Smooth likes to come here and post his theory that the only reason for Dashs high market cap (given its broken tech) is that its a manipulated market by insiders holding large amounts of coins. (It isnt - the reason is that Dash has the right business model and XMR has a doomed one that was never thought through because they became too obsessed with cryptography. But thats for another post).
In fact Ive never seen any evidence of this and he has never posted any.
I heard Poloniex owns hundreds of thousands of XMR because they have set up the deposits so that they can't tell who deposited what and users can't prove they made the deposit unless the user knew to send a special ID to go with the transaction. So now they have a high percentage of the XMR float that no one else can claim, and they have the monopoly on the market. There aren't many who would benefit more from the price of XMR going up than Poloniex, perhaps not even one.
You can detect the footrpints of a pump and dump operation by doing some volume analysis on the respective big price moves.
I learned this from watching paycoin for weeks - not because I was invested, just because it was quite fascinating to see it in action.
In particular, the OBC (On Balance Volume) has very squarish patterns in it, while the price signal has lots of reflections - a big move up, a horizontal section and an equivalent move down.
Heres whats been going on over at Poloniex lately
From that you cant tell if its deliberate manipulation. You can only tell that large holders are moving the market and small ones arent. You can get clue to motivations, however, by measuring the cost of the pump against the revenue from the dump.
In the following move (this is a longer range chart - 4 hour), the market was coaxed up in a move that barely reflected in the volume profile. What this does however is attract large amounts of liquidity into the bid stack of the order book which
doesn't manifest itself in the 'upside' volume statistics. What the pumpers then do is wait for sufficient liquidity to appear to absorb their dump before selling into it. This then does reflect in the OBC and gives them a huge gain in BTC, even though the price signal would appear that it was a zero sum game.
Now that's some great analisys!
Thank you
