
The "Bart": sudden hundreds-of-Bitcoin pumps or dumps to burn the margin traders - davidgerard
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/12/17/the-bart-sudden-hundreds-of-bitcoin-pumps-or-dumps-to-burn-the-margin-traders/
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dragontamer
As BTC Difficulty decreases, the profitability of miners begins to re-enter
the picture, but at a cost.

It no longer costs ~$6000 of dollars to mine a bitcoin. Difficulty has dropped
dramatically, by 30%+ since August, so miners can actually make money selling
BTC in the $3000 to $4000 region now.

I used to theorize that $6000 was the price floor for BTC, but I was proven
wrong these past few months. If BTC's price drops, then miners leave, which
causes the difficulty to drop, which allows (remaining) miners to stay in and
make a profit.

Which now brings up the question: what is BTC's true price floor? If
difficulty can ramp up and down and respond to market conditions, what exactly
is supporting BTC's price up? If anything, the low difficulty of BTC now acts
as a resistance: miners probably are fine making a profit now at $3500ish, so
I don't see any real reason for BTC's price to go up.

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jki275
It's very hard to define a floor. Speculation exists that there isn't one,
though I wouldn't exactly agree with that. Bottom line, the floor is wherever
people want to buy it enough to overcome their caution about doing so.

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botever
This sort of thing has always been prevalent even in more regulated markets.
Index futures are a canonical current-day example. The industry is flooded
with $500 daytrading margin brokers who sell order flow and (under the radar)
margin utilization to big players, who can then perform similar manipulation
to effectively steal money from uninformed, overleveraged small traders.

It's legal theft by the same people who made massive overleveraged bets and
got bailed out by insiders. Humans are a joke primitive species, even in the
limited galactic order.

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davidgerard
oh yeah, it's just prevalent in cryptos - here we're talking about the
_biggest and most liquid_ crypto. It's a tiny, thin market.

