Topic: How do exchanges work? (Read 349 times)

I see.
Thanks a bunch for the information everyone and especially NeuroticFish for detailed explanation, it's much clearer now

There are a ton of speculators and speculator wannabes on the exchanges. Many of them have no idea about the coins, they only look for coins on the rise.
The idea is simple: if the coin is rising, let's buy some. When the coin has rose enough, sell and we got some profit.
In theory the Pump and dump groups buy enough coins to give the impression the coin is on the rise, getting others to buy too. When the up trend is created, they have to maintain that buying strategically when small amounts of money give best rise in the price. Fake buy and sell walls can be part of the strategy too. Messages on speculation threads may also "create the mood". All is nice and dandy, at some point the PnD group sells (at the high price, remember?), the speculators cut the loses quick gaining little or losing some and the speculator wannabes start crying about what happened with the coin, the exchange and.. their money.
In practice this happens with a couple of whales (singular entities with big amounts of money) doing this, but not too often.
In practice PnD groups may trick the new members into fake pumps and dump some useless coins onto them.
Imho while pumps and dumps are real, they are not too often, while PnD groups are blatant scams.


It all depends on the coin, the market and the price...

PnD is prettymuch whales cornering the market by buying all the supply.. it works because they have alot of BTc to swing around

Thanks, great information!

So how come people succeed with pumping and dumping?
Pumping is buying a crapload of coins at low price and then dumping at higher price. But to be able to dump them, you have to find buyers who will buy it at that price, which might not be as easy, right?
I bought coins before but it was instant.

The usual exchanges intermediate the exchange between actual people.
There are usually 2 columns: one with people offering certain price and wanting to buy from you and one with people asking certain price and wanting to sell to you.
If you ask a higher place than the buyers offer, your order will be placed onto the sellers column and will wait until somebody will come and buy for that price.

For coins with high liquidity, on the bigger markets, the price difference between buyers and sellers is not so big and you can easily sell.


There are very few such exchanges (shapeshift.io is one of them) and they work with a very small number of coins.
They have their own fees over the "normal exchange" costs, keep this in mind too.

If you have this problem, I think that the solution for you is not shapeshift; the solution would be to mine coins that are actually traded. Unknown or dead coins are not a good business.

there are two types of exchange on the world: one is that you only have to buy or sell at a relatively fixed order which is priced by the exchange; the other is that you can only somplet the buyu or sell, when another people set the price which is matched with you, because you can place your order freely.

Look again at the altcoin prospects we will exchange. Research and search for as much information as possible. So that we are not wrong and regret when investment. Otherwise it is not wrong if we are careful in making decisions because altcoin so fluktuativ

I have only been mining and holding coins so far. I have no experience with exchanges.
I tried to sell some coins on Cryptopia but it's not being exchanged. Is it because I chose a different price than what's currently on the exchange?
Are there no automatic exchanges where I can just exchange coins immediatelly?