Whales pushed the price slowly down to 0.009
I don't know how you arrive at that conclusion.
I only see 2 big volume spikes - June 21st when the RC3 fork issues appeared and then a smaller one around July 3rd which pushed it from 14 to around 11/12. Other than that the price has drifted on very low volume. I couldn't remotely describe it as "whale manipulation". Looks more like lots of tiny trades of sub 100 DRK - probably for all kinds of reasons.
The whole idea of market manipulation is to make people think that there is no manipulation
The truth is that the price is exactly where those market makers want it to be. These are trained pro's, they are actually paid to move the market to maximize profits.
Remember this: what we know as "price" is only the price of the last trade. We tend to make the mistake of projecting this onto the entire coin supply as if the entire coin supply was being traded at that price (that's what "market cap" is). But you try and buy 80 BTC's worth of DRK just now - that's just over one tenth of 1 percent of the coin supply. You can't have it - it's not available on any market. (Obviously if you put the work out you might get a taker, buy I'm making a philosophical point here).
If you wanted to get 80 BTC worth of DRK now you just contact the whales who hold most of the supply and do it via some dark pool. I guess they will give you a discount. Same goes with getting bigger amounts of BTC.
If I decide to sell my mate 1 DRK at a price of 0.005 and that's the "official" last trade, then I've revalued the entire DRK market cap based on just a transaction of that 1 DRK. That's what's going on at the moment - low volume trading which has some significance but very limited to the long term prospects. 98% of DRKs are being held and not traded.
If more DRK flooded market the price would plummet, just no demand. Whales need to keep them under lock. And yes, darkcoin liquidity is bad. Now after the bubble deflated it's even worse.
If you want to see prices skyrocket again like above 0.02 the only chance for that is to get new markets like btc-e, Huobi/OKcoin. Maybe after it's open-sourced and whales make some good business to promote it
