Do you think there is institutional manipulation of the Bitcoin price?

[13abyknight]

With the current market cap of Bitcoin being upward of $131 billion, it is hard to think of any sort of price manipulation given the distribution of the currency. Yet, there have been many instances in the past wherein 'sharks' have dictated the price of Bitcoin, deriving utmost profit for themselves.

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I do not think that price reductions should be associated with price manipulation over time.
The fall is perfectly normal and acceptable to know that we are reaching such heights in just a year. Scream 'manipulation' when successfully maintaining the same level while knowing that everyone wants to sell while nobody wants to buy. Also, it is not always the news that drives the crypto market.

[ivakar]

this is possible situation, indeed. there is something happening on the market, I think. and needles to say, that officials will never do anything unless they sure they can hit and catch someone.. something really shady here. I hope it will be sorted out anyway..

[sarta afdal17]

We believe that. Bitcoin reaches a fairly high capitalization. To collect such groups. The problem is good and bad at the same time. Due to such artificial changes, many people do not want to use bitcoin as a means of payment, but I think the bitcoin is too big to be manipulated or influenced by a group of people. We are sure bitcoin will be stable at a certain price..

[cappy176]

I think there is most definitely price manipulation anyone with 1000 or more btc can dramatically shift the market

[Dukjila]

Since the beginning of the year, interest in BTC has been declining, and judging by the requests of GOOGLE, queries with the word "Bitcoin" decreased by 75%.
But who is to blame: the bad news or something else, is unclear.
It is necessary to determine the reason for such a drop in interest. 

[Ferry22]

I'm not going to say there's a manipulation done by a bunch of groups against Bitcoin's price, because I have no strong evidence for it, what I know is, the Bitcon price is heavily influenced by the Supply and demand that takes place within the Cryptocurrency exchange market.

[tunapa]

I think its not right to always think there is manipulation whenever the bitcoin price or other crytocurrency are tanking. We shouldn't expect that price will always go up, otherwise, it is very dangerous. Cryptocurrency price increase in december 2017 was way too much, hence there is need for correction. So corection isn't manipulation, its a normal thing. No institution is manipulating the prices. 

[Dudeperfect]

Yes, we have already experienced that there was the artificial pump in the price in the last quarter of the last year and it was from the big whales and institutional investors. I believe that they are able to manipulate the price not because they have money but we don't have the maturity to deal with the volatility in the extreme conditions. Thus, any decisions from the institutional investors create FOMO in the market resulting in the price change.

[zakariajaki]

your opinion is very interesting and I am very interested in that, who can determine the bitcoin ready price that plays a big role here to be able to control the price is so big and global, find out about it is not difficult but also very difficult not easy to be sure many ask who the holder of that role, but I only get a bit positive where the price of bitcoin down of course altcoin prices will rise and vice versa instead of that which is usually done by the parent, the mother or parent altcoin is bitcoin, may be useful and successful for all of us

[squog]

That is the problem with unregulated and decentralized market. It couod be easily manipulated. Then again, i. Think it's more like the sudden increase in investors and a huge back lash from all of it. It's more like a normal market tremd and not like a clock work manipulation. Then again, I'm new to this so take it with a grain of salt.

[bowals]

Like in force, there are many traders that trade daily. Trying to buy the dio and sell in the rise. That makes for a pretty unstable price in a predictable manner. However the role of some sinister background guys cannot be ruled out

[Burogh]

I think price manipulation can be happen if some one or some institution holding a lot bitcoin. Its hard to make manipulation in bitcoin trade because anyone can make transaction. News about price manipulation maybe just a manipulation from big firm to buying bitcoin at cheap price

[CHENIEN]

 It can be absolutely happens that there were price manipulations, mostly who can afford to manipulate the price are only those big investors, because every prices on cryptocurrency coin are base on the total volume of stocks, and if stock market are too much higher it will result price dropping and likewise when crypto coins stocks are lesser it will also develops the price become higher because of too much market demand.

[JiuMiBe]

It can be absolutely happens that there were price manipulations, mostly who can afford to manipulate the price are only those big investors, because every prices on cryptocurrency coin are base on the total volume of stocks, and if stock market are too much higher it will result price dropping and likewise when crypto coins stocks are lesser it will also develops the price become higher because of too much market demand.

I agree with what you are saying. But one thing I want to add is that in order to manipulate this market, big investors have to shake hands together to do so because the market capitalization at the moment is not small.

[gambitcoin53]

We have seen reports lately that the US Justice Department has opened a criminal probe into alleged price manipulation of

Bitcoin and other digital currencies. We have seen for months now that the Bitcoin price cannot get momentum and as soon

as there are positive signs that it is recovering, then it drops down again. In many of these instances there are no negative

news that would have triggered that downward spiral. There are also no Alt coins with significant growth during these times,

 for us to say that these Alt coins are the trigger behind this. The only logical conclusion for this is that someone or a group of

people are "killing" the correction phase of the Bitcoin price. 

Do you think there are some sinister agenda behind this or is this just Bitcoin whales doing their normal thing?   

for me, there are few people who are trying to manipulate the price of bitcoin in the market, but it doesn't trigger this downfalls that we are experiencing today, what really triggers the price correction if there is really such thing as the triggering factor is the trust issue of users regarding bitcoin hodling, many are affected by these kind of news, many panic sellers and users in short term investments. we all know that there are millions of small time users rather than big-time holders, if those million users act at the same time on selling their assets especially today, the market responds reciprocally. 

[btc78]

OP, believing that there was no manipulation of any kind and form would be very naive. Bitcoin's history had a lot of of its share of unchecked and widespread price manipulation.

I believe there is no "dark" agenda except profit.

Maybe theres no dark agenda,but there's surely price manipulation,this is not coincidence that prices has likely a price restrictions that if the target is this price,then it wont go down on that specific price ,looking on what is the step by step dropping of this coins is a proof that it was manipulated,and if you dont see that it wasnt my problem atleast i am not blind for not seeing this

[Hydrogen]

I think there definitely is institutional manipulation over bitcoin's price AND tether is being utilized as a scapegoat / smokescreen intended to fool people into thinking crypto market manipulation ended in january 2018. Sad to say I can't prove it and have no real evidence to support my stance on this. Its been said south korea's heavy crypto purchasing volume played a role behind bitcoin's rise near $20k. Then inexplicably for no reason south korea banned bitcoin on a limited basis. Looking at the big picture, its almost as if a coordinated effort has been made to identify and shut down major players who fueled bitcoin's massive success in 2017 in an effort to push bitcoin's value down.

There have been many threads and posts made on this forum attempting to answer a question of what form of attack central bankers would make on bitcoin if they decided to pursue that course of action. Perhaps we're witnessing the answer to that in terms of the preferred means of attack being a strategy of devaluing bitcoin in an effort to kill confidence and end user belief in it.

Tether may be key to this. If in the future we find that tether is innocent and allegations against it made by the media were fabrications, then we might begin to have sparse evidence that there was a type of conspiracy or political agenda in play. Not only perhaps to defraud bitcoin's reputation and name but also to divert attention from real sources of crypto market manipulation--which may be defined today as being somewhat anti bitcoin.

[Matic]

We have seen reports lately that the US Justice Department has opened a criminal probe into alleged price manipulation of
Bitcoin and other digital currencies. 
Do you think there are some sinister agenda behind this or is this just Bitcoin whales doing their normal thing?   

I don't know what to think recently, and so I choose just to be patient and flexible in order to make a good reaction, and proper decisions while the things would collide.

[patt0]

Well bitcoin market is relatively small yet, so it's possible that some big whales, that bought during the price jump that happened when futures were launch, are now manipulating the market and taking profit from the futures market and these bitcoin sell offs. Nothing we can do about it, and our best approach, if we are not trading, is to just hold the coins. The problem is that most people just care about profit, so they see the price going down and just massive sell all their coins out of panic, or to simply buy them at a better price in the future.
These things will change in the future though, as BTC gets more adoption, and the market gets more liquidity.