[omegaham]

On the bright side, the idiots who join these groups hoping to scam others tend to lose their shirts as well. The person orchestrating the pump-and-dump scheme bought the currency at $X per coin in question long before, and he's using the people in the group as patsies. "Buy the coins at $X + $Y, and the rise in price will make it so that you can sell the coins to some other idiot for $Y + $Z!"

If there aren't enough "outsider" idiots to buy the coins for $Y + $Z before the correction happens, the "insider" idiots lose their shirts. The original person, of course, makes a tidy profit.

---

I learned this the hard way playing Runescape as a 16-year-old. 2007 was an interesting time for that game.

[aphextron]

>I learned this the hard way playing Runescape as a 16-year-old. 2007 was an interesting time for that game.

Playing that game over the years was the most thorough education in trusting strangers on the internet anyone could ever need

[zeusk]

For me, it was an introduction to basic finance topics like abitrage and trading; also the enormous scope of scams people can pull.

I made my fortune in high frequency trading of rune sets after they introduced Grand Exchange and steel smelting prior to it.

[shiado]

I was one of those assholes that ran a bot farm to devalue your labour. RS was a great place to learn about the race to the bottom, economies of scale, and other random economic topics as well.

[omegaham]

The most interesting part of RS was that the more raw the product, the more it was worth - you could get more XP out of it.

And before the Grand Exchange, buying in bulk cost more than buying small amounts, because buying large amounts of materials required you to sit on World 1 spamming "buying iron ore whatever each" for hours.

[swarnie_]

I'm not sure the historical data still exists but would this be around the time of organised market manipulation? The spiking gold rings 500% then dumping just before you told everyone else to springs to mind.

[omegaham]

Yeah, it was when the Grand Exchange locked in market rates - you couldn't trade at any price outside 10% of the established price.

At the same time, ClanChat was introduced, allowing enormous groups of strangers to coordinate their activities.

[csomar]

They usually accumulate old cryptos or whole-buy them at ridiculously low prices (almost 0). So their biggest expense is actually marketing.