re: Bitstamp Halts Withdrawls

I'll meet you halfway on that. I believe that there are a relative small amount of "players" in the bitcoin world among an ocean of bit investors and it's those players that manipulate the swings on prices on occasion.

We already know that it doesn't take a huge amount of volume to be suddenly dropped to at least temporarily crater prices and if one were to look at the buy and sell orders on the exchanges, the vast majority are for fractions of a bitcoin at a time.

Mix all that in with the fact that the exchanges can at any time "temporarily suspend" exchanges back to dollars and the price of bitcoin is more or less a mirage. It doesn't matter if it hits 25,000 if you can't get it.

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My bet is this is actually bitcoin owners doing this manipulation to acquire more bitcoins on the cheap. Think of how Wiki or Josh view bitcoins. This is the future. If you know it's the future and nothing will stop it, why not try to manipulate the market while you still can to acquire market share?

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I think Wiki & Josh are 'true believers' who just want bitcoin (or something like it) to succeed so desperately badly. I don't think that's the kind of person who would do this, because it's damaging to the bitcoin ideal and postponing the day when we can all throw off our shackles of etc etc in favor of the glorious techno-anarchic revolution. This is probably someone more prosaic, like the Russian mafia.