Maybe it is just all PR
The craziest conspiracy theory is the whales did this on purpose not just to profit by shorting and repurchasing cheaper, but also to create a massive amount of promotion for The DAO.
The any promotion is good promotion school of marketing.
$50 ETH here we come? (note it could also crash to $1 so please don't think I am offering any advice)
Normally it is best to buy when there is "blood in the streets". Ethereum isn't likely dead. So far, CC is a delusion of decentralization any way.
The ETH chart is looking very similar to BTC's 2013/14 crash.
Note after an extended deadcat bounce, then BTC proceeded to make lower lows and eventually found bottom @150ish.
I rescind the quoted speculation. Lower lows seen on the chart now, because of the revelation that ETH is fucked.
It's going down, down, down. Game over.
The big shit might come soon as the press takes this to damn all cryptos...
Bitcoin survived well from previous problems and correction hard forks. So did the Monero. I think Etheruem will also survive.
A salient difference is that Bitcoin and Monero were fixed. This issue can't be fixed because smart contracts are programmable and so the protocol can't protect against all bugs in the smart contracts.
The only way it is fixed is by the ecosystem maturing and having a wide diversity of smart contracts (many of which have been well vetted) so that the failure of any one of them can't impact the ETH price significantly. And I think also Ethereum might have a problem where bad contracts can infect other contracts, so that may prevent the ecosystem from ever being NOT TOO BIG TO FAIL (I need to research this more).
Thus since the ecosystem is a long way from achieving that (heck there
isn't even a use case for smart contracts yet and The DAO as it was designed was not a use case as I had explained), the price could move much lower, perhaps at least back to $7, if not $1. But maybe not. It depends on how the speculators interpret this.
Note I called every price move of ETH correct, the temporary correction at $5-6, the top at $15, predicted in advance the drop to $7 and rise to a double-top at $15, and recently I said it was at nosebleed and I also warned against technological failure. I also wrote within the past 48 hours that it was best to sell out of the DAO to ETH so as to be ready to sell.