Quote from: toknormal on September 08, 2015, 09:52:25 AM

Quote from: wozzek23 on September 08, 2015, 08:57:56 AM

Manipulation or market moves according to your intention(s); it does not really matter. Your transparency, taken with a grain of salt (I am sure you'd recommend that approach also) is more than welcomed despite the sentiment. As a result of this overall discussion I halved my intended (future) percentage of DASH in my portfolio.

I've got quite a lot of sympathy for both of you (....hey, I can post again after my recent "knuckle-wrap" - thanks mprep !).

Otoh has taken up his market positions as suit him and wozzek has responded accordingly. The market depth and trading price simply aggregate the two.

As far as the use of the term "manipulation" goes, the fact is that Otoh has not been able to manipulate the market at all IMO. If he had, he would have been able to adopt his new positions without suffering an adverse market response. True manipulation is a whole order of magnitude more malignant - such as re-hypothecation in the paper gold market where you can actually prevent the market from functioning properly by creating fake supply.

I'd call what Otoh's doing "strategic positioning" to maximise his perceived investment.

Having said all that, I can see why smaller holders refer to this type of strategic positioning as "manipulation" because, relatively speaking, large holders are able to effect far bigger price movements than small holders are. It also tends to be regarded as a distortion of the "genuine" balance of supply and demand.

But lets examine this for a moment. What is the "genuine balance of supply and demand" ? We cannot know. We can never know what motivation lies behind all the orders up and down the length of a market depth chart. We can only see WHAT each market participant values the asset at, we can never see WHY they value it at that level.

At the end of the day, many people have a problem with swallowing the idea that markets are not democracies. They belong to whoever wants them the most - be that many small players or a few large ones. You just have to hope to f*ck that the larger players are benevolent, not malevolent and in that regard, Otoh's transparency has helped a great deal.

Markets function best when everyone makes up their own minds about how they value an asset and how they position their investments which is why I respect both Otoh's and wozzek's perspectives equally.

Great post, thanks.

I have zero problems with semantics. If "strategic positioning" is the best way of describing that one particular investor's play, be it. But, while I have zero reasons to doubt him (and I do not doubt him) isn't it naive of anyone to believe in anyone's benevolence?

Whatever is going with the price, whatever is the reason behind -- strategic positioning of one investor, intended manipulation of another, dropping of illegals obtained, hijacked DASH you fill in the blanks -- this points to an intrinsic weakness of the whole project, something I've been hammering about many times before but do not feel a need to repeat any of this and suffer abuse

))))))

The KEY question for me at this moment is - why DASH is not getting any real (venture) investment from the outside to keep it going if it is so great as many of us, cheerleaders, think it is?