I am not sure if anyone has noticed, but ever since the reopening of MtGox, there have been literally insane BTC placements, both on bids as well as on offers.

Now, I could understand the offer side; there are various BTC millionaires who might want a steady trickle for cashing out.

But someone is constantly placing and replacing buy orders (single line orderbook entries) for 2-5000 BTC x 14-16$ (as well as staged 5xx BT increments), i.e. over $70k worth.

Now, not everyone has that much spare cash to throw around just as speculation could-lose-all money.

So, my first thoughts were: Who is this? Is this just one guy or several? Are people trying to "launder" their money?
What's going on?

Then I thought about both use and abuse fantasies, such as: There have been complaints that the price isn't steady and that this is detrimental to people who might want to look at it for business.
What if some of the early adopters with a few hundred thousand BTC in their pockets made a pact to "stonewall" "fence" prices in between a window, say 14-18$, or maybe an only sloooowly sliding window (say 0.1$ more a day?) where they cash-in/out in order to keep price contained?

Which, of course, lead to the next thought: What if the theoretical market-cornering theory of a few powerful players is actually playing out? I.e. they put in buys so huge that the market literally can't get past them, and then place sells 1-5$ over their bottom-barrier, thus continually ping-ponging market price between the bounds and making 10-30% profit each time.

What I mean to say is: I don't believe that this is the "same" market as before the MtGox hack. I think something happened, changed or came into the market, and I'm basically asking whether anyone knows anything or anyone who is putting up these sums.


(And no, I won't believe you if you have a 300+ pixel banner saying GOX'd lulz and claiming you're the BTC millionaire doing it for shits and giggles and have I seen the BTC is going to 1000000$ thread yet)