Seems like a strange theory, although they might have data to back it up. Seems more likely that the panic happened and then everyone is logging on to either panic sell or watch the carnage, causing an accidental DDoS.

lag down to 7 minutes, looks to be stabilizing a bit

Few more theories

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the...n-crash-begins

Very interesting. I saw the bitcoin billionaire this morning doing what he was doing. He gave one guy like 2k in coin and right after that, he gave another guy about 1300 and just kept going and going. I don't know what the **** he was doing..or who he even is..odd though..very odd

I think my theory is by far the best I've seen (I wrote it earlier today when it was still at $240 a coin) :

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=4440

Someone care to critique it or tell me how I'm wrong? (seriously, I want to know if my theory is crappy)

I am becoming quite convinced it was coordinated DDOS.

69k bitcoins transaction occurred minutes ago

http://blockchain.info/address/1HQ3G...ytPCq5fGG8Hbhx

You stated the obvious so not really sure what you're looking for here. Yes price is driven by speculation. No people are not selling bitcoins on exchanges for millions (we can see every transaction as it goes down) and yes obviously people panic sell all the time. This isn't the first crash (even in the past month) and won't be last. Other than that I don't understand what your theory says other than its a bubble which is obvious.

what this doesnt show is that if you bought ~2 weeks ago you still tripled your money

........ and away we go!!!!!!!!!

Your an idiot. I always thought a lot of your posts were lies, and this just verifies it.

bitcoinity.org had been lagging by a few minutes all morning long before the crash and at one point it was shutdown for maintenance, so i don't think the lag was initially started by huge traffic although it compounded the problem when people started panic selling

and it's down again.

Guys, I am grunching, but that bitcoin.txt twitter account is one of the many "website.txt" accounts that sarcastically reprints what people in certain web communities are saying. Whoever runs it is making fun of whatever crazy message board posts they find. Here are a couple of others:

https://twitter.com/pua_txt
https://twitter.com/fanfiction_txt

So someone probably DID say what's in that tweet, but just some random person on a bitcoin msg board said it.

Interesting day we're having. I very randomly fell into owning a few bitcoins when they were dirt cheap (see this thread), and I'll be holding onto most of them while the market goes nuts, which I view as essentially pure speculation. And since I support decentralized crypto-currency from a philosophical / political perspective, this is something I want to participate in.

One thought I had is that for any given average price level (over the course of a day, for example), smaller spreads between the high and the low would tend to be favorable for the future prospects of bitcoin. Larger spreads would undermine confidence in the stability of bitcoin as a currency, scare off investors, and tend to make the value decrease. Is this general line of thinking reasonable or not? Obviously there are countless other factors to consider but if we only looked at this one factor, would it have any positive correlation with the market at all?

I honestly wouldn't even doubt if it was true anyway. The theory ever since that white paper came out is the the central banks are going to start pump and dumping.

also http://bitcoincharts.com/ is randomly not accessible for the last 12h+, long before the crash

It all depends on how long your steps 1-3 take. If it is longer than the average holding time, it will decrease velocity, increasing price. But yes, the main effect on price is from those who choose to hold their coins, for whatever reason.

I buy the DDoS, but I think a big government plan is a lot less likely than many other things. People trying to manipulate the price to get in low, whatever. Probably whatever sparked it didn't do a lot of the damage too, a lot of people have surely been saying "as soon as it goes down 40% I'll sell" for the last few weeks, etc etc.

It appears to be quite contentious that the price is driven purely by speculation (which is my assertion). I'm saying this because I think that once someone spends a bitcoin it will eventually be converted to dollars, so it doesn't matter how many businesses start to accept bitcoin. So the two determinants of price in the long term are speculation (demand) and the length of time that people hoard the coins (supply).

It actually is possible that individuals are selling millions worth, when you execute a big order Gox doesn't sell them all at once. When I sold my 32 coins it sold them in weird intervals of like 2 at a time.

I also gave the reasons why I think it will be a massive fall to ~50 bucks or less, rather than just a correction to 1xx dollars.

Everything you buy is driven by speculation. The grocery store sells an apple for a dollar based off of what he thinks will yield him the highest profit.

That's a bad example. People don't buy apples at a grocery store with the intent of profiting from them (this is what speculation is) but rather because the value is within the nutrients/taste gained from having purchased them.

Even if eventually it is converted to USD, does it matter? There is no easy(almost instant) way to buy BTC right now for cash, but imagine you can do it and also every merchant accepts BTC (regardless if it is direclty of BitPay style). In such world, to pay/send money somewhere it would cost us almost nothing compared to methods today.

If the prices fluctuates then the hoarding is the real problem, but if we can buy and pay with BTC wordlwide for less fees, then we will all use it.

That's because there's no money to be made speculating on apples. If there was a rapidly fluctuating apple price I bet you people would. Also my main point is that the grocery owner is purely speculating at what to sell his apples for.

Really curious where bitcoin goes from here... watching with popcorn in hand.

I've been doing a bunch of reading here on 2+2 and talking to a variety of different people, and as far as I can tell, when it comes to bitcoin there's a whole lot of "I have independently confirmed this by thinking about it" going on.

Essentially everything I've read is just a blind guess with a [source?] tag behind it.

Yeah, that is right.

Another part of what I am saying is that I think that folks who hold a lot of coins are not thinking: "Hmm, bitcoin is rising, I'm gonna put in a sell order at 200 dollars". Instead they wait until it gets to that point (say 200 dollars) and go: "Hey, I should buy a boat with this bitcoin money!". So there is a lag time in them making the decision there and that allows there to be a huge run-up in price, followed by a sharp correction.

The second part is that I think this correction will lead to a ton of speculators jumping ship because I think they will want to book a profit.