Glad I listened to you guys. Price is down somewhat from earlier. It's mostly bots putting in tiny bids to drive it down, right? Someone may hate me for asking, but is there any way for exchanges like bitfloor/Mt Gox to stop the manipulation? I understand the need for bots to an extent, but they're being abused.
The few financially minded people I have spoken to about bitcoin say they love the concept, but price manipulation is just too easy and it will never be effective as a currency or way to trade until this can be stopped.
Otherwise, they said they would be all for it.
They also questioned, "What is bitcoin's true value?" which I don't think there is an answer to, yet. I heard the number $3,333 thrown out there once, but can't find the thread to see who said it and what their background is to determine if it was a legitimate guess or not.
It's also the pump and dump method.
The BTC market is tiny compared to most other markets, if someone have put in $50.000 into the market, the would have had 1000 BTC if they bought at $50. They can then put out a sale offer that is slightly above the going rate with one account, and then buy that from the another account. This will make it seem like the market goes up.
This might be done in several steps over a small timeframe. At the same time a high buy offer is put in to illustrate that there is a lot of demand. When enough people have put in orders to buy around the new price, the high buy offer is retracted, and are replaced with a large sell order.
They make a few % surplus every time, and since the input is high, it quickly adds up.
