How traders 'pump and dump' cryptocurrencies
uk.businessinsider.com
uk.businessinsider.com
I'm a member of this group, only because I was added without my consent, which is probably the case for most of the users in the group.
Just for giggles, I watched them do a pump and dump one time, and they basically sold the pump hard, managed to get about 10 Bitcoin in some tiny market cap coin, and then one guy sold all the way back down and left the "members" of the group holding the bag.
This group is a scam, but not in the way that this article says.
Also, telegram isn't encrypted as far as I know.
Sure it is. There are (optional) E2E one-on-one secret chats. Doing E2E for a group is obviously a bit harder, as that's broadcast or multicast encryption -- think the DirecTV problem -- but the protocol itself is encrypted nonetheless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(messaging_service)#E...
Telegram has it as much as Facebook Messenger has it. It's a fig leaf.
- client to server, server to 2nd client
- full end2end encryption
The second works only on demand, is restricted to 1:1 chats, doesn't work in the browser and is generally not used that much among regular users who don't know about the feature.
The article is talking about minutes after all so there's likely no outside buyers fast enough to react. Essentially most 'members of the community' will lose, but some lucky ones will be fast enough to dump before the whale for at least some cash.
The article doesn't talk about it, but there are campaigns organized over days and weeks to talk up a coin. It's not all about minute timescales.
Don't get me wrong, I believe you, but convincing evidence, even anecdotal, would be useful.
Of the big coins, not the hundreds of random ones with "To The Moon" Reddit comments.
In terms of personal experience, I've not seen anything as explicit as this article. And nothing with a giant market cap coin. More like a gray area between pump and dump and a bunch of over enthusiastic marketers.
Like I'll be reading a forum and notice a ton of people hyping up a small market cap coin. Check their post histories and they are generally new or they've only talked about the coin. Eventually find the slack/discord for the coin, people are posting links to forums/threads/mentions of the coin in the discord, and people are organizing shifts to give support. The comments are all purportedly coming from a genuine place (and to an extend they may be) but they were posted as if they were just random people stumbling across this discussion -- not an organized group explicitly trying to spread the good word.
Really, there wasn't much different between that era and the yahoo penny stock boards of the late 90s.
Learning to detect and filter that noise is a crucial skill if you're gonna trade those things.
I came here to say exactly this. Coins are extremely similar in nature to pink sheets. Bitcoinforums et al are the new yahoo finance forums. Full of shills and pumpers, be very VERY wary.
I was doing "research" this weekend for some long tail alts I could ride the pump on next. I couldn't help but note the number of template Diva Wordpress sites out there, all using the exact same template just with different fonts and minor style changes. All have some bullshit "whitepaper" (overused term of the year). Then I thought this can't be that hard to start my own. So, I am. Hopefully I'll pump my own coin within the next few weeks. I've noted a few criteria that I'm sure will attract some gamblers/fools.
On a side note, the eBay market for mining rigs and accessories is stunningly healthy.
Would you be willing to discuss this further? I have some silly ideas.
Technology is still not there yet. There's no scaling solution anywhere in sight.
These valuations are for a product that does not exist.
If scaling miraculously comes then the price might hold, otherwise the transaction fees will grow up to a point that most small investors won't be able to make that 2nd layer entry transaction and will be stuck on the expensive 1st layer.
The price will then crash.
lightning network?
Show me some working software or this is all hand-waving bullshit. That thing's dated 2015, so where's it at?
You're in luck:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.acinq.eclai...
https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0...
There are currently 3 implementations by different teams being tested, all compatible with each-other and open-source.
No, it's not production ready, there are still plenty of bugs and missing features but it's close and you can go test it right now on testnet if you want to.
Yeah, well, that sounds like incomplete to me. Will it beat GNU Hurd to market?
Perl 6 shipped so anything's possible.
Elon Musk has plans to land people on Mars. He hasn't landed people on Mars.
If and when it goes live, sure, you've got a point. Until then it's just speculative.
There's no such thing as a free lunch in distributed system design! If IOTA had solved for scalability without sacrificing other attributes, the technology would probably be integrated into other coins very quickly.
Here's[1] a rough estimate of the growth of data on Steem.
[1] https://steemit.com/steem/@crokkon/steem-blockchain-size#@bl...
Manipulating a coin with 1k+ volume is significantly harder.
This article more seems like spammers. Same kind of thing that the stock spammers did with emails. There's a nice DefCon video about this [2]. Basically some people have a lot of the stock (or coin), get people to buy, and dump on them. I think the evidence that people have been doing this with the smaller stock exchanges show that it can be done with BTC. I think if you watch BTCs price long enough, you can even see these patterns.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitco...
That seems dubious. These numbers usually don't account for custodial wallets e.g. exchanges
Typically what happens, is a whale starts buying a particular currency and magically you start to see news articles appear on major and smaller niche crypto blogs. Then the reddit posts start appearing causing a even more hurried frenzy to buy the coin. It is very similar to how traditional stocks are pumped.
On a side note, I am noticing a trend from Forbes, Business Insider, and CBS News that are very hostile to the crypto space. They will literally grasp at any resemblance of shadyness to write a negative article.
First, there are positive campaigns run for multiple coins through YT channels (some really respected ones), reddit posts, bitcointalk forum etc. Once enough frenzy is generated a pump date is announced but not the coin name. The coin name depends on various factors like -how many coins these guys have accumulated, which coin is generating some vibe outside their efforts, how much of the supply has been mined etc.
Once the time arrives, the coin name is announced in the chat group, twitter etc. And the coin price flies on a particular exchange. It seems obvious that the price should tank. But it doesn't. Because there are a lot of things going on here:
a. In the cryptocurrency world, everyone has a constant FOMO fever. So, if they see a coin flying they buy irrespective.
b. Then there is lot of belief in technical analysis too. So, if there is some MA crossover, RSI crossever etc happens then people buy irrespective.
c. There are a lot of "arbitragers" who have automated setups to try and catch up the difference. So they sell at the high price exchange and buy at low price exchange. But, the imperfect market ensures that they actually end up pulling the price at the lower exchange. The price does drop but it doesn't go to the previous low price.
d. Lastly and most importantly the orderbook gets messed up and price is re-framed.
These coins are thinly traded. So, there is some form of equilibrium at the low price - there are both buyers and sellers at this price. Once the pump is over the price has inched higher. The bag holders have bought the coins at a higher price so they wont sell for a loss. Then the FOMO, TA and arbs come in to create an equilibrium market at the higher prices.
Things don't end there. The pump and dump schemers also are unable to get out at the high so, they keep creating positive buzz for the coins. In most cases, the same coin gets pumped up by many (or maybe same) groups multiple times.
Look at the chart for the Magi Coin mentioned in the article:
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/magi/#charts
It is going higher and higher.
If you look at the market on bittrex, which btw is the go to market for these schemes:
https://bittrex.com/Market/Index?MarketName=BTC-XMG
you will find multiple price swings, which are actually prices being pumped.
Does it work for big coins? Yes it does. But, those are much more nuanced than telling people to pump a coin. There it takes form of some announcement - mostly it is a vaporware feature which remains WIP for a long time or some collaboration.
"Russian messaging app Telegram is heavily encrypted and,..."
enough of the mccarthyism.
anyway, time to log off of my freedom infused american hacker news app and go work for a bit in my almost fascist italian code editor on my communist chinese computer