[cadetzero]

Oh, this literally happened yesterday.

Someone sold off 5k bitcoins (~USD $450k at the time).

That's exactly what happened. Big sell off from 95 to 80ish, and then it sprang back to ~$90 today.

There's low confidence in it right now, but that's because most players are actual players. They aren't using bitcoins for groceries, like a bank reserve (yet). They're playing them like stocks.

[powertower]

5k bitcoin sell crashed the market?! To the tune of 100MM in market value loss on those transactions.

That just shows most people are hording it / not really selling or trading, and a few people are buying it, probably the majority of which are doing so because they need to spend it on SilkRoad or a gambling site.

The moment that goes away, or a few big holders decides to cash out, watch out.

[gyom]

And maybe the 5k seller wasn't even trying to game the system. He/she just wanted to get out.

Imagine a hedge fund with an order of magnitude more monetary mass trying to provoke those kind of sell offs and benefit from them.

[cadetzero]

It totally stands within reason that until it has wide spread adoption and regular people stop caring about what the exact exchange rate is that we will see large runs like that. As I stated, we have several people (myself included) invested to make money and take care of an investment, not to use a daily currency.

[Helianthus]

...this is exactly why it will fail.

[mrb]

No. There were already massive amounts of people exiting the market in 2011 (price went down from $30 to $2 in 6 months) yet Bitcoin did not fail.