Very interesting post about whats going on in the Bitcoin market.
Worth reading because similar things are probably going on all over the place. (OTC means "Over The Counter". Thats when large trades are carried out off exchange directly between a buyer and seller who negotiate the transaction).
A few thing people here don't seem to understand:
Most buying is done off exchanges and OTC. By a wide margin too.
China is not leading this market.
No fee Chinese exchanges are being used to "control" the market, because bots are linked and people think China is leading the market.
Bitfinex is linked to Chinese exchanges to provide liquidity. Just like when BFX was linked to Stamp. That is why some full orderbooks are not shown. When a large drop occurs on Chinese exchanges the volume stays within the range, while Bitfinex drops with larger volume than normal. This is a combination of bot manipulation and Bitfinex offering liquidity.
The rise to nearly 800 was one entity, the OTC sellers and buyers waited until this entity was done and then plopped up over 25K BTC in ask walls, now it's up to 35K. The 35K BTC is a mix of real coins and borrowed coins for sale. You can see this by looking at the full order book, you notice the amounts for sale at XXX.37 repeatedly at every dollar interval? There are other patterns you will see as well.
The OTC buyers put sell pressure on BFX to keep the price down, so their OTC purchase will save them millions, by only making people who look at exchanges think we aren't mooning yet. Without their "fake" sell pressure we would be at ATH.
OTC firms do not care about this "manipulation" because they get a percentage in BTC and know that they will sell much more BTC OTC when the price is reasonable and not mooning. OTC firms might also be in on the fake sell pressure.
My guess is currently someone wants to buy OTC in the $650 range, or an OTC firm is seeing an influx of customers and is easier to just have stable prices for everyone Brexiting or running from their fiat market.
The Bitfinex "malfunction" was deliberate. Using statements from above you can see that dropping the Chinese exchanges prices are easy, causing all the longs on BFX to be force liquidated. Well guess who bought up all those coins that were liquidated while also putting the price back in their range? BFX has a ton of fees in BTC to sell, and guess how they do it? That's right, mostly OTC. And if a buyer says "no way I'm paying $700+ for those coins when the price has only been at this level for a week", then BFX has only one thing to do, bring the price back down in the OTC range.
Long term holders like myself, 4+ years, know this is going on and don't really care about exchange rates YET, because one day millions of small buyers who will only use exchanges will overpower any manipulation put forth by OTC markets and online exchanges.
