into stability because we who hold a substantial amount of BTC and are not momentum-chasing lemmings sell when the price rises too much or too fast and buy when it plunges or falls too fast or too much. We make more fiat that way. We pick up extra coins that way. This is not a conspiracy. This is smart investment management.