Smooth likes to come here and post his theory that the only reason for Dash’s high market cap (given it’s “broken” tech) is that it’s a manipulated market by ‘insiders’ holding large amounts of coins. (It isn’t - the reason is that Dash has the right business model and XMR has a doomed one that was never thought through because they became too obsessed with ‘cryptography’. But thats for another post).
In fact I’ve never seen any evidence of this and he has never posted any.
I heard Poloniex owns hundreds of thousands of XMR because they have set up the deposits so that they can't tell who deposited what and users can't prove they made the deposit unless the user knew to send a special ID to go with the transaction. So now they have a high percentage of the XMR float that no one else can claim, and they have the monopoly on the market. There aren't many who would benefit more from the price of XMR going up than Poloniex, perhaps not even one.
You can detect the ‘footrpints’ of a pump and dump operation by doing some volume analysis on the respective big price moves.
I learned this from watching paycoin for weeks - not because I was invested, just because it was quite fascinating to see it in action.
In particular, the OBC (On Balance Volume) has very squarish patterns in it, while the price signal has lots of “reflections” - a big move up, a horizontal section and an equivalent move down.
Here’s what’s been going on over at Poloniex lately…
From that you can’t tell if it’s “deliberate manipulation”. You can only tell that large holders are moving the market and small ones aren’t. You can get clue to motivations, however, by measuring the cost of the pump against the revenue from the dump.
In the following move (this is a longer range chart - 4 hour), the market was ‘coaxed up’ in a move that barely reflected in the volume profile. What this does however is attract large amounts of liquidity into the bid stack of the order book which doesn't manifest itself in the 'upside' volume statistics. What the pumpers then do is wait for sufficient liquidity to appear to absorb their ‘dump’ before selling into it. This then does reflect in the OBC and gives them a huge gain in BTC, even though the price signal would appear that it was a zero sum game.
Another superb market analysis.
Btw I just tried to update the Monero wallet to try yet again to obtain an accurate Tao ratio for update speeds and the wallet that was fully updated and synched only on friday night is now 86 days behind to catch up! At least if you flog a dead horse, it would still get there in the end bit by bit, after all it has the handy added advantage of always going forward in the time
Happy Easter everyone, please do make sure you eat enough chocolate to get as bloated as a Monero blockchain
and as full as main RAM usage
The worlds largest Easter Egg in Argentina
What was the trick to get the blocks moving again ? 