The BTC price is a little frustrating. I keep reading about "market manipulation" dragging it down. How does that play out exactly?
well when most orders are below 1btc, with only a couple orders under 5btc.. it is pretty simple for someone with 200 btc to eat a nice slice of the order list and then let the sheeple panic do the rest of the snowball effect.
the easiest thing to do is to just ignore the exchanges as they are not true supply and demand indicators, they are just bot trading speculators who day trade.
use localbitcoins or bitcoin-otc as your true supply and demand indicators. try not to let someone with just 200 coins determine the market cap value of 13.5million
Well said, I agree entirely. Adding to that, it pays to keep in mind that opposition to Bitcoin is still a very real threat. How that might play out is if a large entity with plenty of money decides to buy bitcoins over the counter (otc) without affecting market price, and then dump those bought bitcoins (at a loss) on the market. One needs to remember that not everyone is trying to make money with Bitcoin. Ultimately however, their efforts to suppress the price will fail, all they are doing by keeping the price down is making Bitcoin more accessible.
Hope that was clear.