Number go down: the single trade that crashed Bitcoin

“The crypto blogs put forward all sorts of bad reasons — it’s capital flight from China! It’s Bakkt offering Bitcoin futures! It’s Flexa offering retail payments in crypto! It’s Microsoft experimenting with the blockchain! — even though this was really obviously a manipulated push like so many before.“

All reasons for the price to rise or drop are obvious in hindsight. I like to see pundits make these predictions before the price event. Better yet, buy or short sell BTC, make a screenshot and put your money where your mouth is.

So figure out when market manipulators are going to act? You'd have to be colluding along side them to know this.

Any reasons to expect that they won't be able to cash out? Why?

These fluctuations have been a part of Bitcoin for a few years now. And while most people think it's no big deal I think it's absolutely fatal.

It's fatal because bitcoin isn't supposed to be some kind of stock that you buy, sell and speculate on. It's supposed to be a currency and that's where it's supposed to get its value from. Unfortunately that's not how it's being used because unfortunately it's not a very good currency.

Nobody wants to use a means of exchange that fluctuates widely from day to day. No one wants to accept $ 1 in bitcoin for a loaf of bread if that $ 1 could be worth ten cents tomorrow. Currencies need to be stable for them to be usable as a means of exchange.

Unfortunately this sort of instability seems to be a feature of bitcoin rather than a bug. Unlimited anonymous transactions means the system will be easy to manipulate.

That said the dream of bitcoin could be one that saves humanity from the financial tyranny imposed by governments. This is particularly true for people who live in third world countries where governments play fast and loose with their currencies and their money can quickly become devalued.

It is also to an extent true for richer nations where government control of the currency led to things like the great depression the great stagflation of the 70s and heaven knows what ill effects it's causing today that economists of tomorrow will learn about.

It is clear to me that having independent currencies will result in a freer more prosperous world. I think what's needed is an alternative to bitcoin that is set up to actually work like a currency rather than a share or forex market with people buying currency that they don't plan to use.

I think the solution is to learn from paypal which also set out to create it's own currency and almost succeeded. Create an alt coin and brand it as a currency and have it be used that way. Maybe go to ebay top sellers or etsy top sellers and convince them to accept your alt coin. Have rules and tracking mechanisms in place to prevent manipulation of the money supply. And most importantly a widespread currency can't have anonymity. I'm not saying anonymity shouldn't be allowed in a currency. But widespread use of a currency requires being able to manually undo transactions that were done through fraud, the way banks and credit card companies can. This is why people tend to avoid making large payments in cash, they want a paper trail so it can be undone if necessary.

>That a trade that small would cause the market to crash by double digit percentage points is absolutely a sign of a thin market.

It was only the market on a single exchange, Bitstamp, which is extremelly illiquid compared to the largest exchanges. The problem was that Bitmex, a much more liquid exchange, bases the settlement price of its popular perpetual Bitcoin swap on an index of just two exchanges, Bitstamp and one other, so manipulating the price on illiquid Bitstamp also screws with the price on liquid Bitmex.