I got silenced over at ethereum subreddit. I hope you guys are more accommodating.
I want all crypto traders to be aware of some very suspicious things happening lately that effect the whole of the crypto community. We don’t want to see a repeat of Mt Gox, which will not only bring Ethereum down but severely hurt all cryptos in the process.
So, first things first. I think this pump has been carefully orchestrated for a long time now. Here are some of the suspicious oddities I have noticed since observing this whole thing over the last weeks.
The first thing I’m fairly certain of: All of the Ethereum IRC chat channels are full of bots. When I first joined the channel during the beginning of the pump, not a single person was talking in that channel for days, yet they had HUNDREDS of users in there. Even a few weeks into the pump, still no one was talking. All of this excitement, and apparently not a soul on IRC wants to talk about it? Then as the weeks went on I noticed some real users starting to join and a bit of conversation between these new users picking up pace, and the amount of conversation that happens on there now compared to the first couple of weeks of the pump is ridiculous. Also, now the only people I see talking in there are the newcomers I’ve observed joining over the last weeks, I still don’t see any of the 300+ idlers talking who were there from the beginning.
Poloniex: A few things very strange going on with Poloniex. First there are the OBVIOUS trollbox chat bots. During the initial pump up to $12, it was very obvious that there were groups of people (or a person) using chat bots to influence people on the trollbox. Whenever there was a pump you would see hundreds of precanned ETH pump messages (“eth to the moon”, “eth is going to $100”, etc), and a sell off you’d see hundreds of precanned ETH dump messages (“eth is going to the bottom”, “sell eth now”, etc). Now, you’d probably think this were just regular users if it weren’t for two reasons: #1, out of the blue, all of a sudden after the ATH was reached and a wave off the sell off was complete, ALL of this chat just vanished out of thin air and it was like a ghost town with maybe 10 different people talking. It went from hundreds of messages flooding the trollbox to a handful of people chattering casually. This is good evidence that chat bots are being used. And then there’s the fact that I’ve seen the same messages recycled over and over and over again whenever I see this spam flood happening.
I’m also inclined to think they’re cooking the books. Myself and other people have had problems verifying with them (probably because they want to limit your withdrawal amounts so they remain solvent), have had problems with coins going missing or verifications for withdrawals, and there has been a lot of very suspicious trade activity and volume happening. Not only for Ethereum, but across the board for a number of different altcoins. I’m inclined to believe they’re pulling a similar strategy to what we saw with Willy bot during the MtGox days, to pump altcoins and sell into traders for free profits.
Ethereum’s PR hire (Lisa Cheng): She was seen trying to pump the coin earlier, as you can see here: https://twitter.com/lisacheng/status/703395181735743488 – and never actually followed through with this pump post by delivering anything. So I’m heavily inclined to believe it was merely to pump the price, without anything to actually back it up. It’s well known that she had a very large stake of coins. Now all of a sudden, as of today, she’s no longer a moderator on the Ethereum subs, and appears to have lost her job with Ethereum. Nothing has been said about why or under what circumstances, it’s a strange mystery that has presented itself out of the blue.
And some more well known things:
The Ethereum devs will be/are dumping on the markets to build revenue to fund the Ethereum business. I find it suspicious that they were talking about having money problems, and then all of a sudden this pump comes out of thin air, with suspicious activity surrounding bots, fake chat users, and trading manipulation. If anyone has a lot to gain from this, it’s those with the largest ETH stake.
Also, there’s a lot of nonsense about Ethereum being a replacement for Bitcoin or not having any scalability issues or any issues of any kind. It’s all exactly that though, nonsense. If you think Bitcoin is having problems now, imagine what the problems will be like with a blockchain that doesn’t only store transactions but also stores bloated bytecode as well. The issues will be MUCH more severe.
All in all, if you’re thinking of touching Ethereum as an investment or a get rich quick scheme, be very cautious. There are only two exchanges (with decent enough volume to even bother) that trade Ethereum at the moment, Kraken and Poloniex. Poloniex is highly suspicious, and I would avoid them like the plague, and Kraken has been suffering from very severe server issues as of lately. It takes multiple page refreshes to even place an order, and if you have a position on there and their website goes down (which has happened countless numbers of times already throughout this ETH bubble) then you could find yourself waking up to an extremely large loss.
TLDR: Kraken has been getting server attacked since the ETH pump, be cautious. Poloniex is highly suspicious, with trade bots and fake trading volume/book activity, as well as withdrawal problems and verification problems. Lots of fake IRC channel users to make ETH seem more popular than it is. ETH’s PR manager has mysteriously lost her job with ETH after putting out a pump post on Twitter that she never delivered for. ETH devs are dumping on the markets, and the timing of this bubble is suspicious when they were only just recently complaining about the vitality of raising funds to fund ETH development.