Bitcoin at all time high

[Dan Druff]

To be honest, all it really takes to manipulate bitcoin upwards is to make buy orders substantially above sell orders, and then do the reverse to bring it back down. The downward slope will, of course, be a lot steeper than the upward one.

It's incredibly easy to manipulate the bitcoin market because it's all anonymous. There's no way to tell who or what is buying up all the bitcoin or selling them rapidly, so that makes it incredibly easy to falsify mass interest or mass panic, thus inducing real mass interest and real mass panic.

I am confused. I really don't read that much about bitcoins except for a few key areas and none deal with price manipulation. I do know you have to have the capital to place the sell orders in your mtgox account.. Do you not consider the capital required to buy in that volume to be significant ? Or am I missing something glaringly obvious ?

Explain this "incredibly easy" way without having the capital required. We can look at trade volumes and prices to get an idea of the capital required, right? Or is it your theory that these volume numbers are falsified by mtgox ?

Is it actually possible to place buy/sell orders in some way that amplifies your capital ? Kinda like trading on margin ?

I also wonder about these "collapses". Something that is trading 10x what it was a month ago.. What sort of metrics are people using when they refer to this as a "collapse"?

Thank you for your clarification.

I didn't say that it took no capital.

When I said "easy", I meant that it did not require a super-clever strategy or complex market manipulation schemes.

Certain people, groups, or entities with the capital to make this happen might have realized this opportunity and gone for it. There's also the possibility that this was manipulated on purpose by the government or banking industry, just to ruin the public's faith in bitcoin. People would be much more receptive to using and accepting bitcoin if it held a relatively static value, rather than launching up and down rapidly.

A "collapse" is something that loses over 50% of its value in one day. Wouldn't you say that's accurate?

There were many reports of the housing market "collapse" in 2007 and 2008, despite the fact that most of these properties were still worth more than what they went for in 2003. It was defined as a collapse because the recent buyers lost a lot of money on their investments in a very short period of time.