Quote from: classicsucks on April 08, 2016, 06:40:16 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on April 07, 2016, 09:11:47 PM

Quote from: classicsucks on April 07, 2016, 05:17:52 PM

Quote from: r0ach on April 07, 2016, 04:14:30 AM

Most people in the speculation forum don't understand anything about Bitcoin mining. The first thing you need to understand is, nobody running a current process node miner actually turns them off no matter what the price does. You're either an ASIC dealer that spent millions on research and design to make it, or some random Joe that paid a big premium for one. Turning them off makes no sense for anyone since Bitcoin is an asymmetric investment. Unless you're mining with crazy expensive electricity, your current generation miner will either pay off eventually, or Bitcoin will go to 0. There's no purpose in turning it off.

While I like your thinking in general, this is a false dichotomy. You're forgetting that miners can and will SELL THEIR HARDWARE. We all know that mining becomes half as profitable overnight when the reward splits. Then likely the price of mining hardware will drop. If the price of mining hardware drops, couldn't the price of coin drop also, despite the decrease in supply? Do we have a good handle on demand? And what percentage of cash for coin exchange is just miners SELLING TO THEMSELVES to keep the price up?

When I look at exchange traffic and charts, it looks like automated trading to me.

I've bolded your last two sentences, above.

You are likely engaged in a bit of fiction thinking if you believe that miners buying/selling to themselves would have any meaningful impact on price or that it is any kind of widespread factor that affects price in any significant way. Further, in recent years, most legitimate exchanges (that affect prices) have various kinds of fees that would cause disincentives to trade with self. The extent to which some of the Chinese exchanges have no fees also cause a dramatic increase in volume, and they tend to not be much if anything of price leaders in recent years (and yes those exchanges are likely heavily employing bots that trade on very tiny spreads).

Employing bots on fee bearing exchanges does not delegitimize the trades, and the exchanges that maintain fees tend to be the most likely to be the price leaders... and even when exchanges allow for a large amount of leverage trading, those kinds of practices can take away (or at least discount) their ability to be price leaders. Yet, in the end, the price is driven by the combination of the actions on the exchanges, which supply of "actual" coins will factor into how much the price changes in one direction or another.

I have no proof that people are selling to themselves, but it's LOGICAL that miners would be. Selling coin to yourself can preserve profits, if it's keeping the price up. Paying the fee to the exchange is trivial, furthermore the exchange could be part of a scheme to keep prices up, and simply refund the fee (or double it). Of course you could also sell to yourself at a LOWER price - I suspect some are doing this as well. These markets aren't regulated, so there is nothing illegal about moving millions of BTC back and forth between sock puppet accounts all day. That's what this market looks like to me. If you control sufficient volume, it's possible even to move the market one way or the other, then buy low/sell high and profit. I know there are big players in the space who have the ability to move the BTC price, fortunately for this ecosystem, most of them favor the upside...

Sure, each of us is free to believe what we like based on the evidence of what we see and what we consider to be logical.

I understand and even believe that a certain amount price manipulation is taking place in the bitcoin space; however, your outline of a mining scheme to manipulate price for its own benefit and worth the cost of doing business seems to attempt to minimize the number of players in the bitcoin scene and the expanding bitcoin market. Your attempt to simplify and to minimize aspects of the bitcoin community is much more complicated than the more likely reality that there are a variety of players and miners are not significantly selling to themselves in any widespread way.

I agree that bitcoin remains a relatively small market (with a small market cap); nonetheless, I place quite a bit less weight on your description of influential bitcoin players because I believe that you are putting too much weight on the manipulation aspect whether you are talking about miners or other big (and likely manipulative) players. They exist, but so what? There are also a growing widespread of additional non-manipulating players.

There are quite a few theories out there that attempt to minimize the paradigm changing reality of BTC including ones that attribute a considerable amount of weight to the Gox willy bot in late 2013.. surely these price manipulation practices are factors that in fact affect bitcoin's price; however, even though bitcoin is currently relatively small, it's growth potential is considerable and likely, even if it may take a few years to evolve and to develop a larger grassroots base..

So even if there is a little bit of truth to your theory regarding some miners attempting to manipulate BTC prices, the practice is likely small in the whole scheme of things.. and anecdotal rather than systematic.