[grageth]

Food for thought for all those that praise Bitcoin's resilience. In the regulated stock exchanges around the world there are laws and steep penalties around doing things shady. In the Bitcoin world there are none. The fact that everything is anonymous only adds to the issue. The value of bitcoin is determined by what people are willing to purchase it for. I am no financial expert (not even close), but as a programmer I think to myself, "If I was a bitcoin exchange and wanted bitcoin to recover it's value, I would just write some code that made increasingly higher value trades between an anonymous wallet pool so that all the trades seem legitimate." Noone would know if these trades are real people or in fact simulated between exchanges. Considering how quickly oil companies were to do price fixing until it was made illegal, it doesn't take too much imagination to think that every exchange out there are working together in some way to control the price of bitcoins.