This is my first time posting, I've never bothered to do it before but i got to share my fear on this matter..
What can someone who stole a bunch of BTC and has very limited fiat do to cover his traces?
I would make a flash crash on a low volume market and prepare everything i have on several accounts to catch the low figures and buy as many clean coins as i could.
I would prolly lose 3/4 of coins but i get clean 1/4.
It is pretty unlikely that it is what happened. Someone that stole so much BTC may not risk in on a plateform if it is "tainted BTC"
I am glad you brought up the post about not glossing this over, it was an extreme anomaly and was crazy to see.
My personal opinion was that it was human error, but I have never sold BTC on BTC-E so I do not know if any sort of queue's pop up before you confirm your sale or anything. My off the wall thought, or you could call it the conspiracy theory thought, that is just for fun and not something I truly believe....is that there was a single person or group of persons responsible at MtGox for the bug on their end that eventually led to the crash, and they were forced to sell their personal wealth of BTCs at $102 OR ELSE!
Anyways, I hope the true story comes out but until then I am sure we will get many guesses..
I have read a few possible explanations so far :
-Human error
-Apetersson's plausible explanation : "the plausible explanation is that a bunch of long positions were forcefully liquidated during a margin call. this caused ridiculous market orders to be executed.
additionally, the total market depth on those two platforms is not spectacular, so "only" about 8000 coins were needed for these two spikes."
-Conspiracy theory to weaker Bitcoin
-A big sell order to activate automatic limit losses and profit from it
The sell-off had nothing to do with the use of bitcoin as a currency. Bitcoin is worth the same today as it was yesterday. Two factors caused a financial event for speculators: A false PR report by a broken company, Mt. Gox, and leveraged long positions facing margin calls. You may recall the same thing happened to the stock market in 2008. Perhaps the NYSE has immature infrastructure that means the U.S. dollar is not ready for prime time? Unlike the stock market, bitcoin resumed normal pricing within hours.
Everything is working as intended, here. Except of course for Mt. Gox.
Bitcoin is great but the BTC exchanges have a lot to learn of NYSE and Nasdaq or at least they are not using the same amount of human capital and technology, NYSE and Nasdaq work smoothly enough, managing huuuge volums without many hiccups