My favorite theory is that botnet operators intentionally keep the price low to keep the GPU miners away from the coin. This assumes that Monero will have an inevitable rise in price. But in this scenario with an inevitable rise in price, you try to keep the mining network as small as possible so your botnets can mine a greater percentage of the supply.

When monero reaches 5 - 10$ (or something), the GPU farmers will come in and eat the hashrate (I don't know where they are now... ethereum, decred, dash, maybe some litecoin still). Monero is the *only* cpu-mineable coin that is worth *anything*, so if I was a botnet operator I would protect the longevity of my resource... in this case, my theory is that they protect the longevity of their exploitation of the mine by keeping it unnattractive for the high-power (meaning, watts) miners.

and these bonnet operators have lots of monero (in this hypothetical scenario).

But this is purely speculation.

This describes the effect of dumps more than the effect of walls.  When one dumps a lot of XMR to drive the price down, hoping to buy more back cheaper.


But a wall is different from a market order. 

The effect of a sell wall is sometimes just a desire to sell monero at that price (a 'real' wall).  But sometimes it is a bluff (a 'fake' wall).


The purpose of a bluff sell wall is to cause other people to panic sell because they see your wall and think the price cannot rise.  You place smaller buy orders below the price and hope that you catch this panic selling.  Once you do, you remove the sell wall and allow the price to rise, while the panic sellers are upset.  The goal of the wall is to get your limit orders filled at a better price.

If it works, its a way to buy cheaper. 

Sometimes it fails because a whale actually munches your wall, then you are sad.



Its hard to tell if a wall is real or fake.  Usually if a wall stays in place for a long time its real.  Usually if you buy part of a wall and its fake, the rest of it will be removed.   

There can be fake buy walls as well as fake sell walls, the goal of fake buy walsl is to allow the person to sell some at a higher price. 

i forgot to add my usual "i have no idea what im talking about" disclaimer. Im just callin em as I sees em. And I have no idea whats going on at the moment. This market is crazy. I don't give money advice, but the best thing for your piece of mind is to buy a little bit everyday - known as cost averaging.

Actually, the best thing to do is buy hardware to mine monero. That way if the price ever crashes and monero is worth as much as the bits on the blockchain, you can then sell your hardware to someone who wants to play games on their computer. On top of that, you support the network and make the network more secure. Our hashrate is paltry for something as powerful as Monero.

Effects of buy and sell walls: Say you have lots of resources. 1,000 bitcoin, 100,000 monero. You're goal: make more money.

You enter the market, and see that on the books there's a nice curve between buy and sell. No walls are visible on the chart. The current market price (the price around where the buy and sell orders meet) is 0.01. A lot of people are willing to buy monero for cheaper. So to drive the price down to 0.001, it costs you 10,000 xmr. So you do that - you sell some portion of your monero holdings to drive the price down, either in one fell swoop or with bots so it appears "natural". The activity creates a panic in the market, because people see the price dropping, so some decide to sell. You then place a large buy order (a buy wall) at 0.005 with, say, 200 bitcoins. Someone who just watched the market tank will say "im gettin outta this" and then dump into your buy wall. So, at the end of the day, you lost 10k xmr due to your initial market manipulation, but made some BTC doing that, and hopefully got > 10k xmr at 0.005 when people panicked.

Now, to move the market the other way you just do the opposite. You use your bitcoin to move the price from 0.01 to 0.1. Once this creates enough momentum in the market (other people going "whoooa boy we going to the moon!!") you then place a sell order of 5,000 xmr (a sell wall) at 0.05 (or wherever things sorta leveled out). If the manipulation was done right, others in the market will view this as a good time to buy-in and will eat your sell wall at 0.05.

edited to add:

but what really happens with the walls is they define limits. So if there's a sell wall at 0.05, people will place buy orders at 0.049. So you can then dump into their buy order.

I just really hate this XMR bully whale.  I watch as he/she/it ruthlessly works the stack for profit, using their hundreds of thousands of Monero to (try to) force holders to capitulate their positions, all the while scraping the asks and picking up cheaper ones - before releasing their price suppression walls just long enough to bully down any new exuberance.  
  
You say consolidation is good, but what is not good is when a community can't even discern something's true price because it constantly gets forcefully manipulated.  I just long for the day when one of the Bitcoin whales decides to make a grand entry into Monero and soaks up every single XMR being used for price suppression for good.  
  
Until then the only answer is for HODL'ers not to give these tactics a single inch.  Buy every spot Monero you can afford, attack fake ask walls when you see them, and never try to flip out of a position to get a lower price.  If we as a community show these asses that these tactics aren't profitable, they'll stop.

So I've been meaning to put some money on /u/fluffyponyza's Monerodice.net for a while now and give it a spin, but for some reason only just got around to it.

Before we begin though, what's the #1 rule of gambling? Look at the money you're about to gamble, pretend its already gone and the only thing you got in return was the entertainment of gambling it away. Is that ok? If so, proceed. If not, reduce the size of your bankroll.

Setup

For me, I had 10 Monero in my Tippero account that I didn't mind losing, and a long boring day of lectures to sit through. So I transferred them over from Tippero to Monerodice, and poof - no transaction difficulties or excessive confirmations. I checked back a few minutes later and everything was there.

The site also lets you add 2FA to your account which is nice, and gives it an air of legitimacy. It's especially nice since I can't always be bothered to login to a dice site with a secure computer - yesterday I wanted to play on a mobile for example.

Play

You surely already know how a dice site works, and this one has a tiny < 1% house edge, a portion of which goes to support the devs anyway. You can set your rolls and odds all the way from a "x2" where you have to beat a roll of 50.50, all the way to a moonshot chance of 5,000x'ing your money where you have to beat a number well above 99.98.

However my favorite bet was the 1.10x multiplier which carries a 90% chance of winning. Maybe I'm just bad at arithmetic (I am), but this bet seems to carry no house edge? I can bet 10 Monero, and if I roll less than 90.00 (or greater than 10.00, players choice), I win eleven back. This also seems to be the most popular bet on the site.

While bored out of my mind in my lectures, I devised what I call "Gauntlet One", which aims to 5x your initial wager with descending chances of ruin, assuming you pass the initial x2 wager.

    Roll 1: x2 (50%)
    Roll 2: x1.5 (66%)
    Roll 3: x1.33 (75%)
    Roll 4: x1.25 (80%)

I'm sure if you work out the probability of surviving all the rolls, it equates to approximately 20%, but this is far more exciting than a one-off shot at 5x'ing a bet.

Anyhow, with a couple of lucky button presses, scaling up a few winning bets, and scaling back bets on losses, I managed to work that initial 10 Monero to 15, then 25, then 33, and ended the night with a win of 40 Monero! Thanks for the free money, and I figured I would write this review now before I lose it all today.

In any case, the site works fine on my iPhone, but you have to remember to click the roll button one time to highlight it, and a second to roll it (if you double click it, that's two rolls so be careful!). Also be warned if you click a 'Go' instruction on the iPhone keyboard that's permission to go ahead and roll too.

Other Features

The site also has great stats where you can see recent bets/wins/losses as well as big bets recently. It also has a basic troll/whine box where you can complain about losing all your Monero, and you can also see a graph of the site's profit/loss (part of the provably fair metric). Players have the option to invest a little of their money into the site and share in the small house edge, but who has time for having a house advantage when you can beat long odds for much more?

I also like that the site explicitly shows you a "maximum win" amount, which is significant but also fair. It prevents me from wondering if the owner would toss me into the back alley should I accidentally hit a real moonshot. For those who want to test their fortunes, that amount is currently set at a whopping 28,000 Monero. Remember not to gamble more than you can afford to lose!

Summary

It would be hard to ask for a better dice site than this, but that doesn't mean the field isn't wide open. There is still room for a quality poker site, blackjack game, as well as something with a bit more flash and dazzle (like slots). Play responsibly, legally, and if you are an entrepreneur consider what other sites you might create to help bolster the Monero universe!

XMR not available on shapeshift right now?  Anyone know what's going on there?