Price manipulation may be going on, but the price of a bitcoin is still high compared to the cost of mining it. When the hashrate curve flattens out again (as it has before), or at least when the "cost of mining a bitcoin" flattens out near (but less than) a bitcoin, we will have a correct bitcoin price. This will happen either if the bitcoin price goes low enough or the hash rate goes high enough. Since the current hash rate is still going up, we don't have a low enough bitcoin price yet.
Have you got any idea how much it costs to mine 1 BTC currently?
No, but he likes to open his mouth anyway to sound like hes smart.
Too bad, the dumbest usually sound the loudest.
Way to say that nice and loud there. The principle that bitcoin mining cost should determine the price of bitcoin was given by Satoshi in the white paper, and is reiterated many times in the early posts on this forum. Here's Hal Finney in 2010:
One reason price might follow difficulty is that mining should not be too profitable (because nothing should be too profitable, the world doesn't leave free money lying around). Therefore the price of Bitcoins can't rise too much above the cost of mining (counting equipment depreciation among the costs of course). The cost of mining is proportional to the difficulty (approximately). Therefore we might expect to see price proportional to difficulty.
Totally agree. I set my "long term" buys at fixed rate above mining costs. I doubt the cost of Bitcoin will cross below the price of mining, but it might come close. Depending on hardware and electricity costs miners are still profiting 20-30%.
Once the price gets low enough or the difficulty high enough "manipulation" will stop and hoarding will increase, causing the price to go up due to no selling pressure.