What's the worst odds you would bet at for the Feds actually manipulating the market? Just curious.

That's just one exchange. When the price doesn't move on the other exchanges, people are going to arbitrage it right back down. That's a lot less risky than playing the momentum side.

If the feds can do this so easily, why are the whales not doing the same? Get coins cheap and slowly. Drive fake bubble. Sell in bulk at top in an auction. EZ GAME!

Well a couple guys from the feds stole 800k worth of bitcoins during the silk road bust. I know a person in the feds who says they need to remember the girlfriends names from the wives names and try not to get them mixed up.

Id say the chances are pretty damn good.

These guys get off on action.

Are you saying this a rouge action?

FFS... because they aren't auctioning them off the market. You can't sell in bulk at the top because it crashes before you can unload any significant amount. I'm done explaining it. Off to do more productive things.

It's far more likely to have individuals being opportunists than getting an entire group in on some ploy. Even if your plan was economically feasible the people who might have the power to pull this off wouldn't also necessarily benefit from making extra money at the auction.

Just as an aside: What is the auction money used for? IMO it should be donated to charity or used in some way that does not benefit the FEDs at all, we don't want them incentived to steal people's money.

lol

There are bulk off-line sales all the time, and no reason you couldn't do that. "Hey, I'm going to sell 50,000 coins on this day to highest bidder" and take care of it. Governments don't have exclusivity on auctions.

If that's the case and you think you can round up people to pay close to market price, then you could make money doing this.

Basically what you're saying is anyone with coins can make more money by manipulating the price up before they sell.
Seems if this is true you could just make an endless amount of money. Not sure why you aren't doing it.

If this was true then why aren't people exploiting the hell out of this and doing large leveraged orders on forex brokers that allow you to short bitcoin? $200k is nothing if you can actually move the price down by that much..

Yes, but then wtf do you do when you want to cover? You have to buy it back which then causes the price to go back up.

Say the price (bid and ask) is just around 400 on CB exchange, and you sell 500 coins at market into it. In the seconds after you do this, you're going to knock the bids down, say to around 392, but the offers will stay at 400. Meanwhile bids and offers on other exchanges will remain around 400. Your average price on the 500 short coins is going to be closer to 392 than 400.

Now on CB exchange people will begin to narrow that spread by posting bids and offers inside the 8 dollar spread you created. As soon as people drop their offers enough below 400, traders and bots will see an arbitrage opportunity where they can take those coins offered below 400 on CB exchange, and sell them on other exchanges. This will tend to stabilize the offers at a little under 400 on all exchanges.

Meanwhile, there is no reason for anyone to hit the bids on CB exchange at 392, because they could still hit them on the other exchanges close to 400. The bids can rise all the way back to almost 400 without any selling pressure on them. By the time people actually have a chance to think about what just happened, the price will have mostly recovered.

You won't have a chance to take advantage of the move you created on one exchange by placing big leveraged orders on another exchange. In fact you will run into the same problem there, where your own orders get a worse average price than the level you can move the market to.

People who think it's easy to manipulate markets with big orders neglect the fact that you don't get to trade that big right at the best posted prices. Read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator for more on this, particularly the experience of Jesse Livermore going from bucket shop trading, where you simply gamble on stock prices without actually buying or selling anything, and trading in actual markets where your orders can move the market.

Auction coins are on the move. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/com...ns_are_moving/

One wallet in particular has a bit of strange action. They instantly broke it down into a bunch of smaller wallets. Didn't waste much time at all.
https://blockchain.info/address/3MTF...HhgcUw9HJdEjUR

Likely bought by a group that bought shares.

If this is the case, you would think they must have gotten them for a discount. Otherwise they would have just bought the BTC from an exchange.

Prediction #1: price will hold or move higher as "they" won't let it drop before they auction off the coins.

Verdict: WRONG. Price according to coindesk dropped from a high of $485.17 at 13:00 UTC on 11/4 to $394.98 at the opening of the auction at 12:00 UTC on 11/5.

Prediction #2: Downtrend post-auction that may "take a few days" to turn strong.

Verdict: Still in progress but so far WRONG AGAIN.

Price at auction open: $394.98. Price at 23:00 UTC 11/9: $381.02.

Indeed the price has spoken.

I said it should hold or go higher and the price was at $305. Tell me how I was wrong? Oh because it overshot and pulled back the day of the auction? It still HELD OR WENT HIGHER.. Much HIGHER from my post.. so don't be throwing your anger as you watch your pig slide and slide as 3600 coins hit the market everyday. Don't hate the player hate the game.

Omt your troll game is strong. Always spinning it.

LMAO... those auction winners are just now realizing they were had :-)

Think the price will be relatively stable over the next few days? I need to move some cash->btc->cash around. Also considering just leaving it in btc for 6months or so hoping the price bubbles up like fall 2013... awful idea?

Troll?

I know the price went a bit nuts last week but it looks like it corrected. Is there something I should be aware of?

http://gizmodo.com/ken-m-is-the-most...net-1739028329