RE: Is what WolfOfPoloniex Doing Illegal?
That was fun. I don't have a way to count up the mentions, but pretty sure my twitter feed got hit about 300 times from his cronies attacking me. Their basic criticism of this blog falls into 3 categories:
- Crypto is the wild west! Who cares, everyone is doing it.
- LOL you are just a jealous salty hater
- I was a wolf customer and I made money! And he took care of us!
To the first point: we need to clean up crypto. This stuff doesn't fly in the real world, it has to be pointed out here. Maybe wolf is unaware of how unethical this is, but I hope this episode has made him change his approach.
To the second point: no I'm not. I was not on the wrong side of his trades, and I'm doing just fine. But there were people who were buying and selling without knowledge of when his pumps/dumps were happening and they lost money.
To the third point: I never meant to imply that he is a scammer. He is a businessman, making a huge amount of money off his reputation, he wasn't going to fuck it up. But him offering refunds to those unimpressed and offering a free month to subscribers is not an indication his process is not unethical.
If there's an extra criticism, it's that I jumped to conclusions or misrepresented things. I tried not to, but I am human, so I went back and edited anything that could have been a conclusion jump. And to me, the damning evidence still stands: him trying to manipulate the price curvature to mimic TA while picking coins that have news/rumors in the works that he can pump so other traders pick up on it and start pushing it is unethical.
Some updates/other rebuttals:
Regarding Wolf not owning coins he pumps
He posted this on 9/2:
Add in the most damning picture, which is an instance of pure manipulation. This is from 9-7, so he that he waited a few days for a rumor to spring to begin the simultaneous fake buy/sell wall pump in group (posted 1206pm), and pump on twitter 1-3 hours later (1:12 pm) which also points to TA:
Wolf calls this "market making". As I said on twitter, this is in no way shape or form market making.
From wikipedia on market manipulation:
He is creating artificial or misleading appearances on the price charts by using over 500! people to help him pump coins at certain time periods and when to put up sell walls to mimic TA to trick other big traders into buying.
Article from forbes describing this on a much bigger forex exchange where it's harder to swing than it is on a coin that is only on Bittrex: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2010/04/30/when-does-market-making-become-market-manipulation/#42ef03da1e04
I think instead of having this argument further, I'll just leave my opinion here, let wolf ruminate on it, and hope he stops doing specifically that in the future. I don't want to have to force him to admit he was wrong as nobody wants to do that, I just want to have less blatant manipulation, and I'll even give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't realize how bad this is.