Someone has been messing around with the prices since it appeared on Bittrex. Lots of bot type activity too. Whenever the price goes up someone puts in tiny sell orders at way below everyone else - sometimes 50 or a 100 sats lower which at current price levels is a massive percentage reduction.
Since the official price on Bittrex is the last selling price (irrespective of quantity or volume) this gives a falsely low price which is then aggregated by all the coin pricing sites.
This leads to the "official" Britcoin price being much lower than the average selling price, giving people a false impression and leading people without patience to panic sell at even lower prices.
The person accumulating then hoovers these coins up at much lower than market rates (like a whale swallowing plankton). They save a huge amount overall at the cost of selling a tiny amount of their Britcoins (and even then these are usually at a higher rate than the ensuing panic sells).
Done enough this can create it's own downward price momentum which results in a general downward price trend.
The whales just sit back and wait for the panic sellers to feed them the coins that they want. It's normally someone with big pockets (whale) who can afford to wait a very long time. When they decide they have had enough they have the resources to put momentum back into the market by selling large amounts of coins back to themselves as they normally have tens of BTC sitting around (unlike the average person).
This is enough to create a real buzz and bring the coin back to the community spotlight and get the price moving upwards again - this is a PUMP. When it has moved up in price enough, they sell all of their coins off - this is the peak price, where inexperienced people hear about the coin's success and buy in. The big whale selling off their coins during a predefined "peak" level is the DUMP.
This starts off a price fall which people panic sell into and the whole cycle can repeat again. Often times the whale will re-accumulate at the "trough" or bottom of the panic selling phase before (after some time) starting the process again with another PUMP once the market has forgotten about the previous cycle sufficiently and/there is some good news on the horizon.
This happens with nearly every coin and will continue to happen until there is more mainstream adoption. It's currently happening a with Britcoin and we are in the phase where one or more whales are slowly accumulating.
You can test it by waiting to see these tiny sell orders popping up and buying them when they do. No matter how often you buy them up after a short time they will return, indicating that someone has a bot working to specifically work on lowering the price.
If they genuinely wanted to sell their coins they wouldn't break them down into tiny trades and sell them at below all the other prices, since in effect they are reducing the money they make. Sometimes genuine people will break up their trades so as not to cause a downward trend in price, but in those cases the aim is to sell at a higher price and maintain it (not lower it). A lower price only benefits someone who is buying.
Very nice writeup, thanks, you have my respect !
Where do you get this bots ? I'd like to have a look at them
There is one here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bot-cat-cryptocurrency-automatic-trader-new-price-list-042021-507103