Topic: How many bitcoins are needed in order to control the prices? (Read 1225 times)

With 10-20 000 BTC at your dissposal you can deffinately effect things at mtgox for example with good likelyhood that you will come out profitable from it.
If your sitting on 100k+ BTC you can do a lot more thou. If your action is against what the mayority of the markets ide of things are and you try to puch the price to far out in either direction you will sooner or later come to a point when it's not profitable for you to manipulate the price further thou.
But basically the big players can control and probably mostly do control the price at the moment to some extent and they seems to have done so for quite some time, at the moment they seems to want it swinging around or slightly under 100 USD.
There's not much that will stop them from rasing the price back up to and beyond 200 USD as soon as they think they have made enouth profit on trading low and bought up enoth cheep coins at the current low pricelevel.
Pressure from GPUminers (mining mostly altcoins(LTC and others) now, seeking profitabillity) and soon the first generation ASIC miners will eventually have to puch the BTC price up to way higher levels than it is at today, it woulden't be to unrealistically that we will see prices at or beyond 1000 usd in a years time from now, maby sooner.
Price will probably start to move up soon or at the latest within a couple of months time when we will start to see the effect of what will come from a few companys ASICs that's much more energyefficient and has better price/performance on there miners coming from Russia and Sweden....

None......

You just control an exchange like Mtgox... force the price up, then when it comes crashing down, cut everyones access to trading.

Probably if they sold them on exchange. It would be much more likely that sales of this kind of magnitude be done either offline by selling the entire wallet and having proof of trusts set up to prevent the original owner from stealing them. Also they could just be transferred and the payment be made offline. I think Yifo alluded to both of these possibilities during a talk.

It wouldn't be in their interest to disrupt the price anyway since their units' ROI would go down and less people would want to buy them.

Just saw many people exchange Avalon chips with their bitcoins.

Will the seller eventually have enough bitcoins so that he can influence the price of bitcoin?