Yesterday, an article appeared that revealed several known twitter users engaged in a group chat where they planned, but seemingly failed to execute a scheme to take a major position in an emerging new coin, with the intent to control its price, at least to some extent. The message below pretty much sums up the scheme, and saves you some time if you don’t want to read the whole article.( Its 35MB+ due to a huge amount of screenshots. (Pro tip: ImageOptim)):
If this sort of activity was below your radar, then you should go ahead and read it. It’s not gonna “shake up the cryptosphere”, as the author teases.
But if you were unaware, you probably need to get some real-world insight into how such schemes work. Even if you were aware — like you should be — that the crypto-space is probably more exposed than any market, you should still check it out, because it makes for an interesting read.
What caused the article so much attention was most likely the names of the parties involved, and their influence over (pro tip: use unique handles in the future).
That part makes the story stand out, and while I found it an interesting read, I do have some concerns about the content published.
My first concern, about the publishing, is that the coin picked by these people, was XHV — better known as the Haven Protocol. Which happens to be my new favourite coin. 😎 So at least we know these guys have good taste, that was actually proven 110% without a motherfucking doubt in the following two screen grabs:
Thats my article, in case you didn’t know ;)
Now please consider the following before reading further:
There is no reason to suspect anyone from Haven to be part of any of this. What convinces me the most about that is how comfortably they’re discussing how this scheme was to play out. A major selling point to get people on board the plan would be to brag about an insider on the team — which they would have done, at least 3 times (imo).
$XHV did a substantial dive as this article got shared on Twitter — the people in that chat did not appear to have been able to accumulate many $XHV yet as they were taken by surprise when it started moving. So the majority who lost value as a result of the somewhat unfortunate posting, which lead to the very unfortunate panic sells from the unenlightened.
They were considering several other coins as targets for this scheme, as well. XHV was a favourite, for good reasons, but the monumental rise it had while they waited generated uncertainty.
Fun fact: They even had their own Leeroy Jenkins-type in the group, who asked if they had made a decision AND suggested a coin just after a spreadsheet had been made for members to pledge BTC for manipulating the XHV value. It kind of makes me wonder if he’s just partially retarded or if he is in that many shady telegram groups, and got confused 😂
If you have objections to the manipulation these folks were about to engage in because it hurts the market, then perhaps you should also make sure not to disclose information that might affect that same market in a negative and unfair manner. I’m not saying this is what happened; but the author could in fact have used the publishing of this story — for which I imagine he anticipated much attention — to pull off a little move of his own.
Now considering that Haven is a fairly new project, it is imperative for them to garner positive media coverage for their efforts, in order to raise awareness and expand their community. This is essential for all new projects. Now, Haven was impressively resilient to the initial FUD effect of the article, and brushed of most of the lost value in a fairly short manner of time.
But a smaller, younger, unknown or less robust project could face some devastating challenges in the event that a misconceived article caused it to drop 50% in an instant. And that is something to take into consideration before publishing any type of post/blog/article/story.
Leaving that article aside for a bit, I’’d like us all to acknowledge that there is are elements of manipulation in basically any market where assets are traded. And its done by some major players, all over the world.
Whats more, we have well established trading companies who knows every dirty little trick to market manipulation, either entering — or considering to enter — the crypto markets.
One of the reasons I love Blockchain projects is its ability to disrupt ages old power structures, some even seem to grow bigger with time. I became aware of Bitcoin in 2011 and since then I have been keeping an eye of reports about cryptocurrencies and Blockchain solutions in regular news media. And for some reason I can probably only recall a handfull of times when a reporter asked some financial advisor about cryptocurrencies, and got an insightful and positive response.
The last 10 months we’ve seen news about big firms, and big investors dismissing Bitcoin as a bubble in public statements, some even got caught buying the dip that resulted from their FUD.
This is something to give some serious thought into, because as soon as we have major financial institutions, from all over the world, embedded in our beloved crypto space it will have some major effects on us all. Some of which have already begun to show their ugly faces.
How many ICO’s have you noticed recently that have cancelled their public sales due to the fact that their private investment rounds filled their target caps? Cancelling a public sale basically means less tokenholders, fewer entities with more control — i.e. less decentralization.
I’m not saying that is a symptom of a major bank taking a huge stake into a crypto startup necessarily, but it could be. One thing that is clear is that more and more Venture Capitalists are focusing their sights on Blockchain startups.
Neither am I trying to claim that good ICO projects are unavailable to the public, not yet.
The money these firms and investors can bring into emerging Blockchain projects, may initially end up funding something truly brilliant — but the same applies to everyone’s money. And I for one would prefer to see great projects, with a large amount of token holders spread all across the world and connecting with each other through Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Telegram(😟) and Facebook(🤮).
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I’d prefer that, as long as we have markets that are susceptible to manipulation — that is a fact I can swallow much easier if I can comfort myself with the knowledge that the markets are under the majority influence of crypto early adopters, rather than decades old institutions and family dynasties who have been enjoying way too much power and money for way too long — while sharing way too little.
Additionally, while posting such articles does expose the actions of a group of individuals engaged in questionable activities. It will not stop this from happening. Anyone who has spent more than a week of their lives looking at live trades on exchanges has probably witnessed many such schemes of varying degrees. It can be blatantly obvious at times, once you learn the tells. Those guys in that group dont even make up for 0,1% of the people involved in such activities, I’m sure.
In the crypto space we have a lot of players that find themselves in unique new existence, we’ve made a brand new breed of elite. Think of all early adopters and miners, and even those who came in a bit later — like before the rally at the end of last year. In a very short amount of time, cryptocurrencies have brought wealth to a large number of people. We have Bitcoin to thank for that, and every quality coin that followed in its path.
As time passes and cryptocurrency is more and more entrenched in our day to day lives these people will increase their fortunes, as will their abilities to influence their surroundings.
Money buys power, we all know this. And if you ask me the people who have been in control of “old money” since the last dawn-of-time, hasn’t been very good at it. Too little sharing, too much hoarding. So whatever my thoughts on market manipulation are, when it comes to the crypto market — I’d rather see the players in the crypto space, which still is in an infant stage, hone their skills and give every “early-FUD’ing & late-adopting” asshole who enters the crypto space reluctantly a real showdown. Let a new generation give this “controlling the-world” shit a go.
“It’s time that we finally get this type of trash out of our cryptocurrency community once and for all”
The above statement is from the article mentioned, I wonder if the author has put any thought into who will replace the “trash”.
Because the amount of trash that is about to pour into crypto from traditional financial institutions from all over the world is literally at out doorstep.
And trust me, they will thrive when they notice incidents like this. Who knows what old money with influence & power in the traditional (soon-to-be-replaced) political system can make of a situation like this. It can be spun in so many directions, bans? licensed traders only? crippling rules that will make it harder or less tempting for pioneers of new coins?
Oh, and by the way. I have issues with the author reporting the members of the group to the FBI for several reasons, the first is that I’ve been to jail and I know by experience that its even more pointless and counter-productive than you might imagine. I would like to elaborate on the other issues here:
Was this really illegal, not sure about the legislation, and these folks might live anywhere in the world for all I know but I’ve yet to hear of a nation who has implemented a regulation on crypto-market manipulation.
Don’t be a dick and send people to prison when it can be avoided. That medieval shit has its function on violent and sexual offenders, by keeping them from society. Most intelligent people actually learn from their mistakes, and only make them once. If you killed someone’s credibility while publicly shaming them, what extra pleasure would it give to have them sent to jail as well?
There is a case to be made about authorities posing a great risk to the crypto community and its many fine projects, also the common media loves to report on the negative and not the positive crypto news. Publishing this might cause critical media coverage to trigger hastily written laws that may have grave consequences. Don’t forget that most politicians are slaves to the will of their voters, and their voters are generally swayed by what the news they consume label. as either good or bad. Give the media enough meat to run a long lasting series of negative crypto pieces and bad things will happen.
In the future, Blockchain tech might replace the positions of a lot of people who feel important in todays society, but in reality are useless fucks.
But don’t make a mistake and take the power of these useless fucks for granted. When they realize that it is just a matter of time until their days are over there is no telling what they might try to pull off.
In my previous articles I have left a tip jar address for ETH,BTC,NEO and for some reason BCH. If you’d like to tip me for this article, I would prefer to receive only XHV.
The reason for this is that more people should get a position now when its early, because this thing has an insane amount of potential. Also, XHV deserves to get back up above 6$ and keep on moving the way it did until yesterday at around FUD o’clock.
So here it is, my Haven address:
hvxyCxSYVGLSysjcLhRUhEfpHX3p9wXjpGNFC7iR84DPewEuZ3BxoYAaC7uUVvMxxVVBWwsxWkzPLPfFqwtVxveE7S9tdCbok4
You can purchase XHV at TradeOgre.com and even if you don’t want to give me any, get some for yourself.