That's the whole thing. About 1,000 miners control over 90% of the cryptocrazy market. These miners have tens of thousands of systems mining for them. They work together to 'pump and dump' cryptocurrency. In any other form of investment, what they are doing would be illegal, but almost nothing is illegal with the cryptocrazies.
The scary part is they are trying to get this to be the defacto standard in monetary exchange for the Internet. What is really driving this is criminals need a transparent way to move money around which is difficult to trace. That is the one thing which will keep it alive, no matter what.
Heh, the real life "Wolf of Wall Street" Jordan Belfort did an interview recently where he said those 1000 people you're talking about are doing what he did using phones and brokers, only writ large with tech and the internet. He said if he came along now instead of the 80s/90s he'd be doing precisely what they're doing. I'll find the article and link it later, pretty interesting to get his perspective on it, him being a past, (and current according to many) commerce criminal.
A friend of mine I took poker courses from long ago, is well known in the poker and crypto world now (Doug Polk), and has friends that play in China/Hk/Macau in a lot of high stakes games, and he's said that Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are very popular in China as the users of it can more freely move their $ around without the Chinese central gov stopping them. They can also "get their $" out of China this was easier too. No wonder such a large % of the 1000 big Bitcoin controllers are from China.
The pump and dump isn't just on their scale, there are TONS of people who organize it on a small scale and strike when micro trends happen due to their criminal BS.
Video regarding what's happening out there - scary when you consider what the large scale Bitcoiners are capable of - totally at their mercy. i made some $ myself in Crypto, primarily because I bought some to purchase stuff with back in 2012, and the leftover coins which I had no purpose for just sat on my thumbdrive and increased in value to the point where selling them paid for some PCs and stuff. I'm out now completely, and would never risk investing ANY of our portfolio in it right now. IMO it's only a matter of time until the government steps up regulations and restrictions. Revenue Canada up here has already really stepped on the gas about it, and forcing everyone who has transacted in any way at all, even just exchanging $ for crypto for the purposes of legit purchases, of which there are many, report these transactions on this year's tax filings.
Similar to the gold rushes in the past.
It truly is, it's the Wild West too, anyone and everyone can created a new "Coin", and it's a complete free for all with all kinds of cowboy like activity re the pump/dumps and every other scam out there. I still astonishes me that enough people have bought into this, and that so many consider it a legitimate store of value and method of transacting online. Skuzzy is right, there is a push from those involved to make it the "gold standard" of online tx, but IMO that's where they're going to meet resistance, and then push back from not just the government, but more importantly the world banking establishment and corporations, which are far more capable IMO of doing something about it.
