even i too don't understand much about the market but i like how BTC is going ;)

I'm on steepshot viewing your post so I just see photo

You can bet that there are a few whales who have a great influence on the bitcoin market whether they are doing it on purpose or not.

Steevc, there is manipulation at every turn that's for sure, I've always been skeptical about the supposed invisibility of bitcoin, although that could be my mind trying to hope. 

Markets are manipulated the world over, and it isnt helping that the price of over 1000 cryptos depend heavily on the price of bitcoin.

Like you rightly said though, the price of steem can and should sway with a little press coverage. 
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Its been long steevc, hows the music been going?

This is not an issue confined only to Bitcoin <a href="Barclays suspends currency traders" target="_blank"><b>Barclays suspends currency traders</b></a> but it does raise an interesting thought.

Money manipulation and stock market influencing are illegal pretty much world wide so if there were such a practice going on I wonder why the authorities such as SFO (Serious Fraud Office UK) are not investigating it. Maybe they still think Bitcoins is <em>funny money</em>? ;-)

The value of an altcoin is strongly linked to btc value but not only. If it has a strong "background" (community, devs, marketing, wether it bring something new technologically and to the people..) like Steemit. Then it can grow almost independantly of bitcoin value.

And not sure about this since I am a beginner, but if your post is upvoted after the payout, I saw somewhere that you still get steem power reward.

It's easy to forget that there are still quite a few power players who could essentially "Buy bitcoin" and take a huge huge share of it.

Or satoshi could reappear, for good or for evil, and tank the whole thing.

We're far from "stable" on a macro, global scale... it's still cutting edge tech in my eyes.

Hi @steevc. I read about Spoofy in the morning as well. Shocking how one person, or one colluded group of people, can have such an influence on the market.

I think Bitfinex should be held accountable for the manipulation it is allowing. Furthermore, how do we know that the rise in the value of Bitcoin is real? 

Something should be done.

Altcoin dry bitcoin not fly . when altcoin fly you also see bitcoin flying too up up

It's true that we can learn a lot from bloggers here on Steemit, thanks for the links to those articles @steevc

of course some large player is playing with the Bitcoin Price

its so evident.

Stuff Like Spoofy is normal in the Equity Markets, I am not surprised to see this happen in the Crypto Space too.

My mind has kharab with poloneix!! Daily my account is going down and polo has suffered with technical issues!!

Hey there .. all I know is at some point with the ups and downs BTC and Steem are still  great investments.

This has been the case since the beginning - and  the manipulation is even greater in the alts (including Steem) because they're easier to move.

That's what happens when there is no regulation - nothing anyone can do about it unless they want to go down the route of regulated exchanges.

i think with AI added into the mix and people paying for super computer access it's only a matter of time before we see pockets of those with the power using it against things like crypto. it's how the community deals with that, with their own white hat AI i guess! let the battle of the AI trading bots begin!