[tinfoilman]

It is commonly accepted that the mxGoT willy bot was the cause of the price rise in 2013 from 200 to 1000 dollars.

History

Gox started as a trading platform in 2010 by McCaleb. He sold this to Mark in 2011. It is rumored that Mark was using customers BTC to expand Gox or/and it was already sold to Mark missing 80,000 BTC. When the price started to go up, Gox was forced to create the willy bot to try and buy back (at a higher price) the bitcoins they missing as they were running a technical fractional reserve). The willy bot drove the price up because it was always buying and in turn defeated its own purpose as it ended up bankrupting MxGot by driving the price so high that they could never hope to recover the missing btc. I wonder if they had not created the bot if they could have made GoT solvant again over a longer time frame.

This sort of thing is still happening, Poloneix is rumored to be inside trading, There was a DDOS attack a few days ago which caused price drops and it is rumored the Dossers were shorting the currencys on the exchanges. One of the exchanges had such little liquidity that a whale was able to dump eth yesterday causing a massive price drop on one exchange (which I am prety sure they then used to buy up cheap coins but you never know)

Anyone activity trading in Cryptoland is at the mercy of these whales, they are mainpulating price, daily pump and dumps on alts and no regulartion

That said, I cannot stop watching it all, i just hlod coins I like the technical merit of

Some light reading

History of Gox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox Information on McCaleb selling to Mark talk of missing 80k http://www.thedailybeast.com/behind-the-biggest-bitcoin-heis... Links on Willybot http://www.coindesk.com/bot-named-willy-did-mt-goxs-automate... Poloneix insider https://coinidol.com/suspicion-of-insider-trading-at-polonie...

[calpaterson]

This is just what stock exchanges were like in the 19th and maybe early 20th centuries. Reading "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" which covers the period ~1890s-1920s I was stunned by how common (relative to now) inside trading, price manipulation and short squeezes were.

Most of these are now prohibited which I'm sure doesn't eliminate them but it makes them much less common - short squeezes in particular are now very very rare. BTC markets obviously won't have any restrictions.

Amazon link for anyone interested in the book (make sure you get the annotated edition): https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0470481595/

[jnordwick]

In that book he actually describes how he can't manipulate the market even though he was blamed for it i real life. The moral is that the market cannot be forced into submission and you need to just accept that fact and take what it gives you.

[eigenvalue]

Short squeezes happen all the time. Look at the ticker RH in the past few months, or AMD over the past couple days!

[peller]

I think perhaps a better example would be the bulk shipping industry during November of last year; take a look at DRYS in particular. $5 to $120 in a week, followed immediately by a breakdown right back to $5. (It's split a bunch of times since then, so the adjusted prices on a current chart are different, but what's important to note is the exponential shape of the price action in conjunction with absolutely zero fundamental reasons for a price increase.)

[koliber]

Would you be willing to share your opinion on which coins have technical merit?