[mikeschmatz]

> It doesn't really make any sense.

Whether it makes sense to you or not market price manipulation absolutely does work as shown by hundreds of lawsuits filed by SEC every year.

>The order book has a lot of orders in it. This appears to me to be one of the stupidest things anyone could ever try to do. It would move the market, but it's not clear that there's any reason to believe that it would be anything but massively unprofitable.

Given enough cash/coins you can easily manipulate order book (see "wash sales"). Even easier if you are running an unregulated exchange, duh!

The goal of bidding price up is to attract buyers and establish an upward trend, which later you can sell into at a higher price. Works even better when it causes a "short squeeze".

Works in other direction too, obviously. All this is rather pretty basic and also highly illegal in _regulated_ markets.