If they saw a bright future in bitcoins then sure, they might accumulate as many as possible.  But they also know they could be the bag holders when everyone else loses interest.  Not too many investors are willing to play the part of the benevolent investor, who doesn't mind taking a large loss for the public good.


Illegal?  What sort of laws, and under which jurisdiction, would any of the above be illegal?  Bitcoin isn't recognised as a serious investment tool or commodity.  It's like trading basketball or Magic The Gathering cards.  If someone corners the market and doesn't play fair you can hardly go complaining to the police that your Michael Jordan trading cards fell in value.

Unethical?  When do ethics come into trading when it comes to accumulating as much money as possible?  

Everyone knows short selling is essentially gambling.  Regardless of all the fancy graphs and protestations on BitcoinTalk about how the market should go this way or must go that way, people really have little clue about short to medium term variance.  

Having an exchange responsible for 90% of bitcoin trading suddenly fold would have an enormous impact on bitcoin.  Many people would lose a lot of money.  Confidence would be shattered.  Sure, another exchange could rise up and fill the void, but would anyone want to use it?  It's also much easier said than done to 'just open another exchange'. 

Many people would be asking themselves 'what's the difference between an exchange getting hacked, and the site's operators stealing all the bitcoins and declaring a shutdown due to hacking?'.

MtGox has been taken down once.  I hope they have 24/7 active monitoring and regular external audits.

3) Trade on the way up and trade on the way down.  Don't be bothered by whether tomorrow's price is higher or lower than today's.  Buy in small increments and trade them when profitable.

Late afternoon here.  Been watching it and enjoying the show. 

It hit $3 bang on, but now there's an evil bid 'wall' in the way.  Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.  Tear it down! :-)

That's how Elliott Wave and other other analyses work: take 20/20 hindsight, apply a graph to it and make it fit, then make seemingly accurate predictions about the future.  The one thing I never saw was anyone drawing Elliott Waves BEFORE bitcoin's crash.  Surely someone could have predicted the multiple waves down from $30 to $2?  Elliott Waves are never drawn for shares or commodities where the wave can't be made to fit, only where it can. 

The nice thing about Elliott Waves is that every serious trader knows about them and at least partially basis their decisions on them.  That by definition distorts the wave.

Looks like the rally to $2.70+ is fizzling.

Short squeeze is on?

Fantastic little bitcoin bot fight on MtGox at the moment.  Rapid fire trades with large swings every second.  My bot made 25 profitable trades during that time.  Keep it up  

Actively trading.  Up or down, I don't mind where the market goes.  As long as liquidity doesn't disappear.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/07/bitcoin-is-not-inherently-anon.html

My point is that bitcoin transactions are broadcast to the whole network.  Everyone knows when 10,000btc is transfered from user X to user Y.  The transfer can be tracked to each subsequent user.  Identify one and you have a good chance of identifying more.  If I hand a $20k brick of used banknotes to a guy in London, do people all over the world hear about it?  That's true anonymity.

If bitcoins were officially recognised as a valuable commodity you can bet law enforcement agencies would be interested in tracking down the thieves. 

So, the news is: burst bubble, major exchange hacks, bitcoin bank disappearing, wallet stealing malware, 90%+ fall in value from peak, negative media sentiment, web sites claiming bitcoin is a pyramid/ponzi/etc scheme.

This is meant to attract brand new investors?

Comparisons to share market crashes or industries aren't genuine.  Bitcoin doesn't produce anything, it does not represent an entity making anything and is used by very few people.

I've seen this mentioned more than a few times on this forum.  Wealthy people with money to hide/transfer can use bitcoins to move it.

There are two problems:

1: Transactions are not anonymous.  Everyone can see everyone else's transactions, and exactly how many bitcoins are being transferred.  Link the address to a known person and you can take down the whole network.  A bunch of unmarked, circulated banknotes or a gold bar are superior.

2: Those bitcoins have to be converted to money sooner or later, somewhere, connected to a real bank.  Maybe bitcoins will have value as an actual bitcoin sometime in the future.  The current value is solely measured by what other currency you can convert it to.  Even the bitcoin businesses on the internet (the vast majority being small concerns) are just a proxy for converting bitcoins into cash.  The products they sell weren't bought with bitcoins, and the taxes on those products weren't paid in bitcoins either.

Bitcoin is a brilliant technical achievement and has (so far) proven to be resilient to attacks.  I just wish a few economists were consulted during its development.  It was clear from the beginning that it wasn't a currency, as it encouraged hoarding through its deflationary model.  

There are many miners out there right now creating more bitcoins but not selling them, as to sell now would mean selling at a loss (assuming they're not power thieves, 'free' power, etc).  That will create a huge overhang of bitcoins to liquidate should the price show signs of strengthening.

Bitcoin will either stagnate (but never die, as long as one person is mining) or experience some moderate growth in the next few years.

I wonder how this guy is feeling right now:
http://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-savings-into-bitcoin/

"These past days, I have done a lot of thinking about bitcoin that ended up with me investing all of the money I had saved and all that I can borrow into the currency. "

That was in late May, when the price was still under $10.

"and all that I can borrow into the currency".  That's a mighty big hole he's dug for himself.

Maybe he's the equivalent of the shoe shine boy giving stock advice in 1929 right before the crash.  When you read madness like putting all your savings and borrowed money into highly speculative X, sell X as quickly as possible.

I'm part of the $2 bid 'wall', simply because people run around this forum chanting things about The Manipulator.  Well, it sounds like a fun game.  I want to have a snazzy title too.

I can assure you I have no intention of raising my bid from $2.  If anything, I'm going to drop it if the asks approach $2 at a rapid pace.  I almost pulled out when the 'wall' was sniffed at $2.04.  I also have no shorts and will not consider taking any out in a commodity as highly variable as bitcoin.  Back in September we saw hacked accounts being used to wildly swing bitcoin's price.  It swung 50% within minutes.  That's an insane market to short.

The bulls, bears, and constant talk of a 'manipulator' on this forum got me thinking: is it illegal to pump-and-dump bitcoin?  Is it illegal to collude with other traders, to post bull or bear comments on forums and drive the price up or down?

Bitcoin isn't a share of a listed company that can benefit from insider trading.  It's not recognised by any significant market in the world.  If a person in Europe tries to pump and dump using a forum hosted in the USA on a bitcoin exchange in Japan, does anyone care?

I put a bid in at $2, just so I too, could be The Manipulator.

It's in no one's interests to see a microcosm of groupthink develop on bitcoin.  This place is big enough for all opinions.  But maybe it is time to cool it a bit on the 'bitcoin is dead, hahaha!' posts, as they essentially serve no purpose.

I'm amazed the hashing rate is still so high.  Once we filter out the power thieves, Libertarian mine-at-any-cost, and fixed (for now) power contract miners, who is left that feels they should be mining right now at a loss?

The people keeping the hash rate high right now are actually hurting bitcoin.  They're keeping other miners out of the market by deliberately losing money.  It has been proven dozens of times on this forum that difficulty does not correlate with bitcoin's price, so keeping the hash rate high (and in turn, keeping difficulty high) in an act of bravado is doing no one any favours.

Is there a 'timeout' on the madness?  Sure.  It can't lose several dollars in price per month for much longer... but it can continue to drop over 30% per month for quite a long time...

Just because we had a massive speculative frenzy up to $32, and a crash down to $2 (and probably going lower) doesn't mean the price will rebound quickly.  It may never rebound at all.  There is no rule, law, or trend that says the price must bounce again.  It has already bounced, when it briefly went above $20 after the $32 blow off. 

In situations like this I like to refer to this graph.  It's from a company that's still in business and had a share price of over 80c ten years ago.  It's currently 0.001c.  It has never recovered.

http://hfgapps.hubb.com/asxtools/Charts.aspx?asxCode=SRA&compare=comp_index&indicies=0&pma1=0&pma2=0&volumeInd=9&vma=0&TimeFrame=M10

I think it's rather ironic that people are discussing the benefits of being able to issue a chargeback against a merchant, on a bitcoin forum.  One of bitcoin's much touted features is the impossibility of chargebacks from customers who have been ripped off. 

Imagine if Butterfly Labs required payment in bitcoins.  No one would ever touch it.