The big dump was because someone is "stupid"?
Not necessarily. If I had a five figure number of bitcoins and wanted to buy a house, I'd probably just sell enough of them in one big lump after perusing the bid orders. Even expecting the price of bitcoins to appreciate faster than the mortgage would build interest it would be worth it to not have the debt.
Overall the dump was a good thing for bitcoin. That five digit lump can now be spread around the bitcoin economy and the exchange took it like a champ rebounding like it did. It shows this isn't like the bubble that happened earlier in bitcoin history and with half of all bitcoins minted, some of these older lumps of bitcoin are going to drop into the market from time to time.What would be stupid is if everyone waits till bitcoin hits another record high to do so, because that would be catastrophic to bitcoin's long term health.
Yes, the fact it reasonably recovered is a very good sign. The timing was actually great, a week earlier and it...
because someone else may do it first? there are people with huge amounts of coins - tens of thousands,
who got them cheap in the beginning (for as much as 0.1 USD) or mined them by themselves and who can crash the price easily;
maybe some of them just needed cash for X-mas presents
Let's see... Size of dump: Around 16K? Blockchain height is 211210.
Number of bitcoins issued to date:
((210000)*50) + ((211210-210000)*25) = 10 530 250
Assume no bitcoins have been lost ever.
Assume every bitcoin is owned by a fat cat.
What is the upper limit on the number of people who can own X thousand coins?
For X = 16K, 32K, 50K, 100K, 200K:
10530250/16000: 658
10530250/32000: 329
10530250/50000: 210
10530250/100000:105
10530250/200000: 52
Even in theory, at most a couple of hundred people could own several tens of thousand bitcoins.
There are some
few people who
do own several tens of thousands of coins,
but their true number must obviously be lower than these upper limits.
Major moves
need to be large enough to turn the market around to be "worth it".
Otherwise the former fat cat is stuck with fiat, and can only buy back at loss.
Big dumps have the effect of distributing coin from the fat cats to have-nots.
Big dumps? Bring them on. (Just not all at once.)
QFT