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All crypto markets have always been shallow and rife with manipulation. It's still almost a total free-for-all.

ouwen 9y ago
It is a bit nerve racking seeing the distribution of coins to such few addresses: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... I wonder if there is any collusion among the top 2000 addresses. Mind you one person can even have multiple addresses.
- simplemath__ 9y ago
  >I wonder if there is any collusion among the top 2000 addresses I would bet my life on it.
- michaelchisari 9y ago
  What's interesting is the rhetoric around cryptos as a populist movement. There's so many people on reddit that claim that trading cryptos is how they're going to get out of the 9-5 working man grind. That it's a way to end the dominance of the wealthy banking elites. And yet, the wealth inequality in cryptos, especially bitcoin, makes our current economic situation seem like child's play. If bitcoin ever does go "to the moon", we will have a small, few mega-wealthy elite who did hardly anything to build that wealth, while the rest of the world missed the boat.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > . There's so many people on reddit that claim that trading cryptos is how they're going to get out of the 9-5 working man grind. That it's a way to end the dominance of the wealthy banking elites. It's a common way of selling get rich quick scams; having a handful of people who have gotten rich quick provides a veneer of plausibility. (Including, but not limited to, Ponzi schemes.)
  - b1daly 9y ago
    That’s one reason Bitcoin won’t “go to the moon.” Real currency represents a claim on current production in the economy. If Bitcoin were to continue its exponential price rise, we would have a situation where the people who amassed Bitcoins early could claim wildly disproportionate amounts of the current wealth of society. There is simply no reason wealth holders are going to turn over real wealth to folks who happened to get in early to Bitcoin. This reflects that Bitcoin is not real currency. It’s a digital token, with artificial scarcity. Since the core protocol has remained relatively secure, it allows it to serve as a pure commodity for the purpose of market speculation. That’s the only thing driving the increase in price. Exponential gains (in dollar price) cannot continue. Therefore, the speculative motivation will leave the market. Probably the price will fall very soon. Once the price resets to a lower price point,speculative demand could pick up again. I suspect that there is massive, almost indefinite amount of demand for this type of speculative gambling. So, unless government steps in, we will see this constant, churning rise and fall distributed between the population of digital tokens suitable for this purpose. You can see that attempts by early crypto coin holders to “cash out” and lay claim to their nomitive wealth in the real world, in any significant amount, hasten the “break” in the speculative mania cycle. I’ve called the top here for Bitcoin, I don’t think it will break $20k. People active in Bitcoin find this hard to believe, but as an example from “meat space,” the price of Beanie Babies never climbed after its big crash. (My to the shock of these “beanie bag” holders, I presume.)
    - Retra 9y ago
      There's a lot of people who think it's a way to get rich... and I'm just wonder where the money would come from? You can't just withdraw $1M from a bank account for doing nothing and have nobody suffer for it. You're either duping ignorant people or you're the ignorant person being duped. Which looks is predictably like a pyramid scheme.
    - kleer001 9y ago
      The only problem with calling the "top" is that this latest bubble is the 8th crash. Of course depending on what we qualify as a bubble and as a crash. It could also be the 5th if we look at round powers of 10 being breached then recovered from. Just look at the full historic price of USD:BTC in a log graph and you'll see what I mean.
agorabinary 9y ago
And this is completely expected - any market with low volume can be easily manipulated.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Indeed. Prototypically, penny stocks.

It is a bit nerve racking seeing the distribution of coins to such few addresses: https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... I wonder if there is any collusion among the top 2000 addresses. Mind you one person can even have multiple addresses.

simplemath__ 9y ago
>I wonder if there is any collusion among the top 2000 addresses I would bet my life on it.
michaelchisari 9y ago
What's interesting is the rhetoric around cryptos as a populist movement. There's so many people on reddit that claim that trading cryptos is how they're going to get out of the 9-5 working man grind. That it's a way to end the dominance of the wealthy banking elites. And yet, the wealth inequality in cryptos, especially bitcoin, makes our current economic situation seem like child's play. If bitcoin ever does go "to the moon", we will have a small, few mega-wealthy elite who did hardly anything to build that wealth, while the rest of the world missed the boat.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > . There's so many people on reddit that claim that trading cryptos is how they're going to get out of the 9-5 working man grind. That it's a way to end the dominance of the wealthy banking elites. It's a common way of selling get rich quick scams; having a handful of people who have gotten rich quick provides a veneer of plausibility. (Including, but not limited to, Ponzi schemes.)
- b1daly 9y ago
  That’s one reason Bitcoin won’t “go to the moon.” Real currency represents a claim on current production in the economy. If Bitcoin were to continue its exponential price rise, we would have a situation where the people who amassed Bitcoins early could claim wildly disproportionate amounts of the current wealth of society. There is simply no reason wealth holders are going to turn over real wealth to folks who happened to get in early to Bitcoin. This reflects that Bitcoin is not real currency. It’s a digital token, with artificial scarcity. Since the core protocol has remained relatively secure, it allows it to serve as a pure commodity for the purpose of market speculation. That’s the only thing driving the increase in price. Exponential gains (in dollar price) cannot continue. Therefore, the speculative motivation will leave the market. Probably the price will fall very soon. Once the price resets to a lower price point,speculative demand could pick up again. I suspect that there is massive, almost indefinite amount of demand for this type of speculative gambling. So, unless government steps in, we will see this constant, churning rise and fall distributed between the population of digital tokens suitable for this purpose. You can see that attempts by early crypto coin holders to “cash out” and lay claim to their nomitive wealth in the real world, in any significant amount, hasten the “break” in the speculative mania cycle. I’ve called the top here for Bitcoin, I don’t think it will break $20k. People active in Bitcoin find this hard to believe, but as an example from “meat space,” the price of Beanie Babies never climbed after its big crash. (My to the shock of these “beanie bag” holders, I presume.)
  - Retra 9y ago
    There's a lot of people who think it's a way to get rich... and I'm just wonder where the money would come from? You can't just withdraw $1M from a bank account for doing nothing and have nobody suffer for it. You're either duping ignorant people or you're the ignorant person being duped. Which looks is predictably like a pyramid scheme.
  - kleer001 9y ago
    The only problem with calling the "top" is that this latest bubble is the 8th crash. Of course depending on what we qualify as a bubble and as a crash. It could also be the 5th if we look at round powers of 10 being breached then recovered from. Just look at the full historic price of USD:BTC in a log graph and you'll see what I mean.

agorabinary 9y ago

And this is completely expected - any market with low volume can be easily manipulated.

mirimir 9y ago
Indeed. Prototypically, penny stocks.