I mean that putting a large sell order at 224 would make the buys (at the moment, at 220) move lower as the orders are filled by other people selling to them. You could then move the wall downwards, say to 221, when the sells in the orderbook had also moved downwards from 222. At this point the market's state would be something like buys at 218, sells at 220, and your wall at 221, effectively having pushed the market downwards from where you started.
The way it works is to use a giant bid or ask wall to push the price around. Say the asset has bids at 220 and asks at 222, and you want to push the price downwards. You put up an ask of an amount equivalent to maybe 6hours volume at 224 (an "ask wall"). Anyone selling will put their orders below that wall, and as you slowly move the wall downwards people will sell into the market in the expectation that they can buy again once you've pushed the price lower than where they sold.
This relies on the large wall not being an attractive offer for someone who has the purchasing power to obliterate it, which is where it occasionally fails. Generally, if the market starts to move against it with any force, it's pulled or moved further back behind other orders.
Another way this can be used is by putting up a wall on the opposite side of your real order to drive demand - i.e. in the scenario above, you might be trying to buy at 220. If you put up a huge wall at 224, people will be more willing to fill your order at 220 than if the orderbook was much thinner.
It seems this is called spoofing in the financial world.
I only intended to comment on the altcoins that are known scams, but draw investors anyway.
Imagine you started XorNotBux, announced you were planning to sell a billion of them in a few months, then inflated the price with a much smaller supply in circulation. Some people will buy this (and possibly profit) fully knowing that you plan to obliterate it in the near future.
Some of these altcoins are the epitome of the greater fool theory, where most participants are perfectly aware that it is a rationally poor decision to invest in them but do it anyway because they think someone will buy it for more later.
It turns out people can make huge returns even from investing in known scams - certainly not guaranteed, but it's better odds than gambling.
Right now the prevailing attitude is that it's legal and nobody will get prosecuted for it. It's certainly possible for this to change, but premined altcoins (creators mine a % before making it public) and other alleged scams such as Quarkcoin (Max Keiser & Bill Still) have happened repeatedly.
My statement was from the angle that if you get ripped off in a situation like this, there is no recourse for you, and not legal advice that you cannot get in trouble for participating in these activities.
It was originally happening in the public channel #dogecoin-market on Freenode but was then moved to the private channel #marketmakers, which seems to have spurred people to start sharing it everywhere since now it's private.
Wolong is the guy who brought the Dogecoin price to where it is now by investing a ton of money into it, and due to that and some charisma he's attracted a cult following. He's now using that cult following to have them do pump/dump ops for him (with their money).
It's entertaining, I'm waiting for someone to do a solid article on the story.
Bear in mind that cryptocurrencies are currently an unregulated wild west, where activities like these are both common and legal. Do not invest anything you are not prepared to lose.
You can check the charts at http://bitcoinwisdom.com/markets/cryptsy/dogebtc and see how that was responsible for a drop to 212. From memory they were using about 36million dogecoins, which comes out to approximately 78btc or $65,000.
My pet theory is that wolong is just building trust at this point so he can eventually have his army of followers buy all his dogecoins at inflated prices, but who knows. No matter what happens, it's very entertaining to watch develop.
> it seems that the most immediate effect would be a higher availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)
This study goes way over my head, but if the goal is to boost ATP isn't creatine monohydrate supplementation a cheap and effective way to do so currently?
Agreed on C.