The benefit of being a holder is i can now disappear off for a month and then get the surprise of finding out about the price when i return. The price could be back in the 6xx's or have plumbed new lows. A few low ball bids on stamp just in case.

I bought 0.2btc in the above enterprise before he ran off with the funds..

Again a sizeable dump. No follow-through selling from panicked weak hands. If there is no one left to sell then perhaps the bottom is near.

Hopefully get to buy a few more coins at below 500 dollar prices..

No manipulation here. It's a perfectly natural way to sell for best price with no slippage to perform synchronised large sells into thin order books.

Very unlikely to be a miner or sophisticated seller. Perhaps a hedge fund or malicious actor..

Oh god. Not falllling clones on the way back up too!

I don't know, i chuckled reading about Warren Buffer.

If you had him on ignore falllling it would say this user is currently ignored and not let you reply. Keep up old chap.

Whales trading bits..sounds good

Hi Mark!?

Alright Einstein!

I take your example to mean that the bitcoin price is a product of consumer/speculator demand. But that also consumer/speculator demand is also a product of the price? Unlike the baker scenario.. And that falling bitcoin prices may in fact reduce demand for bitcoins?

Those with coins to sell hoping to buy back in lower (the bears on here Derpinheimer, dump3r etc..) have already sold.

Who is going to panic dropping 8 dollars on bitstamp anymore? Dumping 1000 coins like that isn't a way to get the best price from a sale, it is a way manipulating the price suddenly downwards to induce further selling. Looks like it hasn't worked so far.

Explain your point more clearly please

I disagree. Bitcoin is already becoming an extremely useful currency through utility. But the main strengths of bitcoin are its monetary properties and scarcity. People who buy and hold it do so knowing this. There is no consumer or speculator, they are one and the same. It is a happy side effect that the first 50 million people into the the bitcoin sphere will likely make significant gains on there initial investment. Whilst adoption continues the price must rise until like your baker there is an equilibrium where all the users of bitcoin are already using it, it has become distributed and the exchange price is stable. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value but is going to work exceptionally well as a future store of value with bouts of likely extreme volatility.

Timing the market always seems so easy looking at the past. Bit harder in realtime

So you can buy in?

Thanks.

I try not to think about it too much. But to discount it entirely would be naive!

Thanks for the replies. I am curious. Are you saying you don't think consumer demand is sufficient to drive bitcoin (price) longterm? Why? For me this is still a no-brainer. If only 1 million people are actively using it then even if the project fails to go mainstream it likely will run further than this. It seems to me that infrastucture is only now beginning to blossom and develop. More on and off ramps are appearing all the time which will facilitate adoption potentially.

I am not sure of there being any real distinction between big business seeing potential profits by adopting bitcoin and big business supporting bitcoin and wanting it to succeed. Bitcoin is cheaper per transaction than a credit card, whilst delivering the actual payment within minutes. Isn't it obvious that a company will implement anything that will significantly reduce transaction costs and increase profits? What is amazing is that major companies such as dell, expedia, newegg etc have implemented bitcoin when the userbase is so incredibly tiny - really a speck on their balance sheets. That makes me think that big business actually wants bitcoin to succeed - i could be wrong.

Yes the construction of a sentiment index is a fun concept. Don't have much time to go into it further now but would probably have to be a scraping spider which analysed the threads on the front page and posts within the forum. I know someone who designed a similar tool for another market and sold it to a hedge fund so several probably exist for this forum already. Another poster speculated that could be the reason for the endless trolling accounts on here.

They could buy off exchange and dump on exchange to depress the price. They could time large sells to floor the price when it starts to gain positive momentum. Whether they could exert long term damage to the market this way is unknown but they could increase volatility dramatically if they wanted which might potentially impact consumer adoption rates.

It is now well documented they have for a long time intervened in the gold market. Recently it has become publicised they have direct access to commodity and stock exchanges, too. So it isn't much of a stretch.

An alternative view is that see the bigger picture and actually buy up a % of bitcoin to add to their reserves.

Of course they may sit back and watch bitcoin instead. Perhaps moving to strangle it through legislation. Or nothing

It is clear the central banks have been watching development of bitcoin very closely. At some point they will probably start to interfere with the price.