Sure. If one had conviction that it would rise. One could buy now and see it at 10 bucks by the end of the week. If one had that belief... One would not invest.

If you have conviction BTC will be back then of course you'd get in now. But people thought getting in at 600 was a deal at one time... Look where we are. Those people aren't too pleased if they had conviction it was going to 1000 again.

If volatility has taught us anything, it is to be wary. Volatility means up-swings and down-swings. Perhaps the past year was just an up-swing and we're doing some mean-reversion. It's foolish to make blanket statements.

>>> If bitcoin's volatility has taught us anything.

Not sure if this has been touched on before, but is there manipulation going on with BTC? With traders who have a bigger stake making the price go up and down, or is this pretty natural for the cycle?

I'm actually interested in this. If there's another thread on HN talking about this, feel free to point me in that direction.

There certainly is opportunity for major traders to manipulate the price, and for exchange operators. Stage a denial of service attack against the biggest exchanges, or spread media FUD and watch the price temporarily tumble. Start buying and boost the price, sell and repeat. It's getting harder to manipulate now though with more decentralized trading, but a year ago you could blast just 2 exchanges offline and affect the price. Btcchina and MtGox, and since Gox left ports wide open this was easy to do.

Exchange operators could also fix the price if they wanted. There's nothing that prevents them from making hundreds of fake accounts on their own exchanges and bidding the price up or down since they are unregulated. They could even be pgp emailing each other to coordinate this for all we know.

It hasn't existed long enough to confidently predict any trend (and the efficient market hypothesis suggests that's impossible even if it had.) It could drop to sub $200 and stay there forever for all anyone knows.