I've long thought this, but the events of the last couple days have made me almost certain it's what's at play.
The entire crypto market is being manipulated by the manipulation of the BTC market.
The culprit?
Sitting Limit Orders
Think of all those limit orders sitting out there at any given time, all denominated in BTC, not fiat.
So even if someone is still willing to pay the same amount for STEEM as they were the day before, in satoshis they will, but in USD they will pay far less if the price of BTC is being suppressed.
As to whether parties who have entered the crypto space in force who are masters of market manipulation have the ability to do this, well just ask anyone who's been investing in precious metals over the last decade. Yeah, pretty effective. They know their game.
I recently heard a CFTC official call for the introduction of derivatives into the crypto space so that it could be considered a sufficiently liquid market to be allowed into retirement accounts (which, btw, is not a decision the CFTC gets to make, thankfully). If that happens, forget about it. BTC will become a completely fake market that has nothing to do with market sentiment.
Decoupling
I took a look at the performance of the top 100 coins a few times between yesterday and today. What I saw again and again was that the altcoins recently introduced to Coinbase/CB-pro were not responding nearly as severely to the downturn in BTC as all other coins, save XRP (where I suspect other manipulation going on). Right now just about everything seems to be coming back, but 0x and BAT were up this morning when BTC was still dropping.
Why?
Well my guess is that they are no longer pegged directly to BTC. That means people are deciding what they are willing to pay for each coin in fiat, and whatever limit orders they had sitting there 2 days ago either filled at that price or are still sitting there. The movement of BTC had nothing to do with it.
The Hope
If this is the case, then what we would hope for would be that more and more coins would get fiat pairs on major exchanges, so that BTC would no longer be the one coin that can strangle the entire market.
They can't manipulate them all! But they can manipulate just a few, and especially just one or two (BTC and maybe ETH if they can get futures through for that).
What Do You Think?
Do you believe the BTC market is being manipulated?
Are you hoping for more involvement in the market by institutional investors?
Do you see liberation of altcoins from BTC as something that will make a big difference in the future of crypto, or not so much?
i do think it's being heavily manipulated by large forces at play -- perhaps because they want to get in at rock bottom prices -- or because they want to kill it to create their centralized state digital coins...
but one thing is for certain, this is exactly what we need:
cannot wait! but i am liking these prices for buying!
Yeah, I had been considering myself fully invested, but I couldn’t resist these last couple days. Got two limit orders out right now.
Posted using Partiko iOS
Makes a lot of sense really. I f you follow the charts over any period of time the almost match the BTC chart exactly. I hadn't though about how the limit orders might effect this but it's a good argument.
There is obviously huge manipulation of bitcoin and the alts anyway as the market cap is tiny to large investment firms. You can see where there were huge moves made over the past year that really effected the pricing. Hopefully we will get to the stage that there is direct conversion to STEEM and that it has enough backing to set it's own chart.
Yes, I think that's going to be vital. If you look at the % change in the charts for most coins this week, you'll see the % change against BTC is less than 1% on them all. But against USD!
And for no reason. USD is a crap currency.
I think it will be a focus for some of the crypto's this year and it really should be for STEEM. If we want more people to get involved and join then there needs to be much easier access to buy and sell than what we have right now. The whole set up is just too complicated for the majority of people to bother with so it needs to change.
This really needs to happen.
Posted using Partiko Android
I'm really, really looking forward to the day!
I don't have the fine understanding of the markets that you do. However, one of the qualities of Steem I found most attractive was its decentralized character. It seems that having one powerful currency essentially controlling the value of other 'altcoins' defies the idea of decentralization. I was hoping for a little more chaos :) Some years ago (before the 2008 collapse) I got caught up in currency manipulation when I invested in European bonds. At the time I didn't understand that these bonds were denominated in Icelandic currency. You can imagine what happened to my investment.
This whole Bitcoin thing feels familiar...
If BTC feels like Icelandic bonds to you, you probably should wait until the industry is a bit more established to really invest. It's very different in some ways, but what is in common is that both are very risky. I'd say they are risky for different reasons, which for me makes the crypto risk worth taking. I think crypto is really like investing in internet companies back in the mid-90s. There was still lots of upside even in the mid 2000's and for a lot of people that was the better time to come in. The whole thing was pretty iffy for years, and a lot went to zero. But you only needed one that didn't go to zero to make a fortune on this brand new industry. Right now we're having to navigate how to protect this industry from forces that would turn it into something else before it even has a chance to mature as its original idea.
I don't mind risk--I used play slots, for fun. But then I knew I was throwing my money away :) What I resented with the European bonds was being "had". The financial advisor and currency manipulators had a field day with me. The high yield should have been a tipoff, but I didn't look too closely. Thought it was denominated in Euros, because it was issued by the ECB.
I love the idea of crypto. I love the idea of decentralization. I'll only take a risk that won't hurt. At my age, that is the way to go.
My hope is that decentralization especially can survive. And my concern that it won’t. To me the greatest risk is that governments will effectively kill decentralization (and anonymity) or failing to be able to, outlaw either holding or trading it.
That's where we come in. There has to be political pressure. That comes from us. This is something I understand a lot more than money.
This needed to happen a long time ago. Manipulation is obvious for quite some time. I hoped for more STEEM-fiat direct pairs on exchanges, but that probably won't happen before one of two things happen first: 1) an emancipation of altcoins in corpore (or the ones which get it) from bitcoin or etherium, or 2) STEEM going mainstream
Yes, though Coinbase is working on getting a large range of coins. Working at it very slowly! But working at it. Perhaps others will want to be competitive with them, so are working to do it even faster. So much going on behind the scenes in this booming industry that the mainstream still doesn't realize they should be investing in.
Well, I don't have a positive user experience with Coinbase. For a long time there was no way to use it from my country for deposits. Now there is an option I don't prefer. We'll see. At least there're trying, while keeping in good terms with various authorities.
Posted using Partiko Android
I never actually thought about that the reason that as BTC goes, so goes all crypto, is because of how all the alts are paired to satoshis on exchanges. I feel a little "d'oh" now, lol.
I agree then that it would probably make a lot of alts more stable. But would it help cryptos overtake fiat if we're still thinking in terms of dollars? I don't know, I'm really pondering this now.
I don't personally hold a goal of seeing crypto overtake fiat. I like the OMG approach of "unbanking the banked." The point is just to make it less necessary, even for those who now have full use of it. When we have options that can hold their value and be a part of money that delivers real value to the world (by solving a problem with the tech), that's good enough for me. Others can go right on choosing USD, pounds and Euros if they want.
As more altcoins start to disappear and the viable list of assets get more attention, I think the decoupling will not only happen but will lead to bitcoin dominance being lower than the current 50% as it becomes the go-to asset for institutions. While it will remain king for now, it will be stuck until adoption increases in payments instead of only being a store of value.
Good point. Another thing good altcoins need is for bad altcoins to die.
Steem is a relatively expensive thing to get into. Why? Euro > pay someone > dollar > pay someone > BTC > pay someone > Steem (reverse for withdrawing Steem). Investors look for max. ROI, and the relatively high overhead of Steem is a drawback. I've long argued for direct exchange against fiat making it easier for folks to start using Steem but hardly any one cared to even talk about it.
Until this changes, Steem will remain somewhat tethered to BTC and therefore subject to market manipulation like Coffee Beans, Oil and Tulips.
The real value of Steem lies in it's utility; it's not a substitute for Gold but could be a great substitute for bank notes.
I agree completely. We aren't trying to be gold. We are great for transactions, with a market already there for earning as well. Best currency, IMHO.
Honestly, the quicker people are able to easily buy Steem directly using Fiat, the better for all of us... I'm sure there are so many businesses who would jump on us the second easy, safe , cheap conversions are possible...
I think so too. It's huge to have a fiat pairing on a major exchange. Heck, even just getting added to Square's Cash app would be a big deal.
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