Some people are still somewhat worried about the flash crash we recently experienced, and that is completely reasonable. In other words, I'm not blind to the problems, the obvious manipulation of the markets, but I don't think long term it will remain the same.
How are markets manipulated, you ask? Well it's not that difficult to understand. Whales, big whales that is, can bet against the price of a particular asset. They do this by leveraging their short positions on exchanges like bitmex. This means, in plain english, that they can gamble that the price will go down, using a 20x or sometimes more probability.
Since they have enough BTC to move markets, after placing such a bet, they can literally go into an exchange with enough volume, an exchange that is used for price discovery, and place gigantic sell walls that will scare the crap out of anyone who is actively trading.
I mean, imagine seeing a 2000 BTC sell wall, right above the current price. What would you do? Take profits, move to cash and wait for the dump. Now, imagine this snowballs, since more and more people will probably do the same, and imagine the stop losses, which are nothing more than programmed scripts being triggered. You see, it's literal manipulation.
Can this be fixed? Well, unfortunately the answer is not so clear. No market that I know of has completely eliminated manipulation. As a matter of fact, the legacy market is extremely manipulated, and there are people, scammers if you will, who even practice something called naked shorting. However, the size of the markets, makes it to where being rekt, so to speak, is not a common occurrence.
Eyes on the ball my friends... don't sweat these tremors too much, they are just that... tremors.
MenO
