A few thing people here don't seem to understand:

Most buying is done off exchanges and OTC. By a wide margin too.

China is not leading this market.

No fee Chinese exchanges are being used to "control" the market, because bots are linked and people think China is leading the market.

Bitfinex is linked to Chinese exchanges to provide liquidity. Just like when BFX was linked to Stamp. That is why some full orderbooks are not shown. When a large drop occurs on Chinese exchanges the volume stays within the range, while Bitfinex drops with larger volume than normal. This is a combination of bot manipulation and Bitfinex offering liquidity.

The rise to nearly 800 was one entity, the OTC sellers and buyers waited until this entity was done and then plopped up over 25K BTC in ask walls, now it's up to 35K. The 35K BTC is a mix of real coins and borrowed coins for sale. You can see this by looking at the full order book, you notice the amounts for sale at XXX.37 repeatedly at every dollar interval? There are other patterns you will see as well.

The OTC buyers put sell pressure on BFX to keep the price down, so their OTC purchase will save them millions, by only making people who look at exchanges think we aren't mooning yet. Without their "fake" sell pressure we would be at ATH.

OTC firms do not care about this "manipulation" because they get a percentage in BTC and know that they will sell much more BTC OTC when the price is reasonable and not mooning. OTC firms might also be in on the fake sell pressure.

My guess is currently someone wants to buy OTC in the $650 range, or an OTC firm is seeing an influx of customers and is easier to just have stable prices for everyone Brexiting or running from their fiat market.

The Bitfinex "malfunction" was deliberate. Using statements from above you can see that dropping the Chinese exchanges prices are easy, causing all the longs on BFX to be force liquidated. Well guess who bought up all those coins that were liquidated while also putting the price back in their range? BFX has a ton of fees in BTC to sell, and guess how they do it? That's right, mostly OTC. And if a buyer says "no way I'm paying $700+ for those coins when the price has only been at this level for a week", then BFX has only one thing to do, bring the price back down in the OTC range.

Long term holders like myself, 4+ years, know this is going on and don't really care about exchange rates YET, because one day millions of small buyers who will only use exchanges will overpower any manipulation put forth by OTC markets and online exchanges.

Im not a newbie, I've been here since the first wall observer thread that is no longer used. Those were the days! My old account "hyphymikey" is no longer usable after this site was hacked a while back using the avatars or whatever it was. I was f@cking almost to Legendary status too, was just waiting on the random post thingy to get my promotion, then the site went down, then they said that I had to pay to get my account back or some shit. I had since moved to the other forum, but just wanted to post my thoughts here.

Most certainly not lol. I'm pretty sure if you read my old post history under hyphymikey, you will see me talking about this years ago. I haven't looked back at the history lately, but I'm pretty sure I've talked about it in this thread.

Low volume bot trading in China manages to bring the price down with big volume on other exchanges. They don't even try to hide the manipulation, but I don't blame them, traders are blind anyways.

China, with Huobi, its "leading exchange because of volume" drops with around 500 BTC traded, while Bitfinex drops with around 6000 BTC traded. Whats even funnier is that Bitstamp had more volume on this dip than Huobi. The day these Chinese exchanges have fees is the day the whales lose their surefire way to eat up all you minnows.

Off-topic:

My most used day trading tool, the all important Apple Watch.

http://i.imgur.com/SrCBWES.jpg

Edit: I guess I can't post images yet. Can I have my old account back please?

I don't get it. Are you a troll?

Too many whales just sitting on their hands not doing anything.

Who will be brave enough to act first?

All I know is the first to act will be the one that ultimately loses.

+1

I used to work in the petroleum and chemical refinery business. This video was shown numerous times in safety meetings and classes. What's surprising is, those tankers aren't suited for vacuum, and very little was needed to crush that one like a soda can.

1 of the 3 whales in bitcoin got bored I see. I wonder why he decided to dump and not pump? He must be stop-hunting some of the open longs, which isn't near as profitable as pump and dumping. But when you have insider knowledge a buck earned is a buck earned right?

He left to start his own hedge fund, he didn't quit out of nowhere. Stop spreading FUD like you always do.

If anybody needs proof of "whales"

http://www.cftc.gov/idc/groups/public/@lrenforcementactions/documents/legalpleading/enfbfxnaorder060216.pdf

"However, corporate users compromised a significant portion of Bitfinex's trading volume during the Relevant Period. In 2015, 88% of the dollars deposited to and withdrawn from Bitfinex were by corporate users."

Bottom of page 3

The failed to keep it under $500 part.... Whales can take a break from time to time. With the insider knowledge they have, they know when a large sum of fiat enters an exchange, and can either front run or at least hold of selling. When they see the "newcomer" is done buying they can sell for a profit. That's what we are seeing now. What's better than a pump and dump? One where someone else does the pumping and you do the dumping. It makes for much greater profit than any other method. You might even coax the newcomer into selling at a loss, and profit from that too. I just made a post here about BFX being 88% corporate aka whales, when this falls under 50% they lose all their power. So expect to see this over and over.

Bringing it back under $500 seems like a 30% chance to me, as in if they will only barely break into the high $400s. I think they have no incentive to do it because margin longs are so heavily backed that we would need $300s to see a significant margin call of longs. I'm thinking sideways between $580 and $620 until another newcomer enters or we see another hype cycle.

Interesting to see 1K BTC on the ask side to $800 on Bitfinex, Bitstamp, GDAX, itBit, and BTC-E.

Uh oh

Back in the original wall observer thread. I got there at $13 but I agree, good ol days!

23 hours and 59 minutes?

Some walls are put up to stall the price to give time for fiat deposits to show up, some walls are put up to gobble any coins front running to get more coins in a certain range, some walls are put up by buyers who want the effect of crossing $1000 to be bigger. It's either something like that or they are crazy.

They load up the ask side and take away from the bid side as if we don't know its all the same entity trying to scare us into selling our coins.

Thats why the sell side is huge, the shorts don't want to get squeezed. Almost the entire sell side is shorts waiting to be filled, so they "try" to safeguard already open shorts while "trying" to short the top as well. It usually never ends well for them in a bull market, but Im not going to tell a bear that.

How much did you pay for this account?

You don't even have that many btc

My guess is all those shorts start liquidating on Finex above $1150, so they are trying their hardest to keep it under. I will be ready for fireworks once its breaks.

Confirmed. They keep fighting it.

Just wait until after the ETF decision on Monday.

https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#dominance-percentage

47% dominance a week ago

Trend lines don't matter when Grayscale needs to buy 100's of millions worth of BTC for their IPO.