If indeed this was the biggest cause of the decline in the BTC, ...on the one hand how volatile and how manipulable is this currency, the rest of the small holders are tied to the decisions of large corporations
First, all markets can be manipulated.
you can thank a whale for the spike in SBD prices.
But what is different about bitcoin is that you have to earn the damn stuff. In the stock market and COMEX, the people manipulating the markets can print infinite amounts of U$D. They can print enough money to keep the price of silver suppressed at about $15 when the market, by all metrics should be $200.
So, with bitcoin, yes they can crash the market, but they had to engineer a crash of MtGox to set up having enough bitcoin to do the dumping. They had to get their hands on the bitcoin in the first place.
There will be a lot of manipulation of the bitcoin market going forward. You just have to learn to see what the big buyers are doing. If you set stop losses, then those whales can dump enough bitcoin to trigger all the stop losses and buy up all of those lower priced bitcoin.
Here is a video by Bix Weir about the MtGox conspiracy.
Great info man thanks, Im still a newbie on crypto so Im still learning. As you said and its true its different with biconic because you can't prin the amount you want immediately to control the market, even this big corps have stacked a lot of btc to crash the market as they want. Im gonna save this video to watch it later at home, thanks for the answer man :)