Something is wrong. We cannot just gloss over the $100 sell

[vokain]

you can't destroy bitcoin by just selling it to death. the selling has to have some substantial fundamental reason behind it in order to do so

Exploiting a vulnerability in bitcoin's design while stealing bitcoins, causing exchanges to shut down transfers would be a pretty good time to dump bitcoins on the market if you wanted to affect the useful stability of the commodity.  At the very least it spawns "Major bitcoin exchange shuts down" headlines and makes people who want to conduct business and trade using bitcoin wonder if they can handle the massive daily swings and risk of losing their money.

welcome to Bitcoin lol

[DPoS]

The feds butt RAPED the Silk Road guy in jail with a 2 by 4, until he squealed out his private key that unlocks his wallet.

Oh, that's awful. I thought they just waterboarded him at Guantanamo Bay or fed him scopolamine. 

They probably just forced him to take shitty Nboms and bathsalts till he puked his password out

[boumalo]

This is my first time posting, I've never bothered to do it before but i got to share my fear on this matter..
What can someone who stole a bunch of BTC and has very limited fiat do to cover his traces?
I would make a flash crash on a low volume market and prepare everything i have on several accounts to catch the low figures and buy as many clean coins as i could.
I would prolly lose 3/4 of coins but i get clean 1/4.

It is pretty unlikely that it is what happened. Someone that stole so much BTC may not risk in on a plateform if it is "tainted BTC"

I am glad you brought up the post about not glossing this over, it was an extreme anomaly and was crazy to see.

My personal opinion was that it was human error, but I have never sold BTC on BTC-E so I do not know if any sort of queue's pop up before you confirm your sale or anything.  My off the wall thought, or you could call it the conspiracy theory thought, that is just for fun and not something I truly believe....is that there was a single person or group of persons responsible at MtGox for the bug on their end that eventually led to the crash, and they were forced to sell their personal wealth of BTCs at $102 OR ELSE!

Anyways, I hope the true story comes out but until then I am sure we will get many guesses..

I have read a few possible explanations so far :

-Human error
-Apetersson's plausible explanation : "the plausible explanation is that a bunch of long positions were forcefully liquidated during a margin call. this caused ridiculous market orders to be executed.
additionally, the total market depth on those two platforms is not spectacular, so "only" about 8000 coins were needed for these two spikes."
-Conspiracy theory to weaker Bitcoin
-A big sell order to activate automatic limit losses and profit from it

The sell-off had nothing to do with the use of bitcoin as a currency.  Bitcoin is worth the same today as it was yesterday.  Two factors caused a financial event for speculators:  A false PR report by a broken company, Mt. Gox, and leveraged long positions facing margin calls.  You may recall the same thing happened to the stock market in 2008.  Perhaps the NYSE has immature infrastructure that means the U.S. dollar is not ready for prime time?  Unlike the stock market, bitcoin resumed normal pricing within hours. 

Everything is working as intended, here.  Except of course for Mt. Gox.

Bitcoin is great but the BTC exchanges have a lot to learn of NYSE and Nasdaq or at least they are not using the same amount of human capital and technology, NYSE and Nasdaq work smoothly enough, managing huuuge volums without many hiccups

[Mythul]

[Siegfried]

Bitcoin is going down. Anyone holding bitcoins now is a complete moron.
If yesterday's actions, and news about a major, unfixable bug in Bitcoin Network, didn't change your mind, you DESERVE to lose all your assets, and I wouldn't feel sorry for you if you lost everything & committed suicide.

Sell now people, I am being serious. This ship will sink very soon.

  you missed the boat and still want cheap coins. Away with your FUD!

Dude, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, there since the beginning, likely holding hundreds of thousands of bitcoins (10s of millions of $) just basically told everyone they're shutting down. (But in a way reminiscent of inputs.io) There's no way to pretend yesterday didn't happen. Bitcoin will be dropping.

Exactly, they are all fucking idiots.
Let them hold, I don't care if they lose money lol. They don't realize that the money they hold in bitcoins now is just air. It will vanish just as fast as they gained it. They are delusional morons who think bitcoin will be worth $100,000. Hahahaha, soon they will realize that they could've sold at the AMAZING, INCREDIBLE price of $700 when it drops back to $100, lol.

FBI has yet to sell 144,000 Bitcoins. Yesterday's crash was caused by only 3 to 6 thousand coins.
If they dump 144,000 bitcoins, it will drop back to $20 in no-time.

144,000 sounds like a lot of bitcoins, and it is, but 144,000 new bitcoins are created as mining rewards every 40 days. Selling 144,000 bitcoins would have a big impact on the price temporarily, but would be negligible in the medium and long term.

[sidhujag]

Sumting wong! as our foreign friends may say.

[jimhsu]

My speculation? Adverse order flow toxicity. If you feel like learning, go read up on VPIN, order flow, information theory, and GARCH.

[grahvity]

you can't destroy bitcoin by just selling it to death. the selling has to have some substantial fundamental reason behind it in order to do so

...  At the very least it spawns "Major bitcoin exchange shuts down" headlines and makes people who want to conduct business and trade using bitcoin wonder if they can handle the massive daily swings and risk of losing their money.

This is actually good news because when it eventually is corrected, it will just be one more example of how resilient is protocol is.

[ElectricMucus]

That was a simple long squeeze, not much about it.