Quote from: deisik on February 13, 2019, 08:55:17 PM

Quote from: figmentofmyass on February 13, 2019, 08:45:09 PM

there was the bitstamp bearwhale back in 2014. i think that wall took a few days to break. Cheesy

i agree though. i might give it a day or so to account for banking delays, but if real people are buying/selling a price level for any sustained period of time, that's the real price. that's why i don't buy the BS about willy bots and tether printing either. sure, maybe there were efforts made to pump the price. you think those alone could sustain bubbles (with full-fledged media coverage) for months and months? of course not. real money did that

There's more to it than you think

If it was real money that made the price rise from zero to hero and all the way up to almost 20k (within just one year), then where did that money go? As a conspiracy theory, let's recall that in August 2016 Bitfinex was hacked with over 120k bitcoins stolen. So how could they repay that debt? After they redeemed all BFX tokens in early 2017, they started to run "quantitative easings" with Tether, which allowed them to buy up real bitcoins with fake dollars and close the liquidity gap after the token redemption. That made Bitcoin go parabolic. Then they stopped printing tethers and the price expectedly crashed. It is basically the same thing as with Mt. Gox but done right this time

that's a nice theory but the numbers don't seem to add up regarding the hack. bitfinex issued ~$70million worth of BFX tokens after the hack. from that, a significant amount was converted to equity in the parent company. by early october 2016 (long before the bubble began), there were only ~$48 million in BFX tokens remaining. all the while, they continued to do record-breaking volumes and became the world's biggest exchange. near the end of the year, they should have been making $100k+ a day in fees and it was constantly growing. if only half the outstanding october debt were converted to equity, the other half could easily have been repaid through operating profits.

bitfinex releasing $20-30 million into the market at once (redeeming BFX tokens for USD) obviously had an effect. naturally some of those people bought BTC with that money, especially because it was already in a strong uptrend. but that was literally only like ~20k bitcoins back then at those prices. there's no way that caused the market to then rise another $18k-19k over 8 months, lol.

so there's no reason to lump the bitfinex hack in there. if tether printing (as in, non-backed USD liabilities) really affected the market, it would have had to be several orders of magnitude bigger. of note: when the market topped in december 2017, the tether market cap was ~$1.1 billion. the tether market cap continued rising until october 2018 when it peaked around $2.8 billion. so the market crashed in spite of the continued tether printing.

people are always looking for explanations why the market does what it does. at the end of the day, bitcoin was pumping for the better part of a year, on massive volumes across the entire world. trying to blame that on tether is silly.