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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Wallet "under maintenance". Yeah, right.

If that happens regularly, you have to assume the "exchange" is front-running, trading for their own account ahead of customer trades.

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Malicious intent is absolutely a possibility but I think you'd be surprised at the amount of exchanges running off the regular consumer wallets (such as bitcoind and altcoin equivalents). These pieces of software are not meant to support the massive amount of transactions that exchanges see and do actually need quite a bit of maintenance to keep operating well. The industry is still in an infancy stage and the tools we are all using tends to reflect that more than anything.

Well if you believe this we can go the extra step and assume that the exchange is _causing_ the wallet "maintenances" to run up the price of a coin they want to sell to their customers.

>Well if you believe this we can go the extra step and assume that the exchange is _causing_ the wallet "maintenances" to run up the price of a coin they want to sell to their customers.

This isn't hard to believe at all. In fact that sounds like a pretty tame level of scamming for the crypto world.

Crypto "exchanges" have a long history of being difficult about withdrawals. Search for "bitcoin withdrawal problems".

And we can go a step further yet by assuming that the reason they want to sell that going to their customer is that they're buying it elsewhere. They're doing the arbitrage.

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