Hopefully the market is a lot bigger when the next batch is sold off.
Yeah I hope so too, kinda lame that only 35k BTC did all this.. my guess is some may have noticed the coins moving in time before these news hit the public and acted accordingly.
The trustee even took a break from selling for a longer period at some point but the last ~25k btc brought it down all the way to $6k.
It's not lame at all in my opinion. At an average of $15,000 per Bitcoin, 35k Bitcoin mean $525 million of sell. In a market where most of the Bitcoins are held for long-term and only a handful of them are traded on exchanges, 35k Bitcoins sold in big chunks can create a huge effect on the market. So it did.
Otherwise too, the marketcap at any given time is not the actual USD amount invested in all the coins. It's probably less by a factor of 50 in actual value because the maretcaps are determined based on total circulating supply. The amounts shown in circulating supply is not actually circulating because most coins are stored in wallets or masternodes.
We can see Steem as an example. The 251 million Steem shown as circulating are mostly frozen in Steem Power on Steemit and many are stored as liquid Steem. The amounts available for trading represents only a portion of the circulating supply.
I hope you know this all better than me but I loved writing this comment as it solidified my learning. I can be wrong, of course, and I request correction in case so is the case.
Lame was maybe the wrong word, I was hoping there would've been more buy pressure. Considering all other negative things that happened during that time though it might have been a combined effort to cause such a steep decline.
If mt. gox dumping to pay back the users that lost all that money in 2014 is one of the causes for the massive scam Bitconnect to go down, I'm not too disappointed by what happened to the price.
The attacks did seem to be coordinated and even right now, after having creating so much fud already, the attacks are still on.
What happened with BitConnect is good for the the crypto market any day. I agree with your sentiments.
I want to thank you for posting this. Earlier I read the headlines and thought "another bunch trying to figure out why markets moved in a given day". Yet you explained that this is a trend over a couple months. That makes it a lot clearer.
As I was reading I was thinking that this explains Bitcoin but it also shows how the alt-coins still are at the mercy of the grand daddy of them all. I know many proclaim Bitcoin dead (on a weekly basis it seems) but the market tells a different story. It is still the ringleader of this circus.
Any break from BTC is only temporary...everything else follows it over time.
There has to be a breakout at some point of one of the other coins. They cannot be simply tied by the apron strings to BTC for ever. Its like most of the worlds currenices tied to USD. Its not healthy for the future of crypto.
Well this explains a lot. I hope the Mt. Gox trustees will space their selloffs so as not to cripple the crypto market but there are so many variables in crypto that sometimes one can't say what will cause a fall in price.
I totally agree with @taskmaster4450 concerning the dependence of alt-coins on bitcoin in determining price. It is rather infuriating to see the price of steem go down because bitcoin's price did also. I also concur with @nathen007; alt-coins should break away from bitcoin. This is the only way for a truly decentralized world economy to emerge
I don't think it was only 35k worth of BTC that caused the crash in price, as acidyo stated, Chinese NY, FUD around regulations, Scams like Bitconnect, FUD around futures and the Issues with Tether all culminated at a point where BTC was at an ATH and an attractive sell point for many hodlers.
In my opinion it is great that BTC held 6k and held well above where it started at jan 2017 with all the selling that happened, all that selling is out of the market now, all the FUD is priced in and BTC held 6k and bounced to 12k doubling, it's only natural that many who bought the tops and bottoms over this wild price action will take their profits and losses or break evens as everyone has their own game and view points here.
The whales are pro's at selling off under pshycological pressure.