[gwern]

Meh. Flash crashes happen with big namebrand stocks too. The nice thing about flash crashes due to dumping is that they are self-punishing: whoever was dumb enough to dump that much ETH in a few seconds cost themselves a ton of money. A fool and his money are soon parted.

[DiNovi]

It was actually a cascade - the market sell brought it down to 224, but then there was a crush of margin calls and market stop loss orders, which triggered all the way down to 10 cents. Wish I was there to scoop some!

[alimbada]

Yep, someone who bought ETH during the pre-sale cashed out (https://etherscan.io/address/0x7d551397f79a2988b064afd0efebe...) which then triggered the cascade.

[samkxu]

Please stop spreading this misinformation. If you look at the transaction, the only thing that happened was using the safe split contract which essentially gives the owner equivalent ETC.

[DiNovi]

I don't think it was confirmed this was the person, or was it?

[FeatureRush]

On reddit someone commented that this whale must have know what he was doing... So, in theory could dumping large amount of ETH could affect pricing of even larger amount enabling the whale to profit from this procedure?

[DiNovi]

it's called stop-loss hunting; this just happened on a grand scale.

Theoretically because literally everyone doing it got liquidated it probably won't happen again - people wont set up stop losses and gdax will probably introduce a circuit breaker.

[fragsworth]

The margin calls are what pissed everyone off, and exacerbated the crash.

It's even possible that the multi-million dollar trade wasn't an accident, and they put a bunch of buy orders in to hunt the margin traders.