Menu
Contact Joel
Resources Facebook Live Is Bitcoin’s Price Being Manipulated?

Is Bitcoin’s Price Being Manipulated?

Published February 3, 2026
Joel Bomgar
by Joel Bomgar
YouTube Video Transcript
Is Bitcoin's price being manipulated? No, no, and no. Bitcoin's price is not being manipulated. Now, that doesn't mean it's impossible for somebody to buy or sell or something like that. But at the end of the day, Bitcoin is a trillionoll asset. You can't manipulate a trillion dollar asset unless you're throwing around tens of billions of dollars. And nobody's doing that. the price of Bitcoin is going up and down because people like me and you and banks and insurance companies and all that are buying and selling it. So if the price is going down, it's because there's more people selling than buying. And if the price is going up, it's because more people are buying than selling. So yeah, the price is also affected by people using leverage. But guess what? Leverage works both ways. If they're using leverage to buy Bitcoin on the way up, it can make the price go up a little faster than it would otherwise go. But also the same on the way down. If they're using leverage on the way down, it can make the price accelerate down to the downside as well. But again, they're not manipulating the the marketplace. They're just doing exactly what all markets do, which is they're betting that it's going to go one way or another. And when people say the the marketplace is being manipulated, first of all, they only ever say it when the asset price is going down. You will never hear anybody say the market is being manipulated when Bitcoin's price is going up. But why not? Why wouldn't somebody be being manipulating it up? And the answer is because they only don't like it when it's going down. And so their positive is being manipulated when it's going down, but they're fine if it's going up. So everything's fine and everything's normal when it's going up, but somehow they're positive it's being manipulated when it's going down. Again, that's not true. There's just buying and selling going on in a voluntary economy with a ton of people in it with a ton of people making major decisions to buy and sell a currency on a 247 basis worldwide. This is not like some tiny US thing. The US has like four or 5% of the world population. Bitcoin is a global asset. Everybody acts like it's a US asset. It's not a US asset. It's a global asset. It goes up and down because somebody in China and India decides to buy or sell it. And we don't even know why half the time. But generally, if you hear people saying the market's being manipulated, it's not true. The market is too big to manipulate in Bitcoin. And people are like, "Yeah, but they're just going to sell it and make the price go down and then they're going to buy it back for cheaper." Well, what do you think happens when they try to buy it back for cheaper? It pushes the price right back above the price they paid for it. You can't game a market by buying and selling into that market once the market reaches a certain scale. It just doesn't work because no matter how much you dump, the price goes down. But as soon as you try to buy back all the thing you dumped, the price goes right back up. You can't end up with more of that asset that way. If you could, everyone would do that with everything. They buy up, you know, the majority of the shares of any company. They, you know, sell them all off and then buy them all right back. The problem is you can't do that because you push the price down when you sell them off, but you push it right back up when you buy them back and you always end up with fewer of those shares because some people are always smart enough to buy those cheap shares on the way down. And then when you try to buy them, you know, push the price up uh as you buy them back, you end up with less. So even if the entire Bitcoin market was made up of two Bitcoin and I owned one of them and someone owned the other one, if I sold all my one Bitcoin into the market and then tried to buy it all back, I would end up with like half a Bitcoin. There's just no way to do that. Not with an asset that has any scale. So the price is not being manipulated. Uh people always say that because they don't want to accept reality. The reality is humans are buying and selling Bitcoin. Humans are fickle. Humans make irrational decisions. Humans do dumb things from time to time. Humans also often have a herd mentality when it involves investing, meaning they do what everybody else is doing, even if what everybody else is doing doesn't make sense. All of those things happen and those things explain why Bitcoin's price does what it does. So, the pra the the drop last night to $60,000 and one penny last night, if you went and analyzed every single thing, every single buy and sell that went into the price dropping, you'd find that it was a bunch of people. It was people getting liquidated on bets they made above $100,000. It was people freaking out, panic selling. I mean, it was like everything. But you're not going to find some, you know, big bad somebody behind a curtain manipulating the price. You're going to find hundreds of millions of people making decisions. And the aggregate effect of those hundreds of millions of people making decisions is the price is either going up or down depending on whether demand is higher than supply or supply is higher than demand. That's how markets work. It's how all markets work. It's that straightforward. Uh so all you can do is respond to the actions of other humans, but there's no benefit of claiming that, you know, somehow the market's being manipulated against your favor. It's just not. It's not being manipulated. Don't worry about that. Uh, just buy Bitcoin and hold on to it for as long as you

Disclaimer:

The content provided in this post is for educational purposes only. It should not be considered financial, investment, or trading advice. I am not a licensed financial advisor, and all opinions expressed are my own. Always conduct your own research and consult with a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions. Investing in Bitcoin or any other assets carries risk, and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose.

Subscribe to Joel's Friday Roundup ✉️

Stay current with the latest bitcoin insights with the Friday Roundup newsletter — Joel's latest posts from the week, wrapped up in a single email for easy viewing.

Success!
CLOUDFLARE

NOTHING for sale. No SPAM ever. Unsubscribe anytime.