Bitcoin Forum

I guess the same as you. Somebody is enjoying right now. They do it because they can and it is easy to just shoot the price up or down.
We will be seeing a lot of it in the coming years

^^ this.

right now the market is not at all healthy. it is empty of real traders and is only filled with the manipulators and the bots running short term strategy scripts to make 0.5%-1% profit.
this will go on unless we go below or over a major price that  can trigger come back of real traders. in my opinion these two prices are $5900 and $8000 respectively.

Every investor willing to buy at 6k range already bought in february or april. Same as every investor willing to sell at 6k range. Now all investors/long term traders are waiting for braking triange up (over 8k) or down (lower than 5,5k). All we see now iside of triangle is manipulation on low volume. Its easy to stop price at one lvl. Make bots/daytraders set stoploss little under/above or start to trade on higher laverage to profit on 6350-6450 range. Then after 50$ pump another 250$ is added by triggering stoploses and closing overlaveraged position pushing price up/down giving extra profit for manipulator who did that.

this is typical of all markets. they're called range contraction and range expansion periods.

the two days of sideways after the selloff is usually called a bearish consolidation or bear flag because the subsequent range expansion usually continues in the direction of the original trend.


why does everyone around here assume manipulation is happening? :D this kind of action can be completely organic IMO.

When Bitcoin is stable for a few days and not moving a cent up or down people are starting to poke it to "do something".
But when it is finally pissed off by all that poking and swings up and down everybody is: "What is happening ??"  ;D

If I were to blame somebody for manipulation I wouldn't cut exchanges from the list, not because they want to acquire cheap coins or drive the value up but because in periods of calm prices trade dies down and so do fees and profit.
Just shake the price a bit with coins out of your own pocket and the avalanche of buy/sell/sell/buy/ would reward you twice or thrice.

Somebody or likely a group of people in collaboration working together to control (to some extent) the market. This, of course doesn’t work if trying to do it into a bull run.

I think it’s a lot easier to move the market when it’s stable, i.e. not much volatility.

Edit - There’s supposedly a secret ‘whale club’, believe in it or not, I’m not sure.

Your explanation makes the most sense to me. Manipulators need a full order book in order for it to be worthwhile for them. Aside from the little bits they're picking up and the movement they're behind there doesn't seem to be much in the way of volume in the market at this present moment.

That's right! Every big time holder who wanted to pad up their bags, and every tired seller would have already done so, though the last batch of stragglers probably waited until June. Almost every price action now is pure short-term speculation at volumes and order sizes too paltry to qualify as manipulation.



My thoughts too. Nothing short of a complete infiltration across all exchanges, with 10% of supply also under control, would be effective at manipulation.

Bitcoin has always been volatile, and sideways trading is always a phase even for volatile assets. With order action comes fatigue and trading volumes since beginning of the year has been struggling, which makes these spikes easier to trigger too.

As illogical as it may seem, this is actually pretty normal to expect.

I stumbled upon a Dutch article (https://bitcoinmagazine.nl/2018/11/grote-investeerders-kochten-in-de-afgelopen-maand-voor-bijna-1-miljard-dollar-aan-bitcoin-via-otc/) that reminded me about this thread:
As evidence for this theory, the article shows several Bitcoin addresses that recently have been accumulating large amounts of Bitcoins.

In the following graph, the image from the OP starts just before the large drop in September:
http://i64.tinypic.com/5nqkhg.gif

With great certainty we can say that this is not just a coincidence, and that someone or something stands behind all these events. In other words, it is obviously manipulation with the sole purpose of greater coin accumulation, which will of course be sold at the moment of the new ATH.

BTC is almost always follow same path : accumulation/pump/correction and I think based on all what is presented that we are now in accumulation period. Price is fairly stable in last few months, but we've seen a few attempts which resulted with fall under 6000 $ for short time. In my opinion reason why price is so stabile is that most of weak hands emptied their bags, and real hodlers do not want to sell at this price.

For some BTC is only money factory, with one important difference - first want to make money on a daily / weekly basis, some others invest and wait for years. It is very likely that the paths of these two sides meet from time to time, perhaps in that moment comes to sudden falls or jumps in price.

I had another thought: one of the reasons the SEC didn't approve a Bitcoin ETF yet, was because of Bitcoin's volatility. What if "someone" is trying to reduce volatility until the SEC approves a Bitcoin ETF?

That makes sense too. I'm not buying, I'm not selling.

Same!

Makes no sense to sell until 6-12 months after the next halving. We all know what happens then (historically). We should see $50,000 per coin then imo.

If you can afford to HODL for 2-3 years then my advice is to do so. You’ll likely be rewarded for patience & solidarity/bravery.

Then, if someone was able to stabilize the market like right now, why didn't he stabilize the market at $20k? If someone did, it would be someone with a large investment in Bitcoin and would have no real use to stabilize his capital at a loss. Taking the risk to lose millions in case the SEC is happy?

All valid points. I can't answer it though.

People stopped selling. What exists today are just traders filling in the Books and the coins that come in after being mined. But the volume, at various times, is very low, which opens up the possibility for short gains with Bots. But soon it is stabilized, with attempts of those who have suffered a momentary loss to make average price

The change will only occur with institutional money or with some high utilization that goes beyond speculation. Few want to use as currency since most believe that we are on a down and sell now would be a loss. Markets today are more liquid too. We have several arbitration tools that correct any distortion within minutes.

A year ago, in Brazil, we had no more than 8 exchanges. Today it is over 60. But none has a direct link with other financial instruments. I believe that this does not yet exist in the world. In the stock market, you have money in stocks but can quickly turn into another financial instrument. Most people will always feel insecure without those opens on cryptocurrencies. A little more legal and financial security will be needed to increase the real volume and break down traders who are using low volume to accumulate or to sell their Bitcoins in the best price.

It's impossible to stabilize the price around $20,000 with how everyone with common sense sells at these levels. If a whale tried to stabilize the price around $20,000 he would only provide liquidity to those looking to cash out, which is the same as burning your money. No one with sense does that.

~$6000 and anything slightly above that is globally accepted to be the main support, at least for now, and people for that reason aren't willing to sell near these levels. What happens is that without whales actually providing much support to the price around current levels, it manages to organically maintain its position, which is why we keep coming back to sub $7000 levels.

Everything above $7000 means sell sell sell, everything around current levels means remain conservative and sit on your coins, or accumulate.

have you considered how difficult that would be? this isn't like the gold market, where one or two exchanges can dictate the price. they would have to tightly control prices on dozens of exchanges around the world. if any exchange got out of line, they would need to heavily buy or sell into it, for months. that entails huge amounts of coordination, capital, and exchange risk.

i think the most obvious answer is that neither bulls nor bears have the power to force price outside of this range.

this theory could have been true only if this was the first time price is stable like this but it isn't!

pan left on the chart and you will see other cases of stability which are usually in a small period of time but we also have prolonged ones too.
- for instance back in June 2016 after the $777 bubble price crashed down to $465 and then from August till October (~3 months) price stayed stable at $600 +-$30 before continuing to rise.
- or my favorite the 2015 stability after the $1200 bubble where price stayed at $220 for most part of the year with some small rises that couldn't break the resistance so the price dropped back down to that bottom again.
- of the short lived stability after the $260 bubble back in April 2013

we say Past performance is no guarantee of future results but the patterns are looking strangely the same!

But my question is still valid though. Why someone would risk his capital at loss "betting" on an approval from the SEC? We are talking about thousands of million dollars. I took $20,000 as an example because it was its ATH. But I could very well have considered $15, 000 or even $10,000. The market could very easily have been stabilized at these levels. (we are still considering someone with the resources to manipulate the market). After all, Bitcoin did not go from $1k (Early 2017) to $20k (End 2017)

@vit05
yeah, what you are suggesting is, we need more KYC and AML about cryptocurrencies?  :'(

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Exactly! What makes you think that someone who has access to millions of dollars won't have influence over the SEC? One could argue that if the person had influence over the SEC they could have approved the ETF at any given price, But if you ask me. That would have looked suspicious. To make it look like a "natural" decision you will most likely do the effort of stabilizing BTC on globally accepted support level.

Or it could be smart AIs repeating the history just like @pooya87 mentioned... The point here is that nobody can be certain of anything that's the beauty of "free markets".

What market makers look for is consensus, but then in terms of what the general market believes to be a support level. We didn't have that at any level above $7000 while market makers may have been trying to settle a floor somewhere, but there are too many sellers. Don't forget that the higher the price is, the less support your liquidity is able to provide.

$10 million in liquidity may seem like it is a lot, but it's peanuts. Around $15,000 your $10 million only stops ~670BTC, which whales obviously have no problems dumping through. As per this example you can imagine how difficult it is to artificially stabilize the price without the consensus of the market. On top of that, spot exchanges have very poor liquidity because of the lack of trust.

Who's going to wire hundreds of millions to an exchange? Deep pockets go straight to the source (miners) for large orders, or have an exchange as ItBit function as deal maker.

I agree there's no point propping price when the trend is parabolic. You're bound to be holding bags.

But regarding "common sense" that's easy to say in hindsight, but hardly anyone was selling at $20K. There's been drastically higher volumes traded at lower levels. With that mindset, anyone with common sense might have been selling at $10K too. In a completely speculative market in the midst of a bubble, nobody has any idea where the top will be.


For now, yes. Whoever is supporting $6,000 may be "burning money" too. We'll only know in hindsight, long after these price levels are history. It was the same in the $200s. Whether this is the same situation as 2015 is still up in the air.

I was reminded about this thread. The recent sharp price drop happened after a long period of relative price stability. This still supports my theory of someone waiting for full order books to cash in big.