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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Last time Bitcoin fell significantly, BitPay announced three days later they were partnering with PayPal. BitPay has a lot of Bitcoins floating in their accounts (since they need to exchange USD <--> BitCoin). They also could predict that announcing a partnership with PayPal would spike the price of BitCoin.

It makes me wonder if some of these price drops could be market manipulation by insiders who have a big announcement on the way.

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There's always insider manipulation, but people cannot prove it either way.

It's like saying that there is insider manipulation behind every price dip and price rise on wallstreet.

Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. You cannot prove either way. So it's just noise.

That's not how PayPal's "bitcoin integration" works. All it is is a partnership with bitpay, where if you're a paypal digital merchant (doesn't sell physical things), and you also have a bitpay account, you can link them.

So someone buys something from you, sends bitcoin to bitpay, bitpay sends actual money to paypal, paypal takes a cut, and gives it to you.

Before you would just use your bitpay account to get actual money, and paypal wouldn't get a cut.

The PayPal partnership is silly.

I think the reasoning for a spike isn't anything to do with the actual details of the implementation. The spike in demand is caused by an existing legit payment company that is widely known and used saying: "We think Bitcoin is important and interesting enough to do something with.". This implicit endorsement draws in new buyers, gets more speculators buying, etc.

I'd say you theory is pretty on-point, and I agree. Someone will probably profit from this, and it's an artificial fall of BitCoin value.

Bitpay only does Bitcoin -> USD/etc so they really shouldn't have many bitcoins floating around in their accounts unless they are having difficulty finding buyers for them. With a downtrend the longer it takes them to sell the more then lose.

Did you manage to rebound the price by a few pips with this suggestion? ;0)

December - Just a small market correction after bubble, soon we go up uP UP!

February - Price dropped because Mark Karpeles is a incompetent thief, now that Goxy is closed we go up uP UP!

May - China dropped the price, now all Chinese is priced in, we go up uP UP!

August - Wall Street dropping the price because they want to enter cheap. HODL and we go up uP UP!

October - THE B3ARWHAL3 DROPPED THE PRICE, CHEAP COINS!!1 up uP UP!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2idb3s/looks_reall...

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