Although I get this one, a lot of these market manipulation strategies frankly baffle me, but I just have to reassure myself that this is simply because I am sane.  

Hmmmm. Interesting. Then the Masternode can denominate the change further from there. Interesting.

I think what is going to happen is: if you want to send 10 coins to somone, and have an address with 10.501241, 10.501241 will go into the pool, the masternode keeps 0.001241, 10 go to recieve address and 0.5 are returned to sender via denominated change addresses. the 0.001241 would be kept as a small nominal fee for the transaction.

I guess you mean those happenings when you can't see any big orders on the tables but some people seem to exchange a lot of coins at progressively higher/lower prices until the price doubles/halves during a few minutes or hours and the volume shoots up into crazy heights?

I hate to participate in those (unless I am accidentally there and I can confidently recognize it close to it's start). Too much stress and too much to loose if you happen to buy in at the peak level (when you can tell it was the peak then it's usually log gone, so you got burned already big time...).

I suspect some API keys may be more equal than others, for a start.

1: Imagine you are superman (or at least a StarCraft veteran ) and you can click with almost light speed. -> This is your trading software (aka a "bot")
Since it interacts with the exchange API, it's even faster than your web browser (no speed penalty from rendering the same graphics after every clicks).

2: You have a lot of BTC (may be you stole it earlier or you are "genuinely rich", so you don't even care if you win or loose, you are ready to gamble for fun and probable profit).

3: You might secured a deal with the exchange staff to get some small advantages like high priority server access and/or slightly lower fees (may be a prepaid fix rate). [May be you are part of that exchange staff.]


So, you are probably faster than anyone (but certainly faster than many others), you can possibly sell as many coins to yourself as you wish without a worry (a nice trick, even easier to abuse if you combine it with low fees) and you can eat up as many coins as you must.

You make others buy for more and more as they try to join to your game by constantly starving them (you eat up every sell orders and also leave some buy orders there, so they offer even more and more).
When the buy table is filled enough, you execute a big sale (using coins you ate up during the pump at lower price levels and possibly earlier in small chunks when it was "normally cheap").

So you are saying some kind of  HFT techniques are used at crypto exchanges with small coins like DRK? Do you suspect it or do you know it?

Yeah, I got a bit carried away.

How about "I recently took part in a "cyber dialogue" in which the consensus was that Darkcoin would be $9+ by the end of May".

"and as the leader of the FREE world, it is up to us to put an end to these illegal crypto currencies!"

On a side note, I was wondering how my wallet could be running but I couldn't find it in my task bar... LOL, new logo!

Nice theory, thanks! As you say, there are probably lot of people without any trading experience around and I keep asking myself if some of those strange buying/selling patterns are part of something I don`t yet understand (and maybe your explanation is good) or simply clumsy. Today it looked to me as if some guy with some (!! not even that many after all) BTC just read about the wired.com article, concluded there could be a price rise tomorrow and started buying on mintpal and cryptsy in a pretty clumsy way (i.e. too quickly and impatiently). Others then jumped on the bandwagon and then people talk about "whales" or "pumps". But I`m not sure either on how to interpret those strange parabolic rises/drops.