Touche - some element if wishful thinking from my part 
And you are right at the moment liquidity is not great with markets shutting down left and right, that is probably the biggest risk.
But... there is a difference between agressive trading and manipulation also called cheating. I can't call a banker friend and set the BTC exchange rate, as we have seen in the libor, and seems to be happening with gold and forex. If I have a lot of coins I can try a big dump, small trades to influence price, etc. But it's all in plain sight and anyone doing so takes risk. So I think I meant 'central' manipulation. The equivalent in BTC world would be someone setting up a trojan in the bitcoin source code to skew the algorithms for private gain. Highly unlikely given open source nature.
The only thing I fear is HFT - I hope the community finds a way to ban or control it. Perhaps exchanges should enforce a minimum time between transactions (but very fast transaction execution), or offer a separate exchange with no limitation for the battle of the trading bots. Otherwise bot become a transaction tax as they work on both sides of the spread.
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Very liquid and without mass market manipulation - you're joking right ?
[/quote]
And you are right at the moment liquidity is not great with markets shutting down left and right, that is probably the biggest risk.
But... there is a difference between agressive trading and manipulation also called cheating. I can't call a banker friend and set the BTC exchange rate, as we have seen in the libor, and seems to be happening with gold and forex. If I have a lot of coins I can try a big dump, small trades to influence price, etc. But it's all in plain sight and anyone doing so takes risk. So I think I meant 'central' manipulation. The equivalent in BTC world would be someone setting up a trojan in the bitcoin source code to skew the algorithms for private gain. Highly unlikely given open source nature.
The only thing I fear is HFT - I hope the community finds a way to ban or control it. Perhaps exchanges should enforce a minimum time between transactions (but very fast transaction execution), or offer a separate exchange with no limitation for the battle of the trading bots. Otherwise bot become a transaction tax as they work on both sides of the spread.
[/quote]
Very liquid and without mass market manipulation - you're joking right ?
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