i've been in crypto since late 2013 and it's always the same, no matter what great devs,great communities,great features a coin has. crypto has and will be for a long time yet been just a way to make quick money. blackcoin, dash, digibyte, ethereum ect ect. all great coins but people will always mine or buy and then dump when the price rises. i'm not sure what can be done to encourage people to keep their coins. all the time it's the same, pump/dump, pump/dump then move to the next coin and so on. i hate that way of crypto
Yes, there is a group of people on Poloniex that has successfully mastered shorting (when available) to kill the coins. Shorting has such a psychological fear effect that when someone shorts the coin big, the price always goes down and then it continues to go down while more shorting buddies take their turn at sucking the life out of a coin. I think they should be called the Crypto-Crushing Shorting-Mafia that only aim to make money and uphold their king BTC. Yes, most of them have no concern at all for the tech, development, and only think that BTC is king so killing all the other alts is their duty.
To top it all, markets like Poloniex allow shorting and margin trading to raise the volatility with the sole purpose of making more money. Again they are here to make money and do not care if any crypto is killed because there will be a copy cat coming up in a few weeks.
Nobody is taking any steps to regulate and curve this financial greed and coin slaughterhouse. As the user above says, "it's always the same", and these pumps are well coordinated efforts that move millions of dollars from BTC into altcoins and then out of altcoins back to BTC and if possible then to dump BTC itself for fiat. Eventually then BTC crashes, they buy back BTC and pump it back to altcoins. Rinse and repeat allows this mafia to get richer and richer and control more bitcoins and thus control the market.
The financial effect of the last ETH pump can be metered by the effect it had on BTC prices, and the flow of BTC in and out of the Poloniex market which is all recorded in the Poloniex bitcoin cold wallet see link below:
https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/17irB8xLxhVRerCoUyypnmpoak3QBpVp2zAt the beginning of the pump in January Poloniex had 9,400 BTC (3.9 million USD) in their wallet, this increased to 84,500 BTC (35.4 million USD) at the peak of the pump. That is almost a 9-fold increase which has now been removed and possibly waiting to cash out when BTC pumps.
Currently there is 13,300 BTC left and appears that much of it at play in Poloniex has also the intention to play the BTC->Fiat market so when BTC goes up the altcoins take a hit. Given this complex relationship we could see further dumps to the price of ETH and other altcoins. So if you are a bag holder (like me) of ETH or other altcoin then I think the best thing to do is hold your coins and wait for the next BTC pump cycle. Make sure you sell at the top.. I never seem to be able to do