On August 30, 2010, someone sold 30k BTC, dropping the price from $0.06 (on August, 29) to $0.03.
It only took one day for bitcoin's price to recover.
There's a non-zero chance that the person behind this flash sale was the author of the nenolod.net blog. While there's no direct evidence of that, there is his post from July 22, 2010, where he boasts significantly raising network difficulty and talks about planning to perform a speculative attack on Bitcoin.
The purpose was to demonstrate in two ways that the Bitcoin system can be attacked. This was demonstrated with higher than expected success in both areas:
- cause an effective denial of service through taking control of the proof-of-work difficulty by ensuring that there was an artificial inflation in available compute resources;
- cause speculation in the bitcoin economy, especially the exchanges (e.g. a ‘bank rush’);
The first aspect has been partially hedged against in the Bitcoin 0.3.2 client [...]The second one is harder, and it is a problem typically seen with “dark” currencies. 1
Visit bitcoin-calendar.org for more Bitcoin & FOSS related historical events.