Most buying is done off exchanges and OTC. By a wide margin too.
I always suspected this. I'm curious if you have any figures or links related to this fact.
P.S. Welcome back.
You need to take that notion with a grain of salt. Because... it might be less likely to see that happening in the West, and more likely happening in the East.
That
"off exchanges" notion is mostly related to the mentality of nations and cultures. And basically in Ukrain / China / Russia / Mongolia / India .. it would be more likely to see "hand to hand" = "black market" transactions going on. All this compared to the West, where people would be more scared and paranoid of doing this sort of transactions. Also... in the East, people tend to not do business with strangers! Usually they need to be family, they need to live in the city, you need to know where they live, you need to consolidate the trust. Because I'm from the East(even if I live in Central Europe)... and I can tell you as a weird notion out there... I live in a small city of 50.000 people and I know where everyone lives, what part of the city if I don't know their exact address or who they are related with, and especially if I want to make transactions with them! And I would expect to be invited in their home or something like that if they want me to sell me something (like bitcoins), and in rest...
everyone knows everyone! And you don't do business without knowing someone. No strangers allowed!
Off exchange transactions is neither an east or west phenomenon, but merely a prudent practice for someone who is able to establish such connections.
If prices can be driven down on exchanges with 10k coins, and those same 10k coins can be bought back at a lower price off the exchanges, without moving the price back up, then conducting off chain transactions makes sense for those individuals with a large number of coins whether they are in the east, west, weast or in the snourth.
The logic seems reasonable, but it'd still prefer to see some facts. You would have to do it across all exchanges simultaneously. Split
BTC10k only puts like
BTC2k on each major exchange and then market sell? How much slippage will that get you? What will you do with all those yuans after that? What are the chances that another whale gets you and market actually moves against you? Now you sold your coins for cheap and got to buy them back at higher rate OTC? I'm sure it does happen, but would probably take more than
BTC10k What's most likely is someone cornering the Chinese miners, wouldn't be surprised if one broker contracted them all, and all mined coins have been already presold with futures. Luckily that funny business would be cut in half in about 10days
I believe that we largely agree.
I used 10k BTC as an example, but yeah of course depending on the level of shenanigans is going to take a larger number of coins to achieve larger levels of control, but it is not unreasonable to be happening by some of the larger players.
Furthermore, surely I also agree with your assessment of various risks that are involved in attempting to make these kinds of plays whether you are a manipulator or not.. and as the bitcoin marketcap grows, the amount of capital needed to make such plays becomes higher and higher.
I think that part of the point with some of the larger manipulators also will be to attempt to undermine bitcoin in various ways on fundamental and perception levels, and they do not necessarily mind operating at somewhat of a loss if they are able to achieve their objectives to keep the BTC prices down and to keep the prestige of bitcoin down.
However, there is some amount of losing battle aspect in this whole matter of pushing BTC prices down as long as bitcoin continues to be adopted on a broader and broader level by more and more folks, it becomes more and more difficult to keep the prices down through these kinds of OTC manipulation behaviors, and these powers that be in the government and financial institutions just have to allow for some upwards BTC price movements.
If these various powers that be (TPTB) in the government and the status quo financial institutions had their druthers, bitcoin would not have surpassed $500 for more than just a blip.. and now, we are kind of stuck with these higher BTC prices, and TPTB are going to be much less and less convincing in their various attempts at spreading FUCD about BTC because the actual facts of the upward moving price kind of speak in a very concrete way against their various propaganda points.
Anyhow, BTC is in a very decent place right now, even if prices were to get pushed down into the lower $500s... and really it seems that there would be a considerable struggle to accomplish such a pushing down of BTC prices and I have my doubts about what kinds of resources would be needed to achieve such pushing down of prices to such lower $500s levels.
Sure, on a personal level (as likely smaller players), each of us gotta prepare ourselves for BTC price movements in either direction.. but stacking our BTC holdings a bit lopsided in favor of upwards price movements seems like a reasonably likely profitable play even with such likely ongoing manipulations taking place behind the scenes.
