Interesting - 6 months ago or so I was monitoring all transactions on a handful of altcoins' blockchains in regards to which transactions were going in and out

Interesting - 6 months ago or so I was monitoring all transactions on a handful of altcoins' blockchains in regards to which transactions were going in and out of exchanges. Because the number of transactions per block were a number of orders of magnitude lower than bitcoin, it was far easier to keep an accurate index of which addresses belong to a given exchange without relying on a bug in BitGo. I kept a running tally of coins in/out per hour, 6 hours, and day. I could with fairly high certainty predict most large dumps 5-30 minutes before they occurred (delay before deposit is confirmed) and then immediately sell myself while placing a buy order for 5-10% lower depending on the size of the deposit. I also started tracking the exact deposit addresses being used - and more importantly, which ones get reused (a crazy high percent) - which let me correlate market behavior to an individual's actions. For example, address X just had a very large deposit. 6 blocks later, there is a market sell order placed for the exact amount deposited and this same behavior happens every time coins are deposited to the given address. I can then basically add a trigger to automatically pre-empt the likely incoming dump with one of my own and then buy back for 5% less. The biggest problem was the market cap and transaction volume was just too small to make much money relative to the risk. However if one could do this same analysis with bitcoin, it could be extremely profitable.