Price manipulation would generally create arbitrage opportunities that would be exploited to the detriment of the manipulator, so I'm not sure it's an issue.
Specifically, if they artificially lowered prices, I would buy cheap from them and resell elsewhere , taking profit out of their pocket. If they artificially raised prices, I would buy elsewhere and sell to them, again taking their money.
Yes, that makes sense. But once again look at the gold market. They sell naked shorts to push the physical price down. You can't just buy the physical at a certain price.
The digital markets can crash the physical markets and then the manipulators come in and buy.
There are limited bitcoins though, so I do think arbitrage would catch up, depending on their timing of the digital dumps. And also, my big worry was one BIG exchange. If that doesn't
happen we probably have much less to worry about, not to mention increasing transactions taking the price up alone.
Luckily the low float of btc and wide adoption will probably win out over the powers that be, not to mention their crumbling inflated fiat.
IAS