Replies

All the world's high tech gurus have not been successful in manipulating Bitcoin.

The price of bitcoin goes up 40% after Trump's election. That's not manipulation? Hype about what the president can do is manipulation. Trump's apparent support of crypto currency is manipulation.

The market price of anything including crypto can be manipulated.

Well, there you go. Manipulation.

But that's controlled by global demand and Putin can only pump and dump like everyone else.

Putin, like Trump, will have an effect on the market, for anything, including bitcoin. Talk it up or talk it down, and voila!, the price goes up or down, which is essentially, manipulation. People in high places can make things happen, sometimes good and other times bad.

And, when it comes to bitcoin, there is no real demand. The world has operated in the marketplace with government issued currencies, for millennia. There used to be a demand for cabbage patch kids some decades ago, and the prices of those dolls went through the roof. It was a craze, and the craze created the demand and the demand created the crazy prizes. Crypto currencies could die tomorrow and a lot of people will lose loads of money, but the government issued currencies will live on.

It appeared you were conflating "pump and dump" which is the world's oldest manipulation with some kind of mysterious high tech manipulation by Putin's evil genius hackers

The former exists and is pretty common in crypto especially "alt coins". The latter is not in available evidence. Hackers have had years and lots of incentive to manipulate Bitcoin in some high tech way. So far almost zero success.

And, when it comes to bitcoin, there is no real demand

Only $100k for something that used to cost a fraction of a penny. But that's not "real" demand as you point out. But the reason is not simply that it's another cabbage patch kid because CPK's are actually physical objects with residual value. You can give one to the dog to chew on and both you and the dog will be amused for a few minutes or so. Can't do that with a Bitcoin private key.

However there are other use cases for Bitcoin that are non-physical, like using the Bitcoin block chain to store immutable data. Example: https://unstoppabledomains.com I am certainly no expert in these use cases but I do know that they create demand and bump the price. You can say that's just another scam, but a lot of scams can add up to real demand.