Bitcoin has often been called "the honey badger of money" for its resilience- but the market price is extremely fragile. Granted, BTC has had previous climbs and drops like this, but with extremely high, psychologically loaded price levels achieved, the correction- or crash- was even more worrisome.
The peak price caused BTC owners to try to move their coins to an exchange, causing another large transaction backlog. For about three hours, the Gemini trading platform was in crisis mode, trying to deal with the influx of transactions and orders.
Users shared stories of orders not getting filled, especially buying at the lower price. The five-hour event, called "the crashening", affected altcoins as well, with some accidental drops to very low prices, as low as $10 for Ethereum at one point and $3 for NEO.
A Telegram group was formed to discuss the strange behavior of the Bitfinex page that did not allow the normal closing and placing of orders, and led to negative account balances: As Bitcoin prices continue to drop, and there are more than 63,000 transactions pending, the selling may continue in the next few days, with prices of $8,000 predicted for Bitcoin, but buyers still ready to buy in case of a deeper correction. At the moment, Bitfinex trades BTC at $10,145, while the Korean markets still hold above $11,000, a curious disparity.
It sounds like it was a shitshow yesterday during the drop. Most of the big exchanges folded under the pressure, I wonder if they were DDOS'd too, or just couldn't handle the traffic.
It also looks like there were some margin calls, which isn't too surprising given the depth of the fall!
I wouldn't read too much into it going forward. That Bitfinex is in troube is already well known, I doubt Coinbase and Stamp are though.
There are frequent flash crashes, knowing bitcoin we'll see a new ATH in the next day or 2!
