If a currency can fall 8.5% in a day on no real bad news such as today just proves the cronies and knockers correct when they say its too risky and volatile. Imagine if there was actually some bad news, sheesh.
You are assuming that people in general are pushing this down, your wrong. It was a flash crash on bitfinex.com caused by deliberate manipulation, absolutely nothing to do with public sentiment or news.
Manipulation? It's disheartening to learn someone can hack into the exchanges and sell all the bitcoins, thats what I call bad sentiment!
thats not what market manipulation is...someone with a lot of coins sold them to trick the bots, no one hacked an exchange and sold other peoples coins..
Believe it or not this kind of manipulation has happened in the past. Several years ago Gox was hacked and caused the price to temporarily decrease to one penny per BTC. The hackers bought at this level then withdrew their coins. Most of the trades were reversed and Gox "covered" the losses (they may have not actually been able to do this in retrospect) but this is something that is possible. I would personally doubt that this is something that happened as the decline has been much too orderly to likely be something like this.
This. And I think now that people can profit both ways (long or short) manipulation is simply a given, both on the exchanges and on the forum. More arguments will appear in favour of bitcoins downfall, for profits sake. Is that good? Im not so sure. The sad thing the USD is more reliable atm as i dont see some russian nerd coming on to forex and knocking the usd down 8 % in a flash.
I don't think the same kind of multiplication that zedicus describes would be possible anymore. I think that exchanges are much more secure then gox was when this happened and there are likely fail-safes in place that would cause trading to halt in the event that the price would decline that much as it should have been obvious that the selling was not real.
