"nothing stops an ordinary person from buying gold at cheap prices as well"
Yes I agree, and quite often in other legal highley regulated markets that are manipulated & "The price is being held up by people who have an interest to hold it up there" so this is not unique to bitcoin, that is all that I mean. IMO the regulated markets that still act crazy , are the ones that are truly nuts.
" maintain that buy support is weak-because it was just a few thousand BTC"
Maybe .but "only a thousand" compared to the market cap, I have not calculated how much was sold in relation to the market cap and then compared to other markets. The price dropped -dramaticly- and recovered in a few min, does this happen in other markets?
ATM the market is a bit freaked because other exchanges seem to have stoped withdrawals and/or are being flooded with withdraw requests (bitcoin withdraws). If someone was thinking about buying bitcoin this would be a good time, set a low buy order and wait.