Topic: One day.. like gold.. the price of bitcoin will be manipulated by banks - page 2. (Read 4641 times)

The free market remedy is the altcoin.

When the free market decides that the ownership of Bitcoins is too lopsided in a manner that is against the public interest, or that there are too many coins out there that are sitting idle, not circulating, and causing people anxiety... those people will start accepting altcoins for their goods and services and will potentially make the value of a Bitcoin plummet.  That should be an incentive for big/majority holders to make sure the coins start flowing.  I mean, this is why Bitcoin is succeeding...the people buying it are jumping, at least in a small part, out of the dollar and euro and perhaps even gold.

And by altcoins, I don't mean any specific altcoin.  In other words, it's not going to be a run to Litecoin.  If the masses start chanting that all old money needs to go down the toilet, they'll start accepting a brand new coin totally free of prior speculators.  The old money won't go to zero, it will just go down a lot and lose its "bubble air" as the speculators jump ship (probably a good thing for stability overall).

You'll have cryptocoin clients with plugins that allow entities to pick which coin they will and won't accept for whatever reason, so the overhead of businesses deciding to accept or not accept a new "whatever coin" will be trivial, especially if there are mostly automated tools and platforms for converting them to whatever asset the business really wants to hold or do their accounting in.

OK, I will admit, I've wandered into pure speculation territory myself.  It is at least plausible, however, I think.  I can't imagine people would want Bitcoin if one entity had a significant percentage of the total coins and was using it to disrupt the markets (presumably without concern for a loss of their own wealth).

Your point is very true, but you must understand that Bitcoin is a huge leap in the right direction, that is, out of the hands and control of any small group.

Here is what I gather from precious metals.. especially gold: the price is heavily manipulated.

The thing that occurred to me... you really can't manipulate the price of a commodity by buying up all of it to then try to corner the market and then flood the market with sales. The reason is as you buy the commodity up it gets more expensive and you end up making other people rich and not yourself. So instead of buying up all the gold........ banks (or whoever is in charge of this manipulation) simply go to people who have large amounts of gold and say hey can I borrow this? The large sums of gold are lent because they will be paid handsomely as a cut for manipulating the market.

Now that a large hoard of gold is "borrowed" it can basically be used to flood the market and outpace any buy orders. The only threat would be someone with such huge reserves of cash that they could buy all the gold and screw the manipulators.


Disclaimer: this is all just theory and I actually don't know much about gold price manipulation... it's just guessing.

so in the same way... right now the bitcoin market can be manipulated because it's so small. but once it's huge it will be harder to manipulate. Manipulators would have to borrow large amounts of bitcoins and then flood the market with them.

I've read and watched different things about gold and the one odd thing is how gold gets borrowed all the time. Why would you ever borrow gold instead of just borrowing money? I think market manipulation is the only real reason for it.