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Dogecoin market manipulation?

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Re: Dogecoin market manipulation?

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investing has a luck component to it as well. The way I like to think of it is, it's gambling when your expected rate of return is negative or zero. It's investing when it is positive. This is why a gambler is gambling, but a casino is investing/running a business.

Gambling and market speculation (and even theft) are related in that they're all 0 sum games. Every dollar you make is a dollar someone else wishes they hadn't lost. Investing is different in that when you win and earn a return, nobody feels that they lost.

How about all those people who sell shares and then see them shoot up in value? They certainly feel that they lost.

Re: Dogecoin market manipulation?

#102
post #84
post #70

Gee, I totally get somebody putting money into Bitcoin or mining Litecoin, but the rest are honest scamcoins (or at least - circuscoins). If you mine, then it's probably okay, although it still costs you real money (energy, hardware, opportunity cost, etc.), but to put money (fiat or bitcoins) into it - you need to be completely out of your mind!

What makes Bitcoin and Litecoin not scam coins?

Nothing of essence, of course. I strongly believe Bitcoin is a bubble that will burst this year although I definitely recognize the innovation and awareness of certain problems that it brought. But at least you see some legitimacy and a level of assurance in VCs putting money into Bitcoin startups where Dogecoin and the likes are just honest scams, not even bubbles. What kind of a person would put money into something called BBQCoin or Junkcoin?

Re: Dogecoin market manipulation?

#104
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gambling is when the game is purely driven by luck. Investing is when the instrument has measurable properties and explanations for why it will become more valuable - i.e. you invest in making your factory larger, so it can produce product more cheaply. Betting on completely unregulated currency markets (which have good reasons that they shouldn't have any value at all) is gambling, because you're entirely depending…

Investing has a luck component to it as well. The way I like to think of it is, it's gambling when your expected rate of return is negative or zero. It's investing when it is positive. This is why a gambler is gambling, but a casino is investing/running a business.

What is your expected rate of return from a horse racing bet? It's certainly negative if you pick a horse at random, but what if you chose the horse based upon form, conditions, odds and so on? It's still gambling, but you cannot prove that the expected rate of return will be negative in this case.

There are people who make a living from this, just like there are people making a living from investments. Likewise, there are lots of people that lose at both.

Re: Dogecoin market manipulation?

#106
post #29

Anyone have a link to a tl;dr on how market manipulation like this works? It seems like crypto-currencies are ripe for for this of thing and it doesn't take much money to do it. Presumably the hidden information you have from being part of a cabal means it's different than just changing your risk distribution like a Martingale betting strategy does.

The way it works is to use a giant bid or ask wall to push the price around. Say the asset has bids at 220 and asks at 222, and you want to push the price downwards. You put up an ask of an amount equivalent to maybe 6hours volume at 224 (an "ask wall"). Anyone selling will put their orders below that wall, and as you slowly move the wall downwards people will sell into the market in the expectation that they can buy again once you've pushed the price lower than where they sold.

This relies on the large wall not being an attractive offer for someone who has the purchasing power to obliterate it, which is where it occasionally fails. Generally, if the market starts to move against it with any force, it's pulled or moved further back behind other orders.

Another way this can be used is by putting up a wall on the opposite side of your real order to drive demand - i.e. in the scenario above, you might be trying to buy at 220. If you put up a huge wall at 224, people will be more willing to fill your order at 220 than if the orderbook was much thinner.

It seems this is called spoofing in the financial world.

Re: Dogecoin market manipulation?

#108
post #13
post #5

Meh. The only reason the price is as low as it is currently is that A) $850,000 needs to be added to the market every single day just to keep the price stable B) Coinbase et al. literally can't convert dollars to BTC fast enough. The situation is similar to how whenever Apple releases a new iPhone, it takes literally months until there is enough supply to match the demand. While this market manipulation is blatantly…

People are free to coordinate their trades as private players on the market. While it may be illegal I see nothing unethical about it. The entire point of the fucking market is to amass enough capital that you're not 'picking' stocks, if you're trading without an edge I really don't know what to tell you.

> While it may be illegal I see nothing unethical about it.

This is interesting. It shows an attitude about laws as being just suggestions that you can also compare against your morality. I certainly agree on many points, for example people who do things on a small scale that are technically illegal (e.g. sodomy where it was illegal, etc). The context and morality does matter.

But in this particular case, the laws exist for quite an important and good reason. Do you know why? It seems to be for the exact case that's happening here. Ignoring the laws shielding the public, because you don't see anything unethical in it, seems, well, akin to ignoring fraud laws because you don't see anything wrong with committing fraud.

For example, why shouldn't I be able to print money (on an inkjet printer) - it might be technically illegal, but is it immoral? It's immoral because you make money from people accepting something that is worthless, and devalues people's faith in the real thing.

Pump and dump schemes have a similar effect on real investment markets, and are illegal for this reason.

Re: Dogecoin market manipulation?

#109
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are free to coordinate their trades as private players on the market. While it may be illegal I see nothing unethical about it. The entire point of the fucking market is to amass enough capital that you're not 'picking' stocks, if you're trading without an edge I really don't know what to tell you.

The entire point of the fucking market is to share information. Pump and dump schemes are not information, they're noise.

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Re: Dogecoin market manipulation?

#110
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are free to coordinate their trades as private players on the market. While it may be illegal I see nothing unethical about it. The entire point of the fucking market is to amass enough capital that you're not 'picking' stocks, if you're trading without an edge I really don't know what to tell you.

> While it may be illegal I see nothing unethical about it. This is interesting. It shows an attitude about laws as being just suggestions that you can also compare against your morality. I certainly agree on many points, for example people who do things on a small scale that are technically illegal (e.g. sodomy where it was illegal, etc). The context and morality does matter. But in this particular case, the laws ex…

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