Topic: I like the manipulator, I had him all wrong, he is robbing you fools (Read 4706 times)

Looks like e-bay needs to start limit people from removing listings for high priced items expensive items.
Good to know stuff like this is going on I guess 

If your trying to sell something rare on e-bay looks like you really need to start watching all similar listings and pull your listing if some tries to screw you over in this manner.

Way to necro post!

The last time "the Manipulator" was around it was found to be the owners of Bitcoinica changing the price to short squeeze people.

Be careful if you have bitcoins on an exchange.

Bitcoinica eventually got "hacked" and a lot of people lost money.

MtGox was also manipulating the price too.

Both of you are the epitome of the kind of blinkering that I was referring to in my post above.

If bitcoin is to be a currency in and of itself, it's value should not be pegged to ANOTHER CURRENCY!! And an inferior one at that. It has to be valued based on the hard assets, goods and services that people are willing to exchange for it, just like the USD is today. I am in no way saying that bitcoin is a hard asset. Read my post again, as both of you glaringly failed to understand it.

Like you said cluster2k, gold is priced in USD (and other fiat currencies, but primarily USD because of the global economic hegemony of the United States). We need it to also be priced in bitcoin independently of the bitcoin:usd exchange rate, and the same goes for other hard assets. That can only happen when people trust it as a medium of exchange and have a rough idea of it's purchasing power in their minds i.e. I can buy X loaves of bread with 1btc, or Y gallons of gas, or Z oz's of gold etc. Wide adoption is first necessary for this.


I had to quote this for fear you would go back and edit it out of shame. How would we value gold if it were not priced in USD? Are you actually serious cluster2k? This illustrates a conspicuous lack of fundamental economic knowledge on your part. Gold used to be the medium through which other things were bought and sold. Gold has purchasing power and intrinsic value not because of the fact it is priced in usd, but actually in spite of it! It used to be the other way round you silly person, the USD itself only had value in the first instance because it was pegged to the value of gold. And the value of gold comes from the reliable forces of supply and demand. The supply is very low, while the demand is extremely high. That is why it has purchasing power.

Yes bitcoin will inevitably be compared to other currencies by speculators, but without any hard assets in the bitcoin economy i.e. people willing to exchange these assets for bitcoin, it is a pointless comparison. YES there are 'real' costs associated with any bitcoin business that needs to be currently paid for in fiat, but they don't have to be paid for in fiat. Once people are willing for these costs to be paid for in bitcoin, then the exchange of bitcoin for fiat will not be necessary. This is why it is so crucial that we begin to offer goods and services in exchange for bitcoin, independently of a manipulated exchange rate.

Then, and only then, will bitcoin be a currency proper. As it stands now, the bitcoin economy is FAR too heavily reliant on fiat exchange services. It is almost akin to getting paid in USD for your goods or services, but having to pay all of your costs in cheese wheels that must be purchased by trading your USD for cheese on an usd:cheese exchange. Until businesses can pay other businesses in bitcoin for the majority of their expenses, it can only be a speculative trading vehicle with some very limited utility as a currency.

No currency or commodity exists in a vacuum.  All are compared against at least one other value metric.  Even the best commodity with a proven track record over thousands of years (gold) is priced in US dollars.  Without that metric, how would one buy a piece of gold?  What is its value?  The exact same is true for bitcoins.  You can mine them yourself, just as you can go out and find a piece of gold in the ground.  But there are real costs associated with both actions.  

Even if we price bitcoins in ounces of gold that doesn't change the fact that bitcoins will always be compared to the value of other currencies, either by one or maybe two degrees of separation.

BTW, bitcoin is not a hard asset.  It has no intrinsic value in itself and doesn't even exist in what most people would consider physical form (no, burning it to a ROM or CD doesn't count).  Bitcoin is an agreement between multiple people who agree to give it value.  Yes, there is a limited number that will ever exist, but in every other way it's the same as any other currency.

Bitcoin is abundant based on its current userbase. Its growth potential is uncertain at best so based on that assertion bitcoin is overvalued.

I am guilty of hypocrisy? Daytrading though a market maker only has an effect on the coins and fiat money already in the exchange. It does nothing to the system. All the bitcoins I ever possessed were either spent or used for trading.

Please do not compare bitcoin to an hard asset, gold, silver are limited by the laws of nature. I cannot substitute it with anything. Bitcoin is still more sane than fiat money but you are comparing apples, oranges and watermelons.

I'll make my own cryptocurrency, with blackjack, and hookers! - modified bender quote

If you want bitcoin to be a currency, then stop buying and day-trading it and start exchanging goods or services for it instead. Provide some REAL value! Complaining about the commodification of bitcoin while actively trading it for profit is utter hypocrisy.

If people are withholding from the market, it means they are unwilling to sell at current prices or else they have no interest in selling it in the first place - at any price. Does that mean the price is being artificially inflated? Whoever is giving away these incredibly rare tokens for $2.20 a piece is absolutely insane.

Basing the worth of a bitcoin on a manipulated rate quoted on an extremely thinly traded commodity market with very few participants, is an absolutely horrible way of valuing it. Of course the exchanges are going to be open to manipulation, of course people are going to get screwed by people with large amounts of purchasing power. The best way to deal with it and to move bitcoin into the realm of an actual currency is to just ignore the exchanges completely, to stop depositing bitcoin with them, and let the value of a bitcoin be determined by real world assets instead of fiat. Money is cheap and abundant, hard assets are expensive and rare.

The btc:fiat exchanges are blinding people to the true utility and value of bitcoin.
We are all getting blinkered by MtGox, and failing to see the forrest for the trees!

I have no problem with rising prices, but I'm interested in a currency and monetary system not a commodity with artificially inflated prices.
I want prices to rise because of real demand not because people withhold them from the market to increase scarcity.

I'm not sure what you mean. Why would you not want to have anything to do with bitcoin if the exchange price were to rise?

If there is an unexpected rally which liquidates my position so be it.

But it would have to be large enough to be market reversal at the same time and in that case that happens now I don't wanna have anything to do with bitcoin. So for me subjectively that is a win-win situation. (while is objectively be not)

An unexpected attack.

In the context in which I used it, an unexpected price movement that would trigger your stops. But since you said in another thread that you don't use stops, more likely it would cause a margin call or liquidation, wouldn't it? My meaning was the folly of being certain in the face of uncertainty.

As I said, if people are fearful after reading my post, then they are either trading at levels they really should not be trading at, or else they are more uncertain about their positions than they would care to admit.

Ahh reverse psychology....
So what exactly is a sucker punch? 

If what I said seemed to you like an attempt to induce fear, I think you might need to re-evaluate your market position. If uncertainly induces fear in anyone, then they should not be trading at the levels they are trading at.

Ok not most miners, just those big ones which do not want to (or can) pay the bills with their regular income. I'd imagine there are quite a few out there but eventually even that wall has to come down if fundamentals don't change.

Which brings me back to the trend & getting punched in the face: As long as bullish arguments are based on the attempt to induce fear I'd remain bearish.

Most miners are not mining hundreds of coins per day and racking up huge electricity bills that are so enormous that they need to urgently liquidate their bitcoin positions. How many of those 7200 coins do you think actually NEED to be sold to pay bills? Very few I would imagine.

Also, how many people do you suppose are mining because they actually want bitcoin rather than fiat? Mining is the most inexpensive way to obtain coins, and if you wanted to invest in bitcoin but not pay the premium charged on the exchanges, mining is the best way to subsidize the cost you would otherwise pay.

This is of course speculation. I am far from certain because there are too many unknowns, but what I want you to admit is that you cannot be certain either. So stop pretending that you are. We all know that you are shorting on bitcoinica. Might I ask what at what position you are shorting from?

EDIT: I just saw your title text. Ok, so your posts consists of opinion and not fact. Still, opinions that are not based on fact should never be held that strongly. And my question still stands.


You might be right. This has happened a lot, and the trend IS your friend...
Except of course when it's not, and you get sucker punched in the face.

There are 7200 new coins every day and most miners have to pay their bills with their coins. Also from past experience the bidwall gets usally pulled out after enough other buyers piled up in front of it.

Once those 10 have sold all their coins, what then?

if there's a manipulator foolish enough to buy, there's 10 more willing to sell.

If someone has sold 16.6K bitcoins at 30 that would equal to 500K USD on mtgox.

For me that is all the explanation I need.

unless the manipulator has unlimited funds, this issue will disappear naturally once more funds are added by more investors and traders.
The couple of hundredthousands he has in mtgox are still small overall in the financial world.
But you are right, there must be first some kind of trust of new investors... Or: one big investor just has the guts to make the manipulator look like a fool, with one big 500 k investment.
We know that this happens in the bitcoin economy. Back in Dec 10 - Apr 11 this is what actually happened.