Never seen that anywhere, anytime. Crashing so quickly!
Does anyone know of something that could explain this apart from pure panic?
In a thinly traded market in the middle of the night, stuff like this can happen. That's how we got from $205 to $152 in a few minutes. Now things have settled out around $180. But that's still down $25 from earlier in the day, and the $200 barrier has been broken for the first time.
Thinly traded? Bitcoin had never seen this kind of volumes. Never!
What most people like you don't understand:
There are people out there manipulating prices of stocks or even currencies long before there was Bitcoin. Just open your eyes and you will find examples for that.
It doesn't matter, that Bitcoin is a new technology, since the exchanges work the same way as everywhere else.
When I told people some years ago, that there are people manipulating stock prices, they told me, that is not possible. Today I can show them a court decision right here in Austra, that a stock was manipulated.
So, don't be naive, just because you don't understand how they manipulate this prices, doesn't mean they can't do it. There are people doing this shit for decades. (and no, I can't tell you how exactly they are doing it, I am not an expert either)
People like me are in the finance business. I am actually comanager of a hedge fund in Bitcoins, been working in the banking and finance business for over 10 years now, and am the CEO of Crypto
Finance Analysis Consulting.
So, unlike you, I
do undersand how these things work, and I can actually explain how prices can be manipulated.
It's been done with gold, for example:
A few banks agree on a strategy (the equivalent here would be the top 5 to 10 exchanges agreeing on such a plan)
During certains periods of the day, when the volume is known to be much lower than at some other times, they put sell orders to push the price downward. They lose money at that point, but since they can predict the volumes from years of experience on that specific market, they know the volume with rise within a couple of hours.
Anyway... Since they push the price downward, stop orders are automatically triggered, pushing the price further down.
Then, the volume starts rising again, but at a low price. The banks buy the gold and the price slowly recovers.
Ready for the next operation.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-28/gold-fix-study-shows-signs-of-decade-of-bank-manipulation.htmlWhy doesn't it work for Bitcoin?
- The history isn't long enough
- The price volatility is too high
- The volume volatility itself is too high, so there's no way to predict it
- The volume is not big enough for such players, who are playing of much larger ones, several dozens billion dollars per day.