It is obvious that the high volume are the insiders buying from themselves in order to control the market price.

The way this works is that if you flood the exchange with high bids and high asks, then the small volume of actually lower asks is insignificant and minor cost for the insider. For example let's say the insider is 99% of the volume (using Sybil identities on the exchange), then the 1% that wants to sell is an insignificant cost to the insider, because the manipulation of the price drives more speculator demand on the bid side than on the ask side.

So in this way, the insider is actually unloading tokens at higher and higher prices. This games goes on until the insiders have unloaded their tokens at nosebleed prices. Then it collapses.

In Ethereum's case, it was alleged by the Dao attacker that the insiders are using their tokens as margin to do margin trades to provide more upside price leverage manipulation. So first you use your tokens buying from yourself to pump up the price, then you use your ETH to short the ETH price, and start selling tokens rapidly to cause a crash in price. You cover your shorts, and repeat the process again driving the price up. But you don't crash the price too far, so as to keep the dream alive. Having very good marketing also helps.

This is why we often see a huge decline in the price after the initial ICO pump, as this enables the insiders to accumulate tokens very cheaply and then the upward price manipulation begins.

Note the insiders need to make sure they are the only large holders, so no one can compete with them and for example sell into their pump.

It seems if you don't do this manipulation, then your token will be scorned by speculators and your reputation as altcoin developers will be tarnished.

The developers if they are honest, will take their funding and continue to work hard. The market manipulators are going to come in and buy up any good coin and pump it. The only way to stop that would be for the developer (and/or the community) to hold the coins tight fisted, but then this creates a dead market such as Monero which has never seen more than 4X gain after the initial pump by rpietila.

So what can an honest developer do  He has no choice but to let the speculators have what they want. The important thing is the developer is funded and able to drive the ecosystem to success. If so, then the downside price crash will be limited or at least a great buying opportunity. Fundamental development (coding) and marketing matters.

But alas, DEX is going to be scorned because the manipulators can't operate there. Or can they? Speculators will go where the (manipulated) volume is.

It is obvious that the high volume are the insiders buying from themselves in order to control the market price.

The way this works is that if you flood the exchange with high bids and high asks, then the small volume of actually lower asks is insignificant and minor cost for the insider. For example let's say the insider is 99% of the volume (using Sybil identities on the exchange), then the 1% that wants to sell is an insignificant cost to the insider, because the manipulation of the price drives more speculator demand on the bid side than on the ask side.

So in this way, the insider is actually unloading tokens at higher and higher prices. This games goes on until the insiders have unloaded their tokens at nosebleed prices. Then it collapses.

In Ethereum's case, it was alleged by the Dao attacker that the insiders are using their tokens as margin to do margin trades to provide more upside price leverage manipulation. So first you use your tokens buying from yourself to pump up the price, then you use your ETH to short the ETH price, and start selling tokens rapidly to cause a crash in price. You cover your shorts, and repeat the process again driving the price up. But you don't crash the price too far, so as to keep the dream alive. Having very good marketing also helps.

This is why we often see a huge decline in the price after the initial ICO pump, as this enables the insiders to accumulate tokens very cheaply and then the upward price manipulation begins.

Note the insiders need to make sure they are the only large holders, so no one can compete with them and for example sell into their pump.

It seems if you don't do this manipulation, then your token will be scorned by speculators and your reputation as altcoin developers will be tarnished.

The developers if they are honest, will take their funding and continue to work hard. The market manipulators are going to come in and buy up any good coin and pump it. The only way to stop that would be for the developer (and/or the community) to hold the coins tight fisted, but then this creates a dead market such as Monero which has never seen more than 4X gain after the initial pump by rpietila.

So what can an honest developer do  He has no choice but to let the speculators have what they want. The important thing is the developer is funded and able to drive the ecosystem to success. If so, then the downside price crash will be limited or at least a great buying opportunity. Fundamental development (coding) and marketing matters.

But alas, DEX is going to be scorned because the manipulators can't operate there. Or can they? Speculators will go where the (manipulated) volume is.

Thanks for the links and discussion.  I still can not for the life of me wrap my head around the "volume" of alt coins traded recently.  With no transparency into these exchanges, we have no idea what is going on behind the scenes.  I'll put dollars to doughnuts there is more then meets the eye.

If 11.7 cents of electricity nets 11.7 cents worth of heat plus 1 for cent of income for 12.7 cents total it is not pointless.

I said in the 100% electric heat case not the natural gas case.

There is zero effective electricity cost.

Just kidding.. the only coin i approve is "Tenebrix" the others are scams !

I figured something like this would happen But in truth, we're seeing "ICO exhaustion." The ICO pyramiders got burned in WAVES and learned a somber lesson about pyramiding.

Myself, it seems the only way I can play the game is by holding for the long-term. Shoulda done that with NEM....

All that you need to do is admit that you are pumping vaporware, and then I will leave you alone.

1. He condemns pumpers whilst pumping vaporware himself.

Stop with the arbitrary ethics. No one can define scam unambiguously. This is not church. Are you a Libertarian who believes people can be responsible for their own decisions or do you advocate a NannyState here in altcoin land?

It will cut down on a lot of needless and useless verbal diarrhoea if we stick to discussions about technology, marketing, speculation and stop trying to win by attacking each other with mud slinging.

Everyone should be free to state their opinion, but incessantly battering our opinion on others is oppressive and leads to a lot of useless arguing.

Also when someone doesn't walk their own talk, they should probably not be surprised if they suffer a credibility crisis.

So I will try to STFU now and await smooth's response, if any.

...But there are some ideas in each development that are perhaps worthy. I have borrowed for example some concepts from Iota, even though I have explained that (afaics) the DAG can't be a decentralized consensus algorithm. So you can't say that it has all been worthless, neither from a marketing development nor technological concepts development perspective.

Nature meanders on the path of annealing optimum fittness. The noise is necessary in order to not get stuck in a local minima. Study simulated annealing algorithms over N dimensional spaces.

I am not going to criticize the projects of others. I think the speculators have to wise up or lose their lunch money. That is life. After all, even you are playing the speculation musical chairs game. The market is what it is. If I deny reality, I am diminishing my opportunities to succeed...

What underwriting for an IPO of a public stock is ever any different than that.

I understand your complaint is you want ICOs to be very visible and open to everyone on a equal availability basis. I think that makes the most sense as well, because you raise the most money for the developers. But I guess they have a different strategy.

Why be so jealous? You missed one. Move on. There will be many others. You win some, you lose some. Anal retention isn't healthy (and I say that sincerely, not being against you).

Why did nature make the thrill of crush, so that we cheat on our wives. Yet then your new crush demands you call her 5X per day and make babies. Was it any better than where you started?

The introduction of chance is absolutely essential to existence of possibilities.

It isn't our decision to make whether or not gamblers would be better off in some other way. There is nothing that top-down control can't destroy.

While r0ach has been locked and loaded in his basement with his stash of BTC gaining 2 - 3X fiat value, while others have pocketed 10 and 100 fiat baggers outside on altcoins. Poor r0ach getting relatively poorer daily and making himself feel better by writing about how all those scams are too profitable and how jealous he is.

The tinfoil hats have been saying the sky would fall down since at least 2007. So much profit outside, while they've been locked and loaded in their basements.

I suspect AnonyMint would prefer the latter.

And when the sky does fall, there is no guarantee that Bitcoin will be any more reliable than an altcoin. Bitcoin might be more controllable with capital controls due to the centralized control of mining in China, and TrojanHorsecoin is surely more traceable.

These CCs are not heirlooms. They are not get-out-crisis-free cards. They are speculative gambles. There is not a certain asset to get you through the coming crisis. The strongest asset is probably one's health and mental acuity. All the "holier than thou" crap is butthurt ointment.

Yes the altcoin arena is loaded with delusional designs that won't end up being adopted for anything. But that is irrelevant. People are here to speculate, gamble, and potentially turn a small amount of lunch money into a fortune.

Now imagine what happens when AnonyMint releases a coin that is actually widely adopted. Fortunes will be made. And r0ach will miss the entire opportunity in his basement locked and loaded sweating in camouflage underpants and an aluminium foil helmet.

Jealous adult men creating strawman squabbles over who can create a better gambling product for the market that wants to gamble.

Buy low, sell high, and ignore the "holier than thou" pathetic, useless whining. Legality is the problem of the issuers and possibly the promoters, not of the speculators.

Compete or lose. Ask the Oklahoma Thunder how that works. I like to see any of these whiners in this thread whining on a basketball court about playing fair while getting repeatedly dunked on and ignored by the opposing team that is fast breaking obliterating them while the losers stand still pleading their futile case.

I bet these whiners resemble this 30-something guy who can't even jumper higher than a shorter, chronically ill, muscle atrophied, 51 year old guy who hadn't been able to train his autoimmunity weakened legs.

All of us know that none of these altcoins have any relevance outside this tiny gambling ecosystem. We'll also know it if ever there exists something of greater relevance, because its million users adoption will exist not as a promise, hope, nor vaporware.

What about the alleged Bitcoin scam of mining costs charged to the Chinese people and profits kept for the politically well connected? Do you ridicule it?

And who determines which is a scam and which is not? You?

I agree you have your free will to do what ever you want. And I have the free will to think you are obnoxious. You seem to be under the delusion that you have any relevance in this sphere.

You are as relevant as the ant who just scurried onto my desk and got squashed by my thumb.


Hey Mr. Irrelevant Self-Appointed Altcoin Police Enforcer, you never answered me:

---

Boohoo. Isn't that just like life and nature. The lion has to kill in order to eat. Lunch money investors want to take risks and try to become millionaires. Who appointed you as top dick sergeant?

You are welcome to criticize their plans, but your "holier than thou" façade is typically a covering for skeletons in your own closet. I been around long enough in this world to know those who protest the most, have the worst guilt. Applying this psychological tool, DecentralizedEconomics likely has some serious skeletons in his closet revolving about sexual perversion.


This statement is not so hypocritically righteous. You are expressing your foresight. I have my own doubts about the viability of most of the altcoins.

Bitcoin seems entirely viable as the TrojanHorse that enslaves us in a digital loss of privacy and easily executed capital controls with the control over the mining by the oligarchs.

It is one big fucking mess. So please stop the pretension.

You do not seem to understand that if Satoshi's idealism was decentralization, then you don't want decentralization. And you don't accept the necessarily decentralized (partial orders, no total orders) physics of the universe you exist in.

Learn:

My research is not a bagholding. I am the only person on earth to have truly solved how to make an ASIC resistant proof-of-work algorithm.

That $5 million was well wasted. $trillions in future value created from a measly $5 million (of which only a small smidgen needed to reach me to create the serendipity of nature's resilience). And you haven't seen even the tip of the iceberg yet.

STFU. You are a depressing, curmudgeon.

Go on with your babbling incomprehension of how nature and the earth functions. And you try to make me responsible for jl777. Who the fuck ever proved that I have anything to do with anything jl777 did? Because I didn't! I wasn't involved in any thing of Nxt.

Go accomplish something and stop whining. If you can't compete, that is your problem. Produce something better for the speculators. Stop your annoying whining.

As MA has explained, there will always be dumb people to be the bagholders in the market. There is nothing anyone could do to change that.

The doubt was removed. Perfect decentralization is possible. The key discovery was how to make validation go to ~0 cost, which causes a homoeostasis (Nash equilibrium) to form on the game theory of centralization.

And the other discovery was how to remove computation from proof-of-work. Both are recent discoveries.


AnonyMint critiqued the ludicrous tech of Factom.

But that is irrelevant. Max brings awareness to crypto, brings more lunch money to the table.

From this cesspool can rise a BitcoinTrojanHorse killer. Processes aren't noise free because there can't exist omniscience on which is the noise and which is the signal a priori (it can only be known in retrospect and even then perspectives will differ on the account of history).

It isn't usually possible to throw the bath water out independently of the baby when the baby is a decentralized market. You say you want decentralized markets, yet you are unwilling to accept their imperfection. Imperfection is required to have any dynamic system. Otherwise you have top-down control, which is the antithesis of existence, because the speed-of-light is necessarily finite (otherwise past and future would collapse into an infinitesimal nothingness) and thus a top-down observer can't anneal distributed processes in real-time.

Nature is simultaneously ugly and fabulously diverse and interesting. I wouldn't prefer the disinfected nirvana of absolutely no possibilities.

Yeah HODL some Bitcoin. It is the most stable CC so far. HODL your nose and realize the altcoin cesspool is necessary.

1. He condemns pumpers whilst pumping vaporware himself.

Because we are just fools:

Thanks for the explanation.

I'll refresh your memory.

It was after I had announced Zero Knowledge Transactions and it was clear that Monero had a competitive solution RingCT and I was shopping ZKT around to potentially BBR and also I approached Bitshares briefly. Thus that must have been roughly Aug or Sept. There is a post from AnonyMint user name at the Bitshares forum as evidence.

I was discussing with you in private about the merits of ICOs and making money from launching a coin in what ever means. And you were trying to tell me that there is basically no money in it and that is why Monero's plan is the best, because the XMR devs just do it as a hobby or labor of love and don't take it too seriously as a way to generate income. You were always in general coaxing me away from any concept of making money from developing and launching CC, and to the open source hobbyist Monero way.

And I mentioned Bitshares as an example with their significant marketcap which had been as high as $40 million at one point for afair the ProtoShares. And had also mentioned Dash. That is when you instructed me about how all the mcaps are fake and you made me aware that insiders buy from themselves to make it appear that the volume is real.

I said okay maybe for Dash, but Bitshares seems to have legit technology and theirs might be real. And you said that look how Bitshares is trying to sell services (at that time in 2015) because they are basically cash strapped and aren't earning hardly anything from creating CCs.

In short, you were trying to discourage me from pursuing making a CC if I expected to earn any $ from doing so. That is not to say you were discouraging me from creating a CC if not for expectation of a payday. That is not to say you were wishing for me to fail if I did attempt to. I think you felt you were just giving sound feedback.

To be fair, you were aware of my illness and perhaps you were concerned and felt I might be better off to take employment, get medical insurance, and have a more stable and less risky source of potential income and funding for health care.

But I just know that before that discussion, I never thought about the altcoin market as being one giant scam and being entirely fake. I really bought into your take on that. But now in hindsight, I think you are not entirely correct. Seems people who have produced less technology than I am working on, having reaped some significant paydays.

Waves raised ~$15 million and referred to IOHK's open source without apparently having developed anything at all. It was apparently purely a marketing campaign. Heck I never expected even a $million, so with better tech than they have, why shouldn't I be able to get my $500,000 and also do some good for the CC community.

When I respect someone, it means I listen intently to what they have to say.

Let me try to unpack those points a bit for laymen:

1. Full nodes in DPOS are elected delegates. With Satoshi's PoW, we don't know which node will win the next block. So an attacker wouldn't know which node to jam with a DDoS attack. Any node attacked would simply not participate in competing to produce the next block, but this wouldn't harm the system at all. Whereas, when we designate the node that will decide what goes into the next block, then an attacker knows which node to attack. As well, a node knows when it will control the next block, and thus it can attack the network by withholding (although it would probably get voted out of being a delegate node soon, although it might be difficult to prove when it was a legitimate network hiccup or when it was intentional). I believe Bitcoin-NG may have an analogous weakness.

2. For me, this is the other huge weakness. With DPOS, the set of nodes which process blocks is static until the next voting. And even after voting, standing up a full node is not something an individual can choose to do by himself. There is always politics and centralization involved. The ideologically great thing about Satoshi's design is that anyone at any time can go standup a full node and process his/her transactions on any block he/she wins. The problems of course with Satoshi's design is that it doesn't scale and also that PoW economics of SHA256 means an individual can no longer win a block nor prevent the centralization of mining over time due to it being 100 to 1000X more profitable for the ASIC farms and because scaling can't work without centralization. So DPOS doesn't really gain anything that we can't get by centralizing Satoshi's design other than saving electricity.

I have another solution which I think is a better compromise than both of those. But I won't describe it, because surely others will start to figure out my design if I describe it further. I need to release it asap, so the discussion of its merits can be open sourced.

3. If one full node's block period is say 5 seconds, but the propagation to another of the full nodes is 10 seconds, that latter node will not be able to receive the new block from the former and produce another new block within its 5 second allocation. Thus the block period has a lower bound which is dictated by the slowest propagation on the network of full nodes. And 5 seconds confirmation is too slow for certain types of microtransactions. Imagine you want to start listening to a song, and you have it set to pay a microtransaction automatically, but you have to wait 5+ seconds everytime you want to click to listen to a new song you have not yet paid for. Or similarly when using microtransactions instead of a CAPTCHA. Even 1 second might be too slow! Vcash's Zerotime can't even get close to being fast enough. Probably Lightning Networks won't be fast enough either, not to mention it doesn't scale well.

5. DPOS (delegated proof-of-stake) is still POS with all its flaws. My desire is to attain Satoshi's security model, but with 100% decentralization, massive scaling, 1 second confirmed transactions, and no economic trend towards centralization!


Edit: Steemit is pioneering combining PoW and DPOS in another way, and do take note that this doesn't seem to fix the issues I enumerated above although it mitigates somewhat issue #2 except doesn't solve the economics of centralization of PoW issue:

How can it get more popular if it can't scale  

Hope you realize BitCON is less popular than a shitty, bottom tier social network.

Even a moderately popular mobile app has more users than BitCON.

Delusion is nice isn't it.

Transactions that confirm definitely in a minute aren't a problem.
There were some places which accepted zero confirmation transactions for low value items, because they were sure that the transaction would confirm. This is no longer the case.  

Security and reliability cannot be copied.
(dont adopt segwit)

LN can't send a payment from Bitcoin address to any Bitcoin address. It requires users establish accounts in the LN before they can be eligible, i.e. it is an opt-in system and it is not persistent.

LN is an incredibly complex Rube Goldberg kludge patched on top of an inadequate block chain design and there IS a better solution coming. You have to discard the Bitcoin block chain and Satoshi's design and start over.

In general, Bitcoin is moving towards centralization over the control of which nodes validate and thus which can do capital controls and KYC enforcement on transactions:

https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2016/01/08/spv-mining-is-the-solution-not-the-problem/
http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/1txn/

So, are you admitting ban evasion?

You can ignore reality if you wish.

Edi 1t: Repeating the same erroneous statement over and over again does not make it correct.

Don't tell me the current Satoshi proof-of-work is any where near a fair, competitive free market distribution scheme:


So we pay $600 per BTC, and 21 Inc. will pay $8.

The coin of decade isnt clear right now, but i think there is a few contenders

* zcash or whatever anoncoin wins the privacycoinwarz

* etherum or whatever wins the appcoin 2.0 warz

* sucks_govt_and_bankster_cocks_coin or whatever wins the panopticon cockchain warz

You obviously need decentralized exchanges to deal with problems like centralized exchanges being able to trade on their own system and naked short coins down to 0.  Then the market would have to consider the DEX as the leading exchange price-wise instead of the margined casino centralized ones.

I do not exactly know what goes on behind the scenes when a coin/token gets listed but you'll know that a team behind a platform knows what their doing because the maintained volume for their coins is always high right from the beginning.  A prime example of this is Ethereum.

It would be naive to think that the market activity will just come without some kind of manipulation going on to jump start trading.

I do not exactly know what goes on behind the scenes when a coin/token gets listed but you'll know that a team behind a platform knows what their doing because the maintained volume for their coins is always high right from the beginning.  A prime example of this is Ethereum.

It would be naive to think that the market activity will just come without some kind of manipulation going on to jump start trading.

It is obvious that the high volume are the insiders buying from themselves in order to control the market price.

The way this works is that if you flood the exchange with high bids and high asks, then the small volume of actually lower asks is insignificant and minor cost for the insider. For example let's say the insider is 99% of the volume (using Sybil identities on the exchange), then the 1% that wants to sell is an insignificant cost to the insider, because the manipulation of the price drives more speculator demand on the bid side than on the ask side.

So in this way, the insider is actually unloading tokens at higher and higher prices. This games goes on until the insiders have unloaded their tokens at nosebleed prices. Then it collapses.

In Ethereum's case, it was alleged by the Dao attacker that the insiders are using their tokens as margin to do margin trades to provide more upside price leverage manipulation. So first you use your tokens buying from yourself to pump up the price, then you use your ETH to short the ETH price, and start selling tokens rapidly to cause a crash in price. You cover your shorts, and repeat the process again driving the price up. But you don't crash the price too far, so as to keep the dream alive. Having very good marketing also helps.

This is why we often see a huge decline in the price after the initial ICO pump, as this enables the insiders to accumulate tokens very cheaply and then the upward price manipulation begins.

Note the insiders need to make sure they are the only large holders, so no one can compete with them and for example sell into their pump.

It seems if you don't do this manipulation, then your token will be scorned by speculators and your reputation as altcoin developers will be tarnished.

The developers if they are honest, will take their funding and continue to work hard. The market manipulators are going to come in and buy up any good coin and pump it. The only way to stop that would be for the developer (and/or the community) to hold the coins tight fisted, but then this creates a dead market such as Monero which has never seen more than 4X gain after the initial pump by rpietila.

So what can an honest developer do  He has no choice but to let the speculators have what they want. The important thing is the developer is funded and able to drive the ecosystem to success. If so, then the downside price crash will be limited or at least a great buying opportunity. Fundamental development (coding) and marketing matters.

But alas, DEX is going to be scorned because the manipulators can't operate there. Or can they? Speculators will go where the (manipulated) volume is.

I am a stakeholder. I just checked to see if I'm a pathetic cypher of the sinister team behind this. I am not. I checked twice.

i know its very easy to assume that there MUST be some kind of deviousness involved somewhere along the line, but that has never been the case with nem. its a major reason why i supported nem wholeheartedly from the beginning and will continue to do so for years to come.