[vlovich123]

And yet so many instances of crypto coins that did this. I’m pretty sure they all had public books. The challenge isn’t I sell one coin. It’s wash trading. You create sufficient volume from multiple different anonymous accounts continuously. That’s impossible to decipher because ownership is impossible to untangle.

[mgraczyk]

This only works if the exchange is in on it. That has happened many times but it's much harder to do than faking node activity.

[giaour]

Why does the exchange need to be in on it? If it’s not a KYC exchange, they would have no way of knowing all the Sybil accounts doing the wash trading were being run by the same individual.

[mgraczyk]

Almost all limit order books required posting the assets on the book and take a fee on trades. You can read off the amount paid to generate the fictional market cap and judge for yourself if it's likely to be fake activity. For thinly traded books with low liquidity, it's cheap. For thick books with high volume, it's expensive.

Also exchanges that are not participating in scams, actively or passively, will attempt to detect wash trading and stop it.

[mbesto]

It's much easier to fake the initial activity, then start to have "real" users pile on. The only value I created in my ICO was that I created fake demand and the lemmings followed.