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Topic: Something is wrong. We cannot just gloss over the $100 sell (Read 7869 times)

legendary
Activity: 1666
Merit: 1057
Marketing manager - GO MP
That was a simple long squeeze, not much about it.
full member
Activity: 150
Merit: 100
you can't destroy bitcoin by just selling it to death. the selling has to have some substantial fundamental reason behind it in order to do so

...  At the very least it spawns "Major bitcoin exchange shuts down" headlines and makes people who want to conduct business and trade using bitcoin wonder if they can handle the massive daily swings and risk of losing their money.

This is actually good news because when it eventually is corrected, it will just be one more example of how resilient is protocol is.
sr. member
Activity: 364
Merit: 264
My speculation? Adverse order flow toxicity. If you feel like learning, go read up on VPIN, order flow, information theory, and GARCH.
legendary
Activity: 2044
Merit: 1005
Sumting wong! as our foreign friends may say.
sr. member
Activity: 266
Merit: 250
Bitcoin is going down. Anyone holding bitcoins now is a complete moron.
If yesterday's actions, and news about a major, unfixable bug in Bitcoin Network, didn't change your mind, you DESERVE to lose all your assets, and I wouldn't feel sorry for you if you lost everything & committed suicide.

Sell now people, I am being serious. This ship will sink very soon.

 Grin you missed the boat and still want cheap coins. Away with your FUD!
Dude, the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, there since the beginning, likely holding hundreds of thousands of bitcoins (10s of millions of $) just basically told everyone they're shutting down. (But in a way reminiscent of inputs.io) There's no way to pretend yesterday didn't happen. Bitcoin will be dropping.

Exactly, they are all fucking idiots.
Let them hold, I don't care if they lose money lol. They don't realize that the money they hold in bitcoins now is just air. It will vanish just as fast as they gained it. They are delusional morons who think bitcoin will be worth $100,000. Hahahaha, soon they will realize that they could've sold at the AMAZING, INCREDIBLE price of $700 when it drops back to $100, lol.

FBI has yet to sell 144,000 Bitcoins. Yesterday's crash was caused by only 3 to 6 thousand coins.
If they dump 144,000 bitcoins, it will drop back to $20 in no-time.

144,000 sounds like a lot of bitcoins, and it is, but 144,000 new bitcoins are created as mining rewards every 40 days. Selling 144,000 bitcoins would have a big impact on the price temporarily, but would be negligible in the medium and long term.
sr. member
Activity: 644
Merit: 250
legendary
Activity: 1918
Merit: 1018
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
sr. member
Activity: 462
Merit: 250
The feds butt RAPED the Silk Road guy in jail with a 2 by 4, until he squealed out his private key that unlocks his wallet.

Oh, that's awful. I thought they just waterboarded him at Guantanamo Bay or fed him scopolamine.  Grin

They probably just forced him to take shitty Nboms and bathsalts till he puked his password out
legendary
Activity: 1834
Merit: 1019
you can't destroy bitcoin by just selling it to death. the selling has to have some substantial fundamental reason behind it in order to do so

Exploiting a vulnerability in bitcoin's design while stealing bitcoins, causing exchanges to shut down transfers would be a pretty good time to dump bitcoins on the market if you wanted to affect the useful stability of the commodity.  At the very least it spawns "Major bitcoin exchange shuts down" headlines and makes people who want to conduct business and trade using bitcoin wonder if they can handle the massive daily swings and risk of losing their money.

welcome to Bitcoin lol
legendary
Activity: 1692
Merit: 1018
you can't destroy bitcoin by just selling it to death. the selling has to have some substantial fundamental reason behind it in order to do so

Exploiting a vulnerability in bitcoin's design while stealing bitcoins, causing exchanges to shut down transfers would be a pretty good time to dump bitcoins on the market if you wanted to affect the useful stability of the commodity.  At the very least it spawns "Major bitcoin exchange shuts down" headlines and makes people who want to conduct business and trade using bitcoin wonder if they can handle the massive daily swings and risk of losing their money.
legendary
Activity: 4116
Merit: 4738
You're never too old to think young.
The feds butt RAPED the Silk Road guy in jail with a 2 by 4, until he squealed out his private key that unlocks his wallet.

Oh, that's awful. I thought they just waterboarded him at Guantanamo Bay or fed him scopolamine.  Grin
hero member
Activity: 529
Merit: 501
The answer is really easy.

The feds butt RAPED the Silk Road guy in jail with a 2 by 4, until he squealed out his private key that unlocks his wallet.

So, with the 600,000 or so bitcoins in there, they went ahead and started selling lots at $100 per BTC, just so they could fuck with the exchanges.

Then they arrested the Bitstamp CEO and buttraped him too, and told him the story to put out. They found some skeleton in the Mt. Gox closet to black mail them also.

It's pretty fucking obvious, a caveman could figure this one out.

Start buying folks. The gubbamint is handing out free money, essentially, which is what they do best.
legendary
Activity: 1834
Merit: 1019
My theory: the current DDoS of bitcoin is done to destroy bitcoin, not to profit from it.  Maybe it's an entity that wants to destroy competition (a government), or someone who is jealous they missed the bitcoin billionaire boat and wants revenge.

MtGox et al still haven't declared how many bitcoins have been stolen using the DDoS.  They simply don't know at this point.  If I was trying to destroy bitcoin I would take some of my plundered goods and dump them on an exchange and see what happens.  Maybe I would spark a mass sell off and crash that helped me in my anti bitcoin goal?

Was it a whale panicking and dumping their load all at once?  Unlikely.  The market was pretty stable right before the flash crash.  It's not like a speculator was sitting there looking at their millions disappear into the ether and wanting to salvage something, anything, from the situation before the value crashed to zero.

you can't destroy bitcoin by just selling it to death. the selling has to have some substantial fundamental reason behind it in order to do so
hero member
Activity: 728
Merit: 500
Maybe the hackers are actually good guys. They've brought the issue up before but the dev team was too lazy to fix it. Now they have no other choice than to exploit it so that it get's fixed. They want to do it now while there's still a chance before bitcoin becomes mainstream and commercially used and it's too late. If it happened later it might damage bitcoin and everyone involved too much.
legendary
Activity: 1692
Merit: 1018
My theory: the current DDoS of bitcoin is done to destroy bitcoin, not to profit from it.  Maybe it's an entity that wants to destroy competition (a government), or someone who is jealous they missed the bitcoin billionaire boat and wants revenge.

MtGox et al still haven't declared how many bitcoins have been stolen using the DDoS.  They simply don't know at this point.  If I was trying to destroy bitcoin I would take some of my plundered goods and dump them on an exchange and see what happens.  Maybe I would spark a mass sell off and crash that helped me in my anti bitcoin goal?

Was it a whale panicking and dumping their load all at once?  Unlikely.  The market was pretty stable right before the flash crash.  It's not like a speculator was sitting there looking at their millions disappear into the ether and wanting to salvage something, anything, from the situation before the value crashed to zero.
newbie
Activity: 9
Merit: 0
I had a buy order at 515 and hit during the Bitfinex flash crash. Made a killing... all luck. My friend had a short position that should have closed during that time but it did not.
legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1011

We need to wake up and pay more attention to this.

Why?  Given the much more substantial problems of scalability, dominating mining pools, and government regulation, why should we worry about such a non-issue?

If a whale is able to profit from creating a flash-crash then I say good for them.


This kind of crashes show how weak the whole ecosystem is. I agree with OP, what happened on BTC-E should be written in the damn history books of bitcoin.

The market is unstable. And while I don't advocate for 'SELL AND RUN', I'd say that only the ones that have the guts to watch falling to 100s to HOLD. Other's should sell portions now and diversify.

To clarify.  I see this flash crash as a non-issue as far as Bitcoin is concerned (which is what I believe OP was considering).  People that are worried by this spike certainly should be paying more attention and should reduce their holdings until they feel comfortable.

It is a neat event for the history books, I'll give you that.
legendary
Activity: 1064
Merit: 1001

We need to wake up and pay more attention to this.

Why?  Given the much more substantial problems of scalability, dominating mining pools, and government regulation, why should we worry about such a non-issue?

If a whale is able to profit from creating a flash-crash then I say good for them.


This kind of crashes show how weak the whole ecosystem is. I agree with OP, what happened on BTC-E should be written in the damn history books of bitcoin.

The market is unstable. And while I don't advocate for 'SELL AND RUN', I'd say that only the ones that have the guts to watch falling to 100s to HOLD. Other's should sell portions now and diversify.
legendary
Activity: 2772
Merit: 1028
Duelbits.com
You can't sell on BTC-e at market price so it's not mistake/typo/thin orders.

Probably either panic, stolen coins or some leveraging got busted.
legendary
Activity: 1246
Merit: 1011
They were certainly very, very strange. In fact I don't think we've seen a move like this in the entire history of bitcoin.

It certainly was a large flash-crash, nearly 10-fold.  I remember witnessing a near 1000-fold flash-crash on Gox (mid-2011, it turned out someone hacked the exchange).

We need to wake up and pay more attention to this.

Why?  Given the much more substantial problems of scalability, dominating mining pools, and government regulation, why should we worry about such a non-issue?

If a whale is able to profit from creating a flash-crash then I say good for them.
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