Very interesting, this is actually pretty cool.

[At first I thought this was some strange redo of that miserable game for the Genesis/SNES; but it looks like it'll be a legitimate game (even accepted by O'Neal himself) and the fact that QRK will be used is quite intriguing.]

It's a good way to gain additional traction, but I personally don't think it looks as "elegant" as it could be.

[I mean after all, unicode supports some pretty complex characters from other languages. Not that I'm saying to make it complex.]

You're right in the case that exchanges want to fix a price at set points.

But in the case that exchanges are okay with oscillating funds (still a type of price fixing), unless the person (or people) doing arbitrage has around the same amount of liquid money as the exchanges, the exchanges can still take advantage.

I disagree. If several exchanges colluded "strategically" it could happen. [Once again, this is just hypothetical...]

Although some will be able to take advantage with arbitrage, the transaction times of bitcoin end up helping the exchanges. Most people don't have enough funds spread through multiple exchanges. Think of this as a sort of dispersed "pump" or something.

Admittedly, we see this sort of thing with other exchanges dealing in alts (where there are fairly large spreads between exchanges). Although, relative illiquidity is the culprit in those scenarios.

Several things first: midas engine, the controversial fontas thread, and tons of pictures of moons and chikuns...

This is normal, these floods come and go just like the tide.

And as stated, there is a very strong correlation between the price trend of BTC and the amount of "lower quality" clones.

There is a lot of belief that exchanges "fix" prices because of how relatively easy it would be for several exchanges to collude and function as a market-maker of sorts. I'm not saying that it happens, but would you really be shocked if it did? I mean, the simple lack of auditability for virtually all bitcoin exchanges says a lot.

That's one of the biggest cons with an "unregulated" market.

This point has been made quite a few times. In fact, I made a thread in the last few days that got moved to Meta about this where I got fairly good feedback. [Remember when there actually used to be a mod in this sub-forum?]

Regarding bloat and spam, the hardest thing is truly differentiating between those who are legitimately excited about a coin (n00bishness and so forth) from those who are deliberately using sockpuppets to promote a coin. Sure it's much easier to differentiate between those who are trolls (or just acting like one) and those who aren't, but most of the bloat that you can find in this section are from those who pose as n00b contributors.

Oh the good old days...

I remember not selling when the price spiked up the first time and I didn't sell and I got all sad. But then a few weeks later it spiked to over $4.

Good memories. Arize chikun. Chikun arise...Chikun will reach moon!

Yeah, that pretty much summarizes everything. I looked at two of the coins that were close to the top of voting and I couldn't help but shake my head. PolCoin (the coin that won this week's vote) had basically 7 BTC and CaishenCoin has over 5.

Looking at those sort of things, I think it's a fair assumption that Mintpal could be using their own funds to let that coin win this week so that they could rake in more coins via some sort of kickback. I mean the traffic of that coin is just pitiful for a coin that just won it. 7 BTC went in to listing, but yet the market hasn't even tipped .1 BTC in volume. I'll be honest and say that I smell shenanigans.

Just a response to this, regarding the pump and dumps, you may want to include the elements of liquidity impacting the severity of a pump. Properly planned illiquidity ends ups burning both miners and early buyers on a “larger” exchange. One of the more common examples of this is how certain coins strategically limit initial liquidity and follow it up with a quick initial pump when released on a “larger” exchange. This is usually followed up with an increased release of coins (due to increased liquidity as everyone tries to get in on the initial sells), and a lot of these people end up selling it for amounts significantly lower than the first spike. This is usually when a pumper can buy back in for a much lower price. From here a second much more prolonged spike occurs in which the pumper strategically sells the remainder of the coins. In terms of market manipulation, the first wave burns the miners and the second wave burns the buyers who think they’re “getting a good deal.”

Additionally, as a follow up to major market price setting, there are also lots of back-alley deals that occur in the crypto-currency world still yet and there is a lot of buying that happens not on an exchange. However, that said, it seems that this current wave of alt-coins are mostly done via the more “normal” channels as a lot of the profiteering space has been fragmented by relative “newcomers.” A lot of the more massive manipulation has drifted back to being done with more established coins as it gets more and more difficult to do this with a new coin because of various factors (trust being one of the biggest factors). There were a few that happened with this wave, but proportionally speaking, it wasn’t as much as the waves in the middle of 2013 or during 2012.

Yeah, mining “sucks” right now. But anyone that understands this scene or has done a little research knows that the waves come and go (just like a nice relaxing beach…uh, minus the relaxing…). I do want to make one point, it isn’t always possible to buy an alt (or at least enough of them) since a lot of people hold on to a bunch of coins in the hope of catching the next spike. And frankly, this applies to most of the altcoins.

So it looks like Mintpal has decided to allow only one voting winner per week (on Mondays). I’m expecting this to cause a lot of people to buy their way in. And it looks like at the moment, the base level to win is around 75k votes.

Interestingly enough, you can kinda see the two next pump coins based on the amount of BTC sent. To be frank about it, it may be a while before NOBL gets onto that exchange. (Part of me feels like it’s becoming less and less worth it considering that Mintpal is turning into Cryptsy v2.0. And it’d be pretty easy to create a new pump coin each week and continuously repeat the cycle. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mintpal is getting some sort of kickback and manipulating the votes themselves.)

It is very unfortunate to see how many people form an opinion when they know nothing at all about something. However, humans are hard-wired to think in terms of dichotomies (at least for the most part). So when most people see a "yes/no" type of question, a vast majority of the time, they will choose one or the other even if a "Don't Know" answer exists. And even in this type of thing, people tend to lean away from disruptions of the "status quo" so there is already an inherent slant towards disallowing change.

Admittedly though, the fact that a fair amount of people chose "Don't Know" means something too. It would seem that there is a lot more of the pie that's ready for taking.

Haha. Fair enough. 

Now someone should start making mounds of coins using Macs/Windows/Linux. Add more spice to this fun little game or something.

Part of me agrees with this, but part of me feels it'd be shame to limit a word that has such a unique kick to one event.

I think because of the newness of the event, the words does dilute its impact at the moment; but given enough time, that diluting will occur likewise. Personally, I see it doing the opposite, those in the know, will still understand the impact of that word, but it'll also add a tinge of richness to the already jumbled up English vocabulary. I'm not trying to appeal to ignorance (argument-wise), but there are lots of words that have etymologies that are vastly different from their present-day connotations.

Damn, and he's doing it all on Macs. Imagine what he could have done if he did all of that scheming and conniving with a PC...

Inherently there is so much that has already happened in the short amount of time that crypto-currencies have been around that it would take much more to even get a reasonable fraction of everything that is around this scene.

It would be nice to have an exposé to dig in the to market-manipulation that has existed since large-scale trading had started with the advent of the major exchanges in 2010-2011; but for something that focuses more on alt-currencies the fact remains that most of the action has centered around the forum, twitter, IRC and on the exchanges themselves.

Yes, the price of bitcoin has been greatly impacted by things outside of that scope, but that story should be bucketed with an in-depth analysis of the bitcoin scene.

[Heck, in the bitcoin scene, there has been well-established arbitrage, options, and derivatives practices that much of the goings on are not captured in these forums despite there being a plethora of information already in that sub-forum.]

I want to see more novel algorithms that attempt to solve various types of number-related problems. How about that huh? At least then there is a "point" for another altcoin.

[I know that there is a coin that is tied in with folding, so more things like that would always be a great thing.]

I disagree, "goxxed" is a pretty awesome word. It has the right amount of glottal "pungency" that allows it to carry the implied negative connotation that is embedded in the word.

[On a side note, I chuckle a little each time I hear it because I've been hearing that word for a while (with a completely different meaning) in the semiconductor industry.]