Are we allowed to talk about Bitcoin?

At the end of the day, if you buy $344 million of an asset, you are on the hook for capital gain or loss on that asset -- depending on where you sell it. So, I don't see manipulation, in the way I think you mean it.

All capital markets are being "manipulated" every day -- by virtue of people buying and selling. Sometimes someone with a huge bazooka -- a LOT of money -- steps into a market that trades relatively low daily volume and can really move the price of something. But don't forget, they still are on the hook for a capital gain or loss on what they bought -- and if it is a low volume, low liquidity market, they are very susceptible to someone else squeezing them by moving the price in the other direction. That is the nature of markets.

Often, people who trade that way are hedging (or speculating on) that exposure with something else (very often in the options market). But to me, that is the nature of trading. I don't consider it "manipulation." These markets should be open to everyone to trade using any means necessary. It's up to the other market participants to understand that there are always going to be bigger players who can push prices around on a short term basis. ... and it really needs to be buyer (or seller) beware (which is why trading isn't for everyone and investors who believe in fundamentals can wait out that kind of "manipulation" if they are right about the fundamentals).

This is where we go wrong. We have somehow been conditioned to think that risk asset prices have to go up. ... even if it is done artificially (a la central banks that have made themselves hostages to the stock market, for example). But free markets can't be free without failure. ... it can't just be everyone always succeeding (because a regulator rigs outcomes to make everyone a winner). That can work for a time. And it always ends in disaster.

On the upside when prices are being pushed higher, most people don't claim "market manipulation." On the way down, everyone is always looking for a villain. On the VIX unwinding that caused equity market turmoil last week, immediately an anonymous whistleblower came forward to the SEC and CFTC claiming manipulation of the VIX. He wasn't claiming the VIX spike was directly traceable to what he alleged (it really is a trade that has taken on too much leveraged money because central banks destroyed price discovery and conditioned investors desperate for the return the central banks are robbing them of with negative real interest rates, to jump into risky bets believing that the central bank will always be there to drive risk asset prices higher. And in turn that pushed "fear" to the lowest levels on record as everyone jumped into that trade. FYI, the unwinding of that trade still hasn't happened.). As for the whistleblower, it's a bit arcane, but the way that the VIX is calculated has nothing to do with traded prices on the S&P 500, rather it is based on bid and offer prices around options on the index. His claim is that people making leveraged bets on the direction of the VIX were trying to move it around near options expiration by flashing way out of the money put options on the settlement days to create a false "average," which in turn can move the VIX dramatically. I really don't doubt this does happen. But what happens now is the "We need to regulate this!" crowd gets in a tizzy. Which always pisses me off, because any regulation by its nature makes the market LESS transparent and creates a side effect that distorts that market and hurts honest price discovery. ... which then leads to yet more regulation to try to deal with the imbalance they created in the first place. Until the markets aren't free, they are regulated messes. We are much better off with simple, transparent pricing. ... and it is up to anyone who dives into any capital market to know what they are messing with, whether it is big whales who will try to move prices, high-speed computer algorithms that spoof bid / ask prices for an outcome, etc.