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It actually doesn't take much to move BTC price up or down. For instance, buying 16.6K BTC on Bitstamp would move the price to $2000. Selling the same amount w

• eterm 13y ago
  It would move the buy price to $2000, but in theory the sell price wouldn't be moved and so there would simply be a large margin until liquidity improved. If no one is willing to buy a bitcoin for $700 right now, there's no reason to think anyone would be willing to buy a bitcoin for $700 even if you were offering $2000 for any bitcoins on the market. Of course people aren't rational and you might catch out people ignorantly trying to follow a graph they don't understand. This is in part why it is irresponsible for exchanges such as mtGox to report a single "price" for bitcoin, they should always report the current prices as a tuple of (Offer, Bid) prices.
  • ye 13y ago
    > This is in part why it is irresponsible for exchanges such as mtGox to report a single "price" for bitcoin No, it's not. They are reporting the price of an actual trade, where buyer met the seller. At that point the spread is effectively zero.
    • eterm 13y ago
      The spread is only zero instantaneously however, and is much more open to manipulation than (bid, offer) is. In reality all three should be reported together when one is as they are all very important.
      • ye 13y ago
        The whole market depth is very important. Should they report thousands of numbers now? Just because there's a buy bid at $700 for 1BTC and a sell bid at $703 for 200BTC, doesn't make these two prices equivalent or equally important.
  • wmf 13y ago
    It's no different than any other market. Noobs look at "the price" and traders look at the book.