Dogecoin market manipulation? | Hacker News Reader

Dogecoin market manipulation?

pastebin.com

260 pointsNotUncivil149 comments

I'm not sure why it's on HN, but it's real.

It was originally happening in the public channel #dogecoin-market on Freenode but was then moved to the private channel #marketmakers, which seems to have spurred people to start sharing it everywhere since now it's private.

Wolong is the guy who brought the Dogecoin price to where it is now by investing a ton of money into it, and due to that and some charisma he's attracted a cult following. He's now using that cult following to have them do pump/dump ops for him (with their money).

Here's his manifesto: http://pastebin.com/RdRAULtT

It's entertaining, I'm waiting for someone to do a solid article on the story.

Bear in mind that cryptocurrencies are currently an unregulated wild west, where activities like these are both common and legal. Do not invest anything you are not prepared to lose.

edit: just for further corroboration, here's logs from a few days ago: http://pastebin.com/1NTTBCXM

You can check the charts at http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/cryptsy/dogebtc and see how that was responsible for a drop to 212. From memory they were using about 36million dogecoins, which comes out to approximately 78btc or $65,000.

My pet theory is that wolong is just building trust at this point so he can eventually have his army of followers buy all his dogecoins at inflated prices, but who knows. No matter what happens, it's very entertaining to watch develop.

> Do not invest anything you are not prepared to lose.

Let me fix that for you:

> Do not gamble anything you are not prepared to lose.

Investing always is a gamble.

Gambling is when the game is purely driven by luck.

Investing is when the instrument has measurable properties and explanations for why it will become more valuable - i.e. you invest in making your factory larger, so it can produce product more cheaply.

Betting on completely unregulated currency markets (which have good reasons that they shouldn't have any value at all) is gambling, because you're entirely depending on irrationality. That said...quite a few businesses with that model.

Investing has a luck component to it as well.

The way I like to think of it is, it's gambling when your expected rate of return is negative or zero. It's investing when it is positive.

This is why a gambler is gambling, but a casino is investing/running a business.

nicely put, never thought of it like that.

Good point, but an even better definition would take variance and risk of ruin into account. If you just look at expectation, then buying insurance would qualify as a gamble. I think most people would say it's more of a gamble to skip insurance.

Betting all your money on one hand of blackjack is a gamble, even if you've been counting cards and know the odds are in your favor. A casino spreading its money over millions of small bets is investing.

That's a good point, and I will have to incorporate it in my example in the future.

Gambling and market speculation (and even theft) are related in that they're all 0 sum games. Every dollar you make is a dollar someone else wishes they hadn't lost. Investing is different in that when you win and earn a return, nobody feels that they lost.

How about all those people who sell shares and then see them shoot up in value? They certainly feel that they lost.

Indeed.

The best example would be bonds. If you buy the California Bonds... the people of California may get a High-Speed Railroad within a year. They will not be able to accomplish the building of the High Speed Railroad without investor support.

30 years from now, the state of California will finish paying off your bonds. And you'll make some money.

Win/Win for everyone. Investors make money, and California citizens get High Speed Railroads today... instead of 30 years from now.

What is your expected rate of return from a horse racing bet? It's certainly negative if you pick a horse at random, but what if you chose the horse based upon form, conditions, odds and so on? It's still gambling, but you cannot prove that the expected rate of return will be negative in this case.

There are people who make a living from this, just like there are people making a living from investments. Likewise, there are lots of people that lose at both.

Some of these altcoins are the epitome of the greater fool theory, where most participants are perfectly aware that it is a rationally poor decision to invest in them but do it anyway because they think someone will buy it for more later.

It turns out people can make huge returns even from investing in known scams - certainly not guaranteed, but it's better odds than gambling.

Really? Only "altcoins"?

They have the exact same mechanics, structure, and backing as Bitcoin...

I only intended to comment on the altcoins that are known scams, but draw investors anyway.

Imagine you started XorNotBux, announced you were planning to sell a billion of them in a few months, then inflated the price with a much smaller supply in circulation. Some people will buy this (and possibly profit) fully knowing that you plan to obliterate it in the near future.

False. They do not all have the same structure as Bitcoin. Many of them are explicitly structured as pyramid schemes (premining, instamining, stealth launches, closed source launches).

While very few have unique selling points over Bitcoin, it is dangerous to assume they are 'at least as useful' as Bitcoin.

Bitcoin was extensively pre-mined.

Not at all. Is betting on a football match purely luck? Of course not, there's the skill of the teams and luck involved.

Investing == gambling. You can buy shares. Or you can make a bet with a spread-betting financial company that pays out in the same way that the shares do. We call one investing and other gambling, but there is no difference.

The crucial distinction is that buying shares is not a zero sum game; it's possible for all investors to "win."

This is not the case in gambling or commodities markets; for me to win, someone else has to lose.

Why is that different from share deals? There's a buyer and a seller... if one of them wins, the other by definition must lose.

Call whatever you do 'investing' if it makes you happy, but as I said before, you can replicate financial 'investments' with spread-betting 'bets' and you will make the same gains and losses.

>if one of them wins, the other by definition must lose.

No. If you sell shares to pay for living expenses you do not lose. If you dilute your shares to raise capital to make your remaining shares worth more you do not lose.

The analog to that goes something like: all participants in a hand of blackjack can win. And even the house doesn't ”lose”: it makes an expected payout, which incentivizes the players to continue in the game, which over time will enrich the casino more.

The #1 trade you make in investing is trading "money today" for "money tomorrow". The specifics of how to trade "today's money" for "tomorrow's money" differ in the forms of bonds, stocks, or options... but its all the same.

Someone wants money today, and is willing to give up more money tomorrow for that money today.

If it weren't for big stock IPOs, Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists wouldn't invest into startups. Not everyone is looking to hold stock for 20 or 30 years... especially Angel Investors who are addicted to helping out small startups.

Buying stock from an Angel Investor who is IPOing allows the Angel Investor to invest into another small company, and transfers the ownership of a (used to be) startup, to your control. IE: Facebook and Twitter. Angel Investors would rather own a smaller, more volatile company... while the typical investor would rather own the bigger, more stable companies for their retirement.

Its not necessarily about "winning" and "losing". If an early Facebook investor liquidates his $$$ in Facebook, it allows him to help out another company. He doesn't care how Facebook does in the future, because he's far more interested in helping startups.

Again, its win/win for everyone. Everyone benefits when the Venture Capitalists sell off their stocks to the Stock Market.

So, poker isn't gambling? That's news to most of the world.

It seems pretty clear to me that gambling and investing are a continuum, with craps at one end and Treasury bonds at the other.

Poker absolutely isn't gambling for skilled individuals, any more than a casino is gambling by offering games of chance that have a house advantage.

Yet gambling is rarely an investment...

The distinction is fuzzy, but the difference is not imaginary.

Two definitions of investing by notable people:

1. From The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham: "An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative."

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Invest...

2. From Mr. Buffett on the Stock Market: "The definition is simple but often forgotten: investing is laying out money now to get more money back in the future -- more money in real terms, after taking inflation into account."

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/...

There's always a gamble percentage in a gamble, but you don't invest like you gamble. Or well, you can, but it won't get you very far. ;)

Why are you sure this is legal (everywhere)? No it isn't regulated by the SEC, but that does not mean that it isn't fraud.

How would it be fraud?

It's perfectly legal if it's not specifically regulated as a financial market. Tons of firms do things quite like this - over-the-counter derivatives are rife with various market manipulations.

Pointing at a bigger gang of crooks and saying, "see, they're doing it too" doesn't make anybody involved less of a crook...

To me, the whole situation is an incredible demonstration of why "free markets solve everything correctly" is only (even potentially) true as N_participants -> infinity - and even more so a direct lesson in how thoroughly a "market" can fail when it's too small...

Why does this make them crooks? This whole thing is just a very convoluted form of gambling -- it's a game. If you bluff when playing poker, does that make you a crook?

I think the relevant distinction here is that the 'crooks' we're discussing aren't likely to be held legally accountable for their activities.

In the securities market is it illegal per the securities exchange act of 1934. It is called a bear raid and is normally done by short sellers who have heavily shorted a stock and then collude to drive it lower. It is not as common as the pump and dump and it is true that market manipulation happens all the time just people dont talk about it because it is illegal http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bearraid.asp

Right now the prevailing attitude is that it's legal and nobody will get prosecuted for it. It's certainly possible for this to change, but premined altcoins (creators mine a % before making it public) and other alleged scams such as Quarkcoin (Max Keiser & Bill Still) have happened repeatedly.

My statement was from the angle that if you get ripped off in a situation like this, there is no recourse for you, and not legal advice that you cannot get in trouble for participating in these activities.

I wouldn't expect premines to legally qualify as fraud, since by their nature they can't be done in secret. If someone releases a coin and you see it already has a long blockchain, you know it's premined and can make your investment decision accordingly.

You're right, that was a poor example.

>Right now the prevailing attitude is that it's legal and nobody will get prosecuted for it.

Probably because that's how it appears to go in regulated markets as well.

While historically pump and dump was focused on penny stock, I wander if doing it with altcoins violate some of the laws mentioned in http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2009/lr21053.htm

Considering how little enforcement (none) there is over pump-and-dump scams with pink sheets and the forums those frauds take place in stay open for years, there should be no expectation of prosecution from doing this.

Let me remind people who think the SEC doesn't care of the case of Trendon Shavers: http://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/137... Market manipulation isn't as clear-cut as a ponzi scheme, but the man might pay attention if enough people get burned.

There was a Dogecoin thread on here the other day that reeked of trying to inflate the prices - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7114813.

There's so many people trying to pump these different coins that I can't see any efforts being too successful.

Sounds from the pastebin content that they weren't really managing to coordinate even a small group?

I'm pretty sure I saw hundreds of bitcoin threads on the frontpage, when it was going up in price as well.

Not having skin in the game, this is fascinating to follow. It's like watching primitive HFT algorithm battles slowed down to meatspace actor speed. I think it's safe to say that there are some participants in crypto currencies making massive percentage gains using lessons learned on Wall Street.

Which leads to an interesting thought: has someone figured out how to judge when an emerging crypto currency gains enough traction to start attracting sharks to the pond of early adopters?

>>I think it's safe to say that there are some participants in crypto currencies making massive percentage gains using lessons learned on Wall Street.

Understatement of the year and it's only January. ;) That's pretty much everything of crypto coins right now, especially alt-coins(any coin that isn't bitcoin). The inexperienced people prone to fear-driven reaction are getting fleeced.

>Understatement of the year and it's only January. ;)

Yeah, an understatement for sure. I can only imagine what will be afoot in December... Wild guess: ransomware used to drive up the price of an alt-coin.

Isn't this already happening with cryptolocker? I had read the cryptolocker wallet has received something like 23 million USD worth of bitcoin at $900/btc.

All traded things are subject to market manipulation. It helps though if there's a bunch of real volume and a dozen or two active exchanges, that makes it harder to move the market.

With Dogecoin however, barely any exchanges, and most of the circulation from their insanely steep on-ramp is in the hands of a handful of people... gonna be a lot of milking going on there.

It's funny how so many people are avoiding trading now because they're afraid of him. If you can't even handle some bored 13-year-old princeling, do you really think you're going to somehow do way better going up against Goldman Sachs in the real markets?

"The only winning move is not to play" - index funds, and get back to creating wealth via a startup or something.

> Bear in mind that cryptocurrencies are currently an unregulated wild west, where activities like these are both common and legal.

Ah, no, it's not legal. Regulators just don't care (yet) to enforce the rules.

more logs: http://pastebin.com/cFfxW7xh

from the manifesto: "there are always trolls that add absolutely zero value to the community" -- you said it Wolong.

Once upon a time in a small village a man appeared who announced to all the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10. The villagers knew that the jungle held countless monkeys, easily caught. The man bought 2 thousand.

As the supply diminished, they become difficult to catch, and villagers returned to their farms. The man announced that he would pay $20. The villagers renewed their efforts and caught 1,000 more monkeys.

The supply quickly diminished, but before they returned to their farms the man increased his offer to $40 each. Monkeys became so rare that it was difficult to even see a monkey let alone catch it. But they caught 500.

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $100 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business his assistant would now buy for the man. The man departed.

Then the assistant told the villagers, “Look at all these monkeys the man has in that big cage. I will sell them to you at $50 each. When the man comes back you can sell the monkey’s back to him for $100.”

The villagers gathered up all their saving to buy the monkeys. The assistant took their money. They never saw either the man or his assistant again.

What is the origin of this story?

it is a variant of "the fiddle game", or "the glim dropper". They are standard conman tricks from back in the day. All work on the principle: "you can't con an honest man".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks

This is basically a classic confidence trick, using people's greed and overconfidence. The con artist leads the marks to believe that they can outsmart the market, when in fact the marks are the ones being outsmarted.

Ultimately, there are two kinds of people that these con artists make money off of, and both have this overconfidence that they can outsmart the market:

1. Collaborators: these are the people who think that they are in on Fontas or Wolong's plan, but aren't. Ultimately, some of these people will make money some of the time, but most will lose money.

2. Manic-or-panic day traders: these people fall prey to a these market manipulations because they are at the wrong place at the wrong time. If they're paying attention when the market spikes, they start buying high thinking it will rise further, and if they're paying attention when the market drops they sell low thinking it will fall further. It may actually be worse to be this kind of trader, because often the only person conning such people is themselves. Their emotional approach to investing causes them to fall prey to every market fluctuation, even ones that aren't caused by any manipulation.

The kicker here is that I believe most day-traders fall into that second group. A lot of them are still making money on cryptocurrencies simply because cryptocurrencies have been growing so rapidly, leading them to believe that their strategies have worked, but the vast majority would make more by simply investing their money and sitting on it. My theory is backed up by how people tend to invest on wall street, which has been well-researched at this point.

What I'm trying to say to anyone reading this is that if you're trading day-to-day, unless you have a very thoroughly proven mathematical model, you're likely in the second group. Don't let overconfidence and greed make you a mark. You aren't likely to outsmart the market. Besides, this market is doing pretty well anyway.

The amusing/sad thing is that so many folks don't realize that only a few of the "market movers" actually profit. Those who don't have the inside inside track, will lose when those who make the call to buy and sell. The whole "we move the market" thing is accurate...but, the suckers who think they're part of moving the market are just the people giving money to "-wolong-". I have a hard time feeling sorry for people losing money in such a scheme, because they intended to take money from others...but, still, the biggest asshole in this scenario is the leader of the pump.

In this case... he's also looking to build a system that will let him control multiple wallets.

The best part is that people are going to essentially hand wallets over to him to manage this, in both BTC and DOGE.

He's not going to come out behind, no matter how it goes .

I guess it's like a pyramid scheme where everyone knows its a pyramid scheme and believes theyre close enough to the top that they'll still profit.

The real winners in these schemes are the exchanges. Since they profit from every trade that's made, anything that increases volume and volatility is good for their books.

Meh. The only reason the price is as low as it is currently is that A) $850,000 needs to be added to the market every single day just to keep the price stable B) Coinbase et al. literally can't convert dollars to BTC fast enough. The situation is similar to how whenever Apple releases a new iPhone, it takes literally months until there is enough supply to match the demand.

While this market manipulation is blatantly unethical and possibly illegal, in the long run it's going to be larger economic factors that determine the success or failure of the currency.

Illegal?

People are free to coordinate their trades as private players on the market. While it may be illegal I see nothing unethical about it.

The entire point of the fucking market is to amass enough capital that you're not 'picking' stocks, if you're trading without an edge I really don't know what to tell you.

Welcome to EVE offline!

The point of a market is not for you to manipulate it. I don't wait to buy milk until I can amass enough capital to drive the price up.

The entire point of the fucking market is to share information. Pump and dump schemes are not information, they're noise.

> While it may be illegal I see nothing unethical about it.

This is interesting. It shows an attitude about laws as being just suggestions that you can also compare against your morality. I certainly agree on many points, for example people who do things on a small scale that are technically illegal (e.g. sodomy where it was illegal, etc). The context and morality does matter.

But in this particular case, the laws exist for quite an important and good reason. Do you know why? It seems to be for the exact case that's happening here. Ignoring the laws shielding the public, because you don't see anything unethical in it, seems, well, akin to ignoring fraud laws because you don't see anything wrong with committing fraud.

For example, why shouldn't I be able to print money (on an inkjet printer) - it might be technically illegal, but is it immoral? It's immoral because you make money from people accepting something that is worthless, and devalues people's faith in the real thing.

Pump and dump schemes have a similar effect on real investment markets, and are illegal for this reason.

can you explain why almost a million dollars needs to be injected into the market to keep the price stable?

That's the value of the Dogecoins being mined every day:

Blocks per day: 60 * 24 = 1440 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361813.0)

Current block reward: ~500,000 doge (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361813.0)

Total block rewards per day: 1440 * 500,000 = 720,000,000 doge

Current exchange rate: 1 doge = US$0.0017 (http://dogecoin.com/)

Total block rewards in USD per day: 720,000,000 * 0.0017 = $1,224,000

That would make sense if every miner immediately sold every coin he/she mined.

Miners have to pay for electricity and hardware. I doubt they're doing that with Dogecoins.

Doge had been the most profitable altcoin to mine several times in the past couple months.

You will be hard pressed to find any serious miner who is keeping mined Doge instead of converting them to BTC or fiat. Serious mining farms pay for their electricity, thus they will not have amortized their GPUs solely from Doge.

Sure, if you are a gamer with "pre-paid" graphics card AND "free" electricity, you may elect to keep your mined Doge.

Because a certain number of new coins are being created each day through mining so the supply of coins is increasing and if demand doesn't increase to match it the price is going to fall. It isn't a perfect calculation because those mining could hold the coins and not sell them immediately but the fact remains that the total supply is increasing and will at some point be put into circulation.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

Some people do hold the coins, though. I am not sure what the percentage is. In my case I have some Doge and have not sold any at this point.

This illustrates a simple idea in economics: cartels are hard to maintain because participants will look out for their own self-interest.

Indeed, and by coincidence Izabella Kaminska published an interesting piece on why that's true with reference to cryptocurencies yesterday:

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2014/01/24/1750472/why-its-tough-...

I don't know the literature, and what assumptions they make in there, but out in the real world the lightbulb cartel lasted from 1924 till 1942 or thereabouts. The keyword to look for is "Phoebus Cartel". Also, recently in the news: the Silicon Valley wage-fixing cartel.

They may be hard to maintain, but they do spring up and may exert power while alive.

Phoebus was indeed established in 1924 but:

1) There is a scientific basis for the 10.000 hours, the "greatest" achievement generally attributed to Phoebus[1]:

    > For a supply voltage V near the rated voltage of the lamp:
    
        Light output is approximately proportional to V 3.4
        Power consumption is approximately proportional to V 1.6
        Lifetime is approximately proportional to V −16
        Color temperature is approximately proportional to V 0.42[88]

2) According wikipedia (and this page: http://www.uwcc.wisc.edu/icic/def-hist/history/famous.html )[2]:

    > In the late 1920s a Swedish-Danish-Norwegian union of companies
    (the North European Luma Co-op Society) began planning an independent
    manufacturing centre. Economic and legal threats by Phoebus did not
    achieve the desired effect, and in 1931 the Scandinavians produced and
    sold lamps at a considerably lower price than Phoebus.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightbulb#Light_output_and_life...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel#Demise

The Silicon Valley thing was no-poaching agreements between a few companies, not an explicit cartel. Which is bad but not nearly as bad.

Really, though, we can only examine the sample space of failed cartels.

Archived 4chan thread where the leak happened: http://rbt.asia/g/thread/S39865892.

-- Edit --

More logs got leaked at http://pastebin.com/7itGzitH. I have not read them yet, so cannot tell you if there is anything of value in there.

It's interesting that this could all be 'fake'. You don't actually need 'followers' to do this. If you lead the public to think that there's a massive pump/dump going on, you can make the public follow your orders. Obviously you need to discuss on public forums, or 'leak by accident'.

I feel sorry for the people participating in this market manipulation. I made a good chunk of BTC thanks to wolong's forewarning of his upcoming pump he made days ago but left it at that.

The character started insisting 10k doge tips for him to answer questions on irc, then moved to a private channel where to get an invite you basically have to prove you at least have 10 BTC and are willing to let him ultimately execute trades on your behalf. There are lots of fools in that channel who will soon find themselves parted with their money.

It would be shocking if there was not manipulation in a completely unregulated market. We can't stop manipulation in regulated markets, without any rules it's the wild west.

I think this is precisely the right conclusion to draw, plus the fact that the manipulation is harmless unless you intentionally expose yourself to the risk.

“I feel so awful for those who lost here.”

Nothing sweeter than the tears of someone who lost money truing to manipulate other people into losing money ...

True that!

Anyone have a link to a tl;dr on how market manipulation like this works? It seems like crypto-currencies are ripe for for this of thing and it doesn't take much money to do it.

Presumably the hidden information you have from being part of a cabal means it's different than just changing your risk distribution like a Martingale betting strategy does.

The way it works is to use a giant bid or ask wall to push the price around. Say the asset has bids at 220 and asks at 222, and you want to push the price downwards. You put up an ask of an amount equivalent to maybe 6hours volume at 224 (an "ask wall"). Anyone selling will put their orders below that wall, and as you slowly move the wall downwards people will sell into the market in the expectation that they can buy again once you've pushed the price lower than where they sold.

This relies on the large wall not being an attractive offer for someone who has the purchasing power to obliterate it, which is where it occasionally fails. Generally, if the market starts to move against it with any force, it's pulled or moved further back behind other orders.

Another way this can be used is by putting up a wall on the opposite side of your real order to drive demand - i.e. in the scenario above, you might be trying to buy at 220. If you put up a huge wall at 224, people will be more willing to fill your order at 220 than if the orderbook was much thinner.

It seems this is called spoofing in the financial world.

That was a good explanation, except for the fact that I think you're referring to eg 220, 222, and 224 as the Satoshi/DOGE exchange rate, and by pushing the price downwards, you'll actually get more Satoshi for each DOGE.

Pushing the price "down" to 224 from 220 is very confusing and caused me to have to read your post several times to make sure I understood correctly.

I mean that putting a large sell order at 224 would make the buys (at the moment, at 220) move lower as the orders are filled by other people selling to them. You could then move the wall downwards, say to 221, when the sells in the orderbook had also moved downwards from 222. At this point the market's state would be something like buys at 218, sells at 220, and your wall at 221, effectively having pushed the market downwards from where you started.

I hope this made what I meant a bit clearer.

Game theory in action. There will always be manipulation in every market, even in doge. Early hedge fund managers here.

Even ignoring the macro effects, just reading the log and watching people bail out early, it occurred to me that this would be a great case study for students of game theory.

I love the irony of the term selfish that keeps getting thrown around by these hypocrites.

To bad there isn't this kind of transparency in the real supposedly regulated markets. There is manipulation there all the time only we never hear about it because it isn't being done by some guy in a public IRC channel.

All cryptocurrencies are being manipulated. You would be naive to believe otherwise.

(and Dogecoin is for lulz anyway!)

What the hell am I reading

...and is it worth investing my time trying to understand this?

So dishonesty. Wow.

Such

I'm not sure if people think crypto currency market manipulation is new but this was going on far before Dogecoin came out.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/in-the-murky-world-of...
https://twitter.com/Fontase

Is the main idea behind this scheme to get other participants to lower the price and since the orchestrators got their positions earlier they profit or do they simply need the volume of the masses to make their scheme profitable? If it's the latter, couldn't they just get a large enough loan and move the markets with their own funds seeing as Dogecoin is still a relatively small market?

I guess this Wolong person is taking the scam serious..
> Wolong To Launch A Forum
> The plan is to make the forum private and tight-knit; thereby locking out trolls. According to him, the entrance fee will be between $25-$30 USD
http://www.dailydoge.org/2014/01/wolong-to-launch-a-forum/

looks like standard troll box blather to me

Pumping is going on in every crypto currency right now. If it isn't as straightforward as a chat log, it is being done more subtly in other ways. Alt-currencies, (i.e. not bitcoin) seem to have more pump and dump going on.

The market is about buying low and selling high, or selling high and buying low.
If you trade with out an edge you're a moron. I really hope no one trades actual markets believing they can 'pick' equities.

> I really hope no one trades actual markets believing they can 'pick' equities.
I do and make a lot of money doing it. It's not about picking equities per se, it's about finding good trading opportunities - every equity provides good and bad trades, depending on a multitude of factors. You can play any stock both long and short....

What you do, is living in tornado zone and counting each day without tornado as a win attributed to our skill on picking and swapping houses in the zone.

A think a more apt analogy would be comparing it to something like poker. Yes it's risky, but if you know how to navigate markets, it's a controlled risk, in which you can come out ahead more often than not...

All risk is controlled until it's not.
In my country to ride the bus you buy tickets in the shop. Once you get into the bus you invalidate the ticket by printing date and hour on the ticket with the device installed there.
Once in a while (once in few weeks or months depending on your luck and how much you ride) the guy shows up on your ride who checks if everyone has properly invalidated tickets. If you don't have one, you'll get a fine.
If you wish you may never buy the tickets and just pay fines when they happen. Every time you ride without the ticket you earn but you take the risk of the fine. You might argue that it's contolled risk since you estimated how often fine happens on average. But everything is awesome until one time you encounter streak of fines that eat up all your previous earnings and some future ones too.
It's the same game that those banks that invested in derivatives were playing.

define low and high, because the "buy low sell high" mantra doesnt mean anything.

It's fun to hear many people saying: "Jamaican bobsleigh donations raised Dogecoin prices", while it's just series of small speculative attacks on cryptocurrency happening.

Market manipulation happens everywhere, why is this special?

It seems quite likely the dogecoin reddit moderators are involved with this due to absolute radio silence about market manipulation on the subreddit.

To be fair, people on /r/dogecoin don't care much about day to day value, they're in for the long run and the fun.

I was curious so searched for manipulation on the dogecoin subreddit. Got the following as first hit. I don't know enough about reddit algo to speculate why it doesn't show up on front page of the subreddit.
http://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1w7otj/dogecoin_ma...

I reported this to a freenode staffer. He said they didn't appreciate this kind of activity much and that they would investigate it.

Gee, I totally get somebody putting money into Bitcoin or mining Litecoin, but the rest are honest scamcoins (or at least - circuscoins). If you mine, then it's probably okay, although it still costs you real money (energy, hardware, opportunity cost, etc.), but to put money (fiat or bitcoins) into it - you need to be completely out of your mind!

What makes Bitcoin and Litecoin not scam coins?

Nothing of essence, of course. I strongly believe Bitcoin is a bubble that will burst this year although I definitely recognize the innovation and awareness of certain problems that it brought. But at least you see some legitimacy and a level of assurance in VCs putting money into Bitcoin startups where Dogecoin and the likes are just honest scams, not even bubbles. What kind of a person would put money into something called BBQCoin or Junkcoin?

There's an argument that the world needs one cryptocurrency but not two. Therefore the first one (Bitcoin) is not a scam, but all others are.

Your second point doesn't necessarily derive from the first.
I can understand standardizing on only one cryptocurrency, but why not one that addresses many of Bitcoins' limitations?
I'm not saying it should be Dogecoin, actually I hope not, but it could be.

I agree that the one cryptocurrency doesn't have to be Bitcoin. What I left unsaid is that so far none of the altcoins provide enough improvement over Bitcoin that it's worth breaking compatibility.

People were saying the same thing about Bitcoin a year ago.

"Bitcoin é foda, o resto é moda." a rhyme in Portuguese which means "Bitcoin is awesome, the rest is fashion."

Well, "foda" means something else entirely in Portuguese, tough I can't claim to understand the meaning of the quote :) .
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=foda

Who the fuck cares? It's fucking dogecoin. It's the "slot machine" of cryptocurrencies.

Penny slots at that.

Slots have the highest rake, and penny slots the highest rake of the slots.
The term fish in a barrel comes to mind.

This is the exact same thing that happened in bitcoin markets early on.
When the capitalization of the market is so low and a small number of people control a large amount of the currency/commodity there really isn't much you can do about it.

This seems to be the channel in question [1].
[1] http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/details.php?net=freenode&roo...

it's not #dogecoin-market, that's the public channel that they push positive messages to. They run their schemes in #marketmakers, an invite-only channel on freenode.

I've always thought of dogecoin as the "CJ" of cryptocurrencies, and I'm still not entirely sure I'm mistaken about that.
In that context, this is a much tamer "conspiracy" than I expected.

"always"? So for the last month and a half?

Nearing two months, yes.

Click: http://www.reddit.com/r/shibedojo (<- We trade Doge the pro way)

Related must-watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kuM_NTTxAc

Funny how these crypto currency people bash on the Wallstreet but then pull of the same stunts with official unmonitored currencies.

Who is to say it isn't Wall Street traders pulling these stunts?

Notice how every single entity is taking part in this.

There are a number of pump and dumpers manipulating the altcoin market. I'm surprised there aren't more people doing it.

Or fake anti-dogecoin propaganda. ... I can't believe we're even still talking about dogecoin, this is insane.

-wolong- is probably on the other side of the trades buying up cheap. Herding a flock of sheep to shear.

another free market triumph ;)

It will be back at 200 in the morning, they did buyers a favorite to discount it before it halves in 15 days.

Wow so it's wolf of wall st online err-Wolf of Reddit?

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