Digit, I don't have anywhere near as much as you, but can you say a bit more about the manipulation you observe at cryptsy? I'm thinking about getting into more active trading but I'm pretty new so I'm trying to learn more first.
I'm just a little fish in the CGB world
About manipulation not everyone would see it this as that but one of ways that can be seen is fake volume being created on a coin by a single user eg with enough btc i can repeatedly sell/buy into my own orders. Doing this i can create the impression of ALOT of trading activity which adds to the illusion of an exchange being popular/large number of traders and force the price to shift in direction i want. This is even easier to accomplish when the distribution is concentrated/centralized or only exists on one exchange. 100 BTC 24hr volume a user can use their own self-trading to get those numbers. it can be as simple as 10 x 10BTC worth of that coin bought and sold over the day. Of course someone will not be that obvious about it, and it could even be considered an art to create a natural looking pattern.
Preventing single users from self-trading can help reduce this and make it a little more difficult and it would mean to create the same deception would required multiple accounts to be used and funded. If there is some regulation standard for an exchange then i would assume they would also be expected to monitor and flagged this type of behavior especially if it could be seen same ips being used to manipulate a coin. Also exchanges that dont allow self-trading means users are less likely to panic if a big dump occurs which as far as anyone knows could be one person simply dumping a huge amount of coin into their own orders.
Any long time users of cryptsy will have also seen when new coins are listed there, an inflated buy order will magically sit there for hours while deposits are held. There may be a good reason for this but the effects of it that after users get their coins the price immediately plummets and the exchange now controls a large amount of coin that is unlikely to be withdrawn.
Here is a couple of posts about previously glitches from other users
Cryptsy Warning - Glitch Detected - Buying more coins than balance should allow!Cryptsy Double Spends are Back. Trade with Extreme Caution- See for YourselfYou can find more examples of it and others w google but its leaves the question that if a coin can be "oversold" or "overbought", even if the audit corrects the balances so those users owe the exchange, how much of the glitched coin has already been traded?
Google results -
https://www.google.com/search?q=cryptsy+balance+negativeFor a coin like CGB i think this is important to considered the effect of glitches combined with it being centralized on an exchange where this has happened more then once eg: more coins existing in the orderbooks/users accounts (who bought the glitched coins) then the exchange holds in their wallets.
Imbalances could maybe be fixed over time and are probaby a a non-issue with coins that have ridiculous 100B supply/high reward etc. But for coin like CGB where scarcity is one of the main benefits of holding this would be upset if significant amounts were to exist in this type of fractional reserve accidentally created by glitches.
Also I doubt that dishonest users who deliberately took advantage of trade glitches when it existed will fix their audited accounts or they might wait until a more favorable price in the coin they oversold can be used to fix their accounts at later date (eg considerable amount of BTC locked up because of negative WDC balance). Honest traders who accidentally oversold a coin have found themselves in situations where they to had buy back the oversold amount and this really cost them if the coin has jumped in value by a huge amount. Cryptsy doesn't consider themselves at fault when these trade glitches happen and users are expected pay up or cannot withdraw any of their altcoins they have on exchange.
I had this happen to me a few times way back simply when Cryptsy had severe lag issues (DDoS/order flooding it was never made clear why) I went to sell some grandcoin which i had bought a month back for 40-50 satoshis, it had gone up pass 200 satoshis so a good time to sell what i had. I placed my sell order - nothing happened. Refreshed and i see coins are still available to place so i try again to place a sell order and again nothing happens. I assume the lag is preventing my order not going so i try again a couple more times until I refresh and find that site does not even load now. Decided to return later in a few hours and i find that Cryptsy has now sold ALL my GDC + GDC amount that did not exist. I receive the BTC from selling but am left with negative amount of GDC. Unfortunately for me at that time GDC price has gone more then what i sold for and so I'm in a situation where i have to buy back or deposit to fix my balance at my own cost if i want to be able to withdraw. Luckily i had GDC i could deposit there so it was not too costly to fix my balance at my own expense. But it left me and others very cautious about trading or leaving large amounts of coins there especially if its BTC, LTC or CGB.
There is barely any trading going on and no buying pressure to counter the possible dumping of PoS blocks by cryptsy itself? I don't know how big their wallet is.
With a multipool at least you create some constant buying support and keep the price where it is (or maybe higher?).
Its not the magic answer to getting the price up, and more effective solution for 100% PoS coin that has low inflation. CGB is mixed PoW/PoS but i think it can be effective because it does have low block reward/low inflation. One interesting scenario that might exist if CGB price were to rise too quickly as result of CGB multipools, we might see 100% PoS coins multipools might switch mining it while the profitablilty was there. Crazy crypto world