Hell, I’m almost enclined to believe this has to be a concerted effort by some entities who dislike Bitcoin. It’s incredible how there is always a huge problem leading to wide and severe trust issues with Bitcoin.
I'm interested in this theory. Did you have the same opinion of the people making the trades that increased BTCUSD from under $3 to $7? Are you opposed to people developing miners that are more efficient, use GPUs or FPGAs, or can consolidate their processing power into pools? These all create more liquidity and volatility in the market, the same as leverage.
Did you think the run up from < $1 to > $10 was healthy? (I will leave alone the one-time push to $30, unless you wish to include it.)
The whole of the BTC economy is less than the most "real world" currency. Of course it's going to be volatile.
I'm not sure what to say regarding your conspiracy theories. If I have a formula such as 1) dislike btc, 2) apply basic trading tools to exchange BTC and fiat, and 3a) Crush bitcoin or 3b) Profit! Which branch do you find more likely?
I’m against leverage with Bitcoin because it is nonsensical to use margin on a highly volatile asset, though it will sort itself out because the gamblers will keep giving their money to zhoutong.
I think the spring/summer runup was justified to a certain point because the community did quickly expand at the time and the huge growth is still visible now. ~500-700% growth from April’s 1 USD is quite possible, yes.
What I meant to say is that it’s weird that Bitcoin is plagued non-stop with such fiascos, and in my opinion at the very least the MtGox incident wasn’t profit-oriented. We know that the attacker allocated himself all Bitcoins on MtGox via admin account, then sold them all off, creating the crash to $0.01. He couldn’t withdraw all his cash due to the limit. I don’t think a profit-seeking hacker would plan that badly. It’s also way easier, quicker and safer to withdraw the Bitcoins. IMO the perpetrator was more interested in creating charts like this one:
http://blog.asymptotic.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Bitcoin_crash_2011-06-19.pngThen followed a myriad of scams and hacks like MyBitcoin, several exchanges, allinvain etc. which undermined trust and further damaged Bitcoin’s reputation.
