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How traders pump and dump sub 50 btc volume coins is a more accurate title. Manipulating a coin with 1k+ volume is significantly harder.

godelski 9y ago
I've been hearing talk about 1k people own >40% of BTC[1]. I think having that kind of market share gives you that kind of power, especially if you coordinate your moves (like the article suggests). This article more seems like spammers. Same kind of thing that the stock spammers did with emails. There's a nice DefCon video about this [2]. Basically some people have a lot of the stock (or coin), get people to buy, and dump on them. I think the evidence that people have been doing this with the smaller stock exchanges show that it can be done with BTC. I think if you watch BTCs price long enough, you can even see these patterns. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitcoin-whales-1-000-people-who-own-40-percent-of-the-market https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitco... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytDamqTjPwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytDamqTjPwg
- VMG 9y ago
  > I've been hearing talk about 1k people own >40% of BTC[1]. That seems dubious. These numbers usually don't account for custodial wallets e.g. exchanges
  - atmosx 9y ago
    "The Bitcoin system is the best known and most widely used alternative payment scheme, but so far it was very difficult to get accurate information about how it is used in practice. In this paper we describe a large number of statistical properties of the Bitcoin transaction graph, which contains all the transactions which were carried out by all the users until May 13th 2012. We discovered that most of the minted bitcoins remain dormant in addresses which had never participated in any outgoing transactions. We found out that there is a huge number of tiny transactions which move only a small fraction of a single bit- coin, but there are also hundreds of transactions which move more than 50,000 bitcoins. We analyzed all these large transactions by following in detail the way these sums were accumulated and the way they were dispersed, and realized that almost all these large transactions were descendants of a single transaction which was carried out in November 2010. Finally, we noted that the subgraph which contains these large transactions along with their neighborhood has many strange looking structures which could be an attempt to conceal the existence and relationship between these transactions, but such an attempt can be foiled by following the money trail in a sufficiently persistent way." - Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir ref: https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    Yes, plus how to tell the difference between hodlers and lost keys?

godelski 9y ago

I've been hearing talk about 1k people own >40% of BTC[1]. I think having that kind of market share gives you that kind of power, especially if you coordinate your moves (like the article suggests). This article more seems like spammers. Same kind of thing that the stock spammers did with emails. There's a nice DefCon video about this [2]. Basically some people have a lot of the stock (or coin), get people to buy, and dump on them. I think the evidence that people have been doing this with the smaller stock exchanges show that it can be done with BTC. I think if you watch BTCs price long enough, you can even see these patterns. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitcoin-whales-1-000-people-who-own-40-percent-of-the-market https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-08/the-bitco... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytDamqTjPwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytDamqTjPwg

VMG 9y ago
> I've been hearing talk about 1k people own >40% of BTC[1]. That seems dubious. These numbers usually don't account for custodial wallets e.g. exchanges
- atmosx 9y ago
  "The Bitcoin system is the best known and most widely used alternative payment scheme, but so far it was very difficult to get accurate information about how it is used in practice. In this paper we describe a large number of statistical properties of the Bitcoin transaction graph, which contains all the transactions which were carried out by all the users until May 13th 2012. We discovered that most of the minted bitcoins remain dormant in addresses which had never participated in any outgoing transactions. We found out that there is a huge number of tiny transactions which move only a small fraction of a single bit- coin, but there are also hundreds of transactions which move more than 50,000 bitcoins. We analyzed all these large transactions by following in detail the way these sums were accumulated and the way they were dispersed, and realized that almost all these large transactions were descendants of a single transaction which was carried out in November 2010. Finally, we noted that the subgraph which contains these large transactions along with their neighborhood has many strange looking structures which could be an attempt to conceal the existence and relationship between these transactions, but such an attempt can be foiled by following the money trail in a sufficiently persistent way." - Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir ref: https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2012/584.pdf
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Yes, plus how to tell the difference between hodlers and lost keys?