So, this is my analysis in the immediate aftermath of the 80-point drop from 630 to 550 on stamp (a 12% drop), which at the time of this posting (a few hours after hitting 550) has rebounded to 585.
I am calling this panic selling as an overreaction to news of the Silk Road selloff, announced immediately prior to the crash, here: http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/
Here's why I calculate it to be panic selling: According to http://bitcoinwatch.com/, the volume of BTC traded over the past 24 hours on all exchanges is somewhere around 150,000 btc. (Someone pls verify I'm reading the chart correctly ... ) Compare that to 30,000 btc that the US Marshals Service is going to selloff. Are they going to dump it on a single exchange over the next 10 seconds? No. They are giving us a 19-day warning (payment is due July 1 - see ). If total trade volume between now and then is (let's say) $2mil btc, an extra 30k just increases the volume over that time period by 1.5% -- a drop in the bucket.
Comments?
I was thinking more or less the same. Lets just see if we rebound strongly from here.