So I had another Mercatox moment today. A few hours ago I placed a limit buy order of 25,000 DNotes for 620 Satoshi. At the time there was a standing sell order of 400 DNotes for 620 Satoshi. So as soon as I placed the order I immediately bought 400 DNotes and that eliminated all sell orders for 620. Not too long after that, A sell of 25,084.1 DNotes at 620 Satoshi executed. But not one bit of my standing limit order at that price was filled. It still sits on the order book at 24,600 DNotes for 620 Satoshi and it might never fill because the price has been going nowhere but up all day. Since placing that order triggered the standing sell order to fill, I would think that meant my order was first in line. But instead, some other order filled first, and mine still sits there waiting.

How is this explained by technical difficulties?

I see no other orders for 620 Satoshi and haven't for hours. As far as I know, my order is the only one, and if there were invisible orders, mine had to be first. And yet, it wasn't the first to fill when someone else sold more than the amount I'd ordered at that price.

I feel like I'm playing by a set of rules I do not understand. Is anyone else trading on Mercatox? Could you share some insight?

I used Bitcoin to buy a lifetime unlimited membership to CoinTracking so that I could have an easier time keeping records of my cryptocurrency transactions for tax purposes as well as tracking my portfolio. They give a discount if you pay in Bitcoin. There is a limited free trial version, but if you do anything significant in this space you'll want to upgrade. It's not cheap, but it's saved me hours and hours of time already.

Thanks for weighing in. That is really good to know that there is a good chance it could simply be technical difficulties. If the order books simply aren't properly updating, that would explain a lot. TeeGee suggested I refresh my page, but I already do that constantly. There are clearly either orders posted that I am not seeing or random trades that execute from two bots buying and selling at the exact same price at the exact same time. It's times like this that I wish I were more savvy about the technical issues. I know a lot of exchanges have had issues with scaling up. I never traded on Mercatox before DNotes got listed so I'm not even sure if this is a new problem for them or an old one.

I'm really looking  forward to trading on the DNotes Global exchange once it's ready. I know your software development team will really hammer it out to make sure there aren't those weird technical issues. Then when word gets out about that, YOU had better be ready to scale up!

I'm sorry to learn about your "odd" trading experiences, Alan. It sounds like those experiences have been costly. I can't say I've lost anything on those other exchanges. I lucked out and pulled out of Cryptsy before it went down (other than dust). I guess I lost some affiliate earnings on Allcoin because they automatically deposited to a defunct Allcoin address (but I blame myself for that and it's water under the bridge). A year ago, I really wasn't that much of a player so probably my trades were all normal even if the platforms were doing weird things.

The Mercatox thing is throwing me for a loop, though. I hate to say it, but I'm not 100% convinced that the DNotes volume is all real there, though I don't want to start accusing prematurely. It just has a weird feel to it, and like I said, there are so many executed trades which seem to come out of nowhere. Maybe since a lot of people trade with bots nowadays, they don't notice, but I haven't gotten any bots yet (anyone want to help me with that?), so I actually watch the markets I'm trading on, and yes, I do notice stuff that seems out of the ordinary. I usually trade on BitTrex and I've never seen anything like it there.

What are the other places that DVC can be bought or sold? They go for 1 Satoshi on Frei Exchange because that's the lowest anything can go for--they don't let you go beyond the 8th decimal place.

So I've had some issues trading on Mercatox. I'm still trying to buy DNotes and get a good price for them, so I've been watching the BTC/NOTE market pretty closely. I've noticed a few things that bother me.

1. Often, there will be trades executed for which there were no prior orders on the books. One time recently I had a buy order of DNotes at 598 Satoshi. It was the only buy order at that price and had been sitting on the books for several hours. Well, there was a buy or sell for approximately that same amount and guess what, not one single bit of my order filled! I was wondering where that other standing order had come from. This is at least the second time something similar happened. Mostly, it's other prices that simply aren't listed on the books.

2. I asked in the exchange trollbox if Mercatox has hidden orders and explained briefly what I'd observed. A bunch of people weighed in saying they'd noticed the same thing and it bothered them too. Some theorized that it had to do with links to markets on other exchanges, but no one really knew. One person mentioned he'd even filed a complaint with the exchange.

Is there a realistic explanation for what I'm observing? I'm finding it really frustrating because I feel as if I'm not being given complete information about the BTC/NOTE market on Mercatox, which means I'm basically trading blindly.

I read an article recently which accused some exchanges of inflating their trading volumes and I've wondered if randomly throwing in fake trades might be one way to do that. However, I'm really hoping there is a much better explanation for this. I would like to know what's going on so that I can trade with more complete information.

Thanks for the tip. In case this hasn't been mentioned before, I recently discovered CoinGecko.com and like it very much. One nice thing about it is that it does not require a minimum trading volume that I know of, so it includes more coins.

I'm pretty sure the meteoric rise that ended in January was the result of market manipulation. You can read all about it in this article: https://medium.com/thedailydose/uncovering-the-real-cartel-in-bitcoin-65b56a7a00a2

The long and steady price decline is really the market trying to find its organic value apart from manipulation. Although I have seen a number of my coins lose value, I think correcting to a level that is more in line with reality is overall a good thing.

The big question is whether the cryptocurrency market has found its real value for each coin or if even the current low prices are still the result of the past artificial inflation.

I suspect we are close, but still have a ways to go. I've heard talk of BTC reaching 5,000, but today's climb would indicate otherwise, possibly a $6,000 floor. In a few days we should be able to tell if the price is heading back up, or if it was just a blip in a much larger downward trend.

For those who want to buy back in, or buy in for the first time, I would recommend using the dollar cost averaging strategy, which is to pick an interval (week, month, quarter) and at each interval, put in more funds to buy Bitcoin and other cryptos with. So, if you want to spend $10,000 over the course of a year, rather than plunk it all down now, you would instead put in $200 a week. That way, you are likely to buy on at least some dips.

I really do not like to buy and hold a coin where the only interesting thing about it marketwise is that its price could go up or down (and of course I hope it goes up). However, I really do enjoy buying coins that have a proof of stake component so that the coins I buy produce more coins. A few years ago, I discovered DMD Diamond. At the time the coins were a quarter apiece and I figured out how many I would need to have in my wallet in order to yield around $25 worth of new coins each month. I figured I'd use that as my spending money, for things like books on Kindle, the occasional latte, etc., and I wouldn't have to strain our already tight budget.

That little scheme worked out far better for me than I could have imagined as the price went up and now enjoys a price of around $3.65 (which is by no means the ATH). Regardless of the price, I never sell off my principal. I only sell off the newly minted coins. Although I'd certainly prefer to sell off my minted coins at a higher price, I can still feel OK about selling them because I'm not cutting into the principal and I know the coins I sold will be replaced.

So I'm thinking for those who want a bit more to go on than a coin that has a price that could "go to the moon," I would highly recommend getting into DMD Diamond. You currently need at least 200 DMD to consistently mint new coins, but that's still cheaper than a single Bitcoin. DMD Diamond is about to celebrate its 5th anniversary too, so give it points for staying power. But of course, everyone should do their own homework before buying in.

I don't think you can totally eliminate the need for a human to actually read the posts (or a sampling of the posts) to determine if they are good quality.

Maybe you could partner with someone who is happy to hire and manage a group of people who get paid to read and rate posts all day, so that the bounty manager wouldn't even have to do that. Your API could spit all the posts in one place sorted by author for the quality control person to read.

I think if you managed to package up all the components together so that from the bounty manager's point of view, he can set it and forget it, you'll have a really great product.

I would have no idea how much to charge for something like that, but I guess you could start by making sure your base expenses are covered and you make some profit.

BTW, there might be other people besides bounty managers who might find a use for such an API. I know personally, I'd love an app that would allow me to read BitcoinTalk posts on my phone. I imagine an app is basically a fancy looking set of API calls to a site, right?

You should definitely take profits. I had a coin that had a meteoric rise right after Christmas and I sure wish I'd sold off a significant amount then.

What if you just sold half of everything you hold? Then you'd have $300,000 of cold, hard cash. You could buy a house with it, or if you are content with your current frugal lifestyle, then I would recommend you put a huge chunk of it into an SA 770 account. I know the guy behind this website--it's one of the best kept fiat investment secrets around, and as young as you are, you could enjoy many years of no risk background growth while you continued to play the crypto game with your remaining 300K net worth.

Not to come across as harsh as the above poster, but before you launch your new coin and before you try to market it, stop.

First, study every single other coin project that has a listing on CoinGecko.com. I used to say CoinMarketcap but they only list coins that have a daily trading volume of over 100K USD, so they leave a lot out.

Study their executive teams, their plans, their goals, what problem they are solving and what new products they are creating.

A lot of the coins out there are probably junk, but let me recommend you focus your study on a few of them: DMD Diamond, DNotes, NEM (XEM), STEEM, SMART Cash. All of those projects are solid, but I'm sure they're not the only ones.

Once you have carefully studied all the projects and eliminated the bad ones...

...look at your own project and ask yourself what your coin will accomplish that these other projects have not already tackled or plan to tackle in the near future. Does your coin offer something unique and of value?

If it does, then start by posting about it right here on this thread. Tell me about it. I love investing in promising new projects, but they have to be more than just an idea with a fancy white paper.

If it doesn't offer anything unique or valuable, then don't bother even starting. Instead, join up with a project that is already accomplishing what you want to see accomplished. You won't regret it.

Hard to believe it's already cake baking time for DMD Diamond!

I'll have to see if my kiddos want to participate again this year. We have a really busy summer, so not sure if it will pan out.

I have a feeling the competition will be stiff. Good luck to all!

I'd be in favor of doing either kDVC (one unit = 1,000 DVC) or going down to the tenth decimal place. Honestly, I'd prefer to stick with BTC/DVC for my own trading, so would welcome either one of those solutions over getting into other base coin markets. But, ultimately it's whatever works.

I do not recommend having anything to do with Yobit. Their support for developers is terrible. DNotes recently did a hard fork to its version 2.0, complete with a one to one swap of old coins to new coins. Yobit was one of the exchanges supporting the old version. Despite numerous efforts to reach Yobit support, the DNotes team never got an answer, and as far as I know, the "DNotes" trading on Yobit is still the old chain--three months after the hard fork! It got so bad that the DNotes team has had to put out multiple warnings that coins purchased on Yobit are not eligible for the swap, and even then, some still miss them and end up as bagholders. It wouldn't take much for Yobit to delist the old coin and upgrade to the new coin, but they won't do either one. Trust me, DVC doesn't need that headache, especially as I'm sure it's only a matter of time before DVC will upgrade to some more current version and have a hard fork of its own.

I'm all for this idea, once the other priority projects are taken care of.

I sure hope anyone who is part of the technical development for DNotes will be able to connect the dots well enough to buy some of their own.

That article was very thought provoking. The part that sticks with me most is where it says easy money tends to breed helplessness and dependency. That's an interesting paradox. The article is referring to all those project leaders who didn't spend all their ICO money wisely and as a result didn't really create any truly innovative product, and yet all the people who bought into their ICO are dependent on them.

My personal experience with easy money breeding helplessness was watching the markets go way up in January, and thinking, finally, the real worth of cryptocurrency is being recognized, but also thinking it was happening way too fast to be real. Then it started to fall, and each month that it declined you kind of wish you'd sold out the previous month but didn't want to sell out this month because you hoped it would rise.

I didn't have much invested in a coin that had a meteoric rise so I got lucky, and had already made back way more than my initial investment. Still, I really hated the feeling of having this wealth on paper that I was completely not in control of. It was all about the price. And then I recently found out that the rise wasn't even real, in the sense that it was the result of market manipulation. I definitely prefer to be a part of a project where the impact of speculation and market manipulation on the price is a much smaller part of the picture. I know that will always be part of it, but there has got to be something more solid, or like the article said, few investors really break even, let alone make money.

I agree that recession is helping to reveal true colors much sooner. We've already had some exposee type articles about the market manipulation, the Bitcoin cartel, etc. And we're finding out about all kinds of projects that are at best not ready for the big time yet but have a lot of money into them already.

Are you willing to swap the original SEED coin for your coin? If so, I'm in. I think I can locate the SEED wallet somewhere on my computer, though I remember the last time I tried to run it several years ago it would not connect to any peers (probably because there were no peers).

I think there may be another coin called SEED. When I was trying to do some recordkeeping for the SEED I had, I noticed my cointracking software kept pointing me to this other more current coin. So you might want to check it out before you do your big launch.

If we take the deal, we should pay the extra to add those other markets. I think a DVC/LTC market might be livelier because BTC only allows you to price as low as 1 satoshi and I suspect a half satoshi is closer to the actual market rate for DVC.

I say go for it.

I just posted this on Telegram and thought it was worth saying here too (it's a reply to one of Alan's posts where he mentions the 4 Pillars book):

I think the book is very important, actually, in particular the principles outlined therein. I've been invested in NEM for a long time. It's a great coin, great project, based on real technology and real world use, not hype. And yet since January the price has been on a downward trajectory with little sign of slowing. Its price goes down each time Bitcoin goes down and then when BTC recovers, NEM adjusts to keep the new low price. I realize a lot of things are going on to test cryptocurrencies in general, and it's been said that since NEM isn't one of the coins that benefits the umbrella organization that owns CoinDesk, it never gets mentioned, so you could say it's being suppressed (DNotes never gets mentioned there either, BTW). So there are clearly external factors beyond the project's control. However, if you spend any time on NEM's BitcoinTalk thread, the number one complaint is that there is no marketing going on, or that the marketing is terrible. I happen to know that there is quite a bit of marketing going on, but somehow the impression that there is no marketing going on is strong. More and more I'm thinking that the biggest reason for that impression of no marketing is that the NEM leaders never take the time to update the investors and other community members on BitcoinTalk about anything. They used to, but they don't now. They supposedly hang out on the NEM forum and other channels, but that's not necessarily where all the community members congregate. I used to be annoyed with Alan's repetitive messaging. I was like, hey, I get that already. But now I totally see the value of that. It's not so much what Alan says, but it's the fact that Alan takes the time to update the community. At this time our marketing is less sophisticated than the NEM marketing I'm aware of, but no one in this community ever says there is no marketing going on. And no one ever doubts that there is a solid direction to this project, even if we don't know all the details. And all because at least three or four times a week, Alan takes five minutes out of his busy schedule to post an update of some sort and answer a few questions.