Quote from: MatTheCat on January 24, 2016, 11:27:02 PM

Quote from: oblomov on January 24, 2016, 10:42:43 PM

The exchanges aren't fake.

The same market mechanics observed with stocks or forex avail to BTC on a relatively liquid exchange like BFX.

As with the stock market, the bitcoin market requires expensive infrastructure. Someone has to pay for it.

There is a stochastic component to the price behavior, and it is such that it maximizes revenue extraction to keep the infrastructure going.

If you understand how market structure develops, you can avoid being the steady funder of the infrastructure, and let other unwary traders be the beast of burden.

Actually, the event which caused me to start this thread, was far worse than the Bitfinex bot conspiring to push the market up to trigger my stop (which proves to me that much of the volume on these exchanges is padding, otherwise it would have been far too expensive to run market up for paltry little handful of BTC from my own trade, and probably just a few other traders with same idea..may as well post this again:

When I started this thread. Some whale had just ramped Bitstamp, up to a point where a whole bunch of Stop Buy orders were placed, just above the 'breakout' point. BTC on Stamp spiked from $325 up to $355 in a matter of a few minutes. The other exchanges followed but the whale on Stamp then dumped it right back down and killed the move. What this basically is, is some Stamp whale, who has both access to the order book, and front running privileges to the exchange, to ensure that his sell orders are the ones that get filled first when he ramps, and triggers the Stop Buys that he can see all placed up above the $345 level.

This is corrupt at the very least, and whilst these are unregulated exchanges, I would imagine that their is some Anti Fraud law that would also make this illegal, just as the Finex bot swiping any customers Stop Orders within easy touching distance of spot in order to fund the super expensive exchange infrastructure, will also be illegal.

I don't doubt what you said about Bitstamp, maybe this is why Gemini has low volume? They jumped through all the hoops to get regulated, and whales who can't cheat the system have little incentive to trade there?