However, the one thing that strikes me as unusual, is the fact that they are acting completely opposite of the way scammers would act. I mean for instance, yesterday if Alty wanted to pump up the price and sell his coins at profit he could have made his tweet a complete fabrication and something to rile the people up like "Yeah we are just finishing Beta testing - the final version of OneMarket is out tomorrow at 2 pm GMT". Doing things like this could have significantly increased the profits of the devs if they are indeed doing insider trading. Yet his tweet yesterday was blank and non-descript - so the whole idea of them trying to pull such an elaborate scam is questionable.
I thought about this a lot. On one side, this kept me thinking the same as you do. On the other hand, I thought about it being a test round for a new way to pull money off of peoples' pockets. Trying not to do one big thing, but instead doing it slowly, looking how people react to excuses, trying to bring the price back up. Rinse and repeat and hope it pays out better than the "one big thing".
I know, that even sounds more like a conspiracy.
It is far fetched, but not impossible. In these day and age we are seeing very sophisticated and elaborate scams, but I hope you are wrong - for the sake of the mental health of these decent people here
Anyway, I appreciate you, and the fact that we can have a healthy debate in dire circumstances such as these. It just goes to show that you are a gentleman and that's a rare thing these days, especially so on the Internet. Cheers.
Thank you very much; I do appreciate your posts as well. Good conversation is important here. I don't know, but I guess that's just the way I was raised. I try to be as much myself as possible; an aspect I try to always keep in mind (more subconciously, I guess) while writing on the internet. Because it's so easy to make up a person on the internet one always wanted to be. I don't like that.
So, to the rest of your post, the sophisticated scams: that's it! Remember how bank scams looked back in, say, 1998? I did not even understand how these scammers could make money. And look at them now... I'd still say I'm kind of (kind of, not totally, as one never knows) immune to the current bank scams. And in crypto? Heck, one does not even always realize falling prey to a scam, as it often just looks like "well, it didn't work out".
The thing is - and people tend to forget that from time to time - we're operating in an area which is all about money. The fascinating part is that it's connected to a somewhat great, libertarian idea of "free money" ("free" from "freedom", as in "free software", not as in "free glass of beer for every 5th guest in our club tonight"
) which attracts many, many good people with the best of intentions. Often, this kind of people is not aware of all those scams taking place, because as good people, they avoided shady people in their "pre-crypto" life.
Now here, those shady people and those with good intentions get mixed together. I think this is a very interesting social aspect which deserves being watched and analyzed. This hasn't happened before; bitcointalk.org is the central that administrates the big, virtual house/city/whatever where honest people often work together with scammers without even knowing it.
And those scammers are good. It is already widely known what people do in the real world to get their hands on foreign money. And on the internet, there were also scams. Guys selling on eBay without ever delivering. They knew that one day, the police would knock on their door and, depending on how much they scammed, they might go to prison. Accepted risk.
Now imagine the potential of a world that offers a kind of pseudonymity which - if done right - makes it nearly impossible to be found. A world which is all about money! Money is its base. Imagine how many scammers become attracted to this, and even imagine how many future scammers are right now about to "learn Bitcoin" to become a pro scammer in the next years!
One should really do the work to calculate the sum of all known crypto scams, set it in relation to the timeframe in which crypto exists and to the size of the community/the marketcap of the according coins which were stolen. I'd guess that the relation of scams here is irrationally high, compared to the one in "real life".
Not sure if I manage to reply again, today. It's evening already and I got some stuff to do.