Well, I read that FBI document with charges against him, and they seem rather serious.

If the charges were drug buy/sell/use one could say that they had nothing to do with his role in the bitcoin movement.  But the charges are about his failure to do his duty as the AML person in his exchange.  Hard to dissociate that from bitcoin. 

It is expected that his friends would defend and support him, but having him as a spokesman for bitcoin, taking part in bitcoin roundtables, etc. looks very bad from out here.

Besides, why would the USG want to harass him? For his role in bitcoin?  But why him and not other prominent bitcoiners?

I expect that "block withdrawals" and "block deposits"  functions are well separated in the code.  Otherwise it is not interesting. 

No, but I am quite tempted to open a bitcoin exchange.   

Daily volumes of BTC trade to/from USD and other national currencies (in kBTC):


             !   Sun !    Mon !    Tue !    Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !    Sun !                     
  EXCHANGE   ! 03/02 !  03/03 !  03/04 !  03/05 !  03/06 !  03/07 !  03/08 !  03/09 ! Currencies considered

  Bitstamp   |  6.44 |  64.91 |  28.03 |  12.72 |  10.40 |  21.45 |   9.70 |   9.12 | USD                 
  BitFinEx   |  3.13 |  50.92 |  25.03 |   8.38 |   7.06 |  17.23 |  10.97 |   8.29 | USD                 
  BTC-e      |  4.58 |  41.71 |  28.83 |  11.19 |   5.69 |  13.54 |   8.71 |   6.52 | USD,EUR,RUR         
  Kraken     |  0.32 |   2.82 |   1.81 |   0.87 |   0.71 |   1.20 |   0.55 |   0.64 | EUR                 
  Bitcoin.DE |  0.32 |   1.34 |   1.02 |   0.40 |   0.34 |   0.38 |   0.31 |   0.20 | EUR                 
  CaVirtEx   |  0.19 |   0.55 |   0.33 |   0.22 |   0.22 |   0.24 |   0.12 |   0.15 | CAD                 
  CampBX     |  0.07 |   0.28 |   0.14 |   0.04 |   0.03 |   0.07 |   0.03 |   0.02 | USD                 

  SUBTOTAL   | 15.05 | 162.53 |  85.19 |  33.82 |  24.45 |  54.11 |  30.39 |  24.94 |                     

  OKCoin     | 34.99 | 126.48 | 137.35 | 286.05 | 139.37 | 109.70 | 146.46 | 136.24 | CNY                 
  Huobi      | 40.64 | 253.71 | 268.47 | 196.00 |  92.40 |  96.37 | 119.46 | 103.51 | CNY                 
  BTC-China  |  2.64 |  16.59 |  15.36 |   8.04 |   5.58 |   4.87 |   5.08 |   4.24 | CNY                 
  Bter       |  0.24 |   0.67 |   0.64 |   0.31 |   0.32 |   0.32 |   0.28 |   0.21 | CNY                 

  SUBTOTAL   | 78.51 | 397.45 | 421.82 | 490.40 | 237.67 | 211.26 | 271.28 | 244.20 |                     

  TOTAL      | 93.56 | 559.98 | 507.01 | 524.22 | 262.12 | 265.37 | 301.67 | 269.14 |                     


All numbers were collected by hand from the site http://bitcoinwisdom.com. Beware of possible errors.

For each exchange, the numbers include only the trade volume to/from the currencies listed in the rightmost column. Trade between BTC and other cryptocoins, such as LiteCoin, is NOT included.

Dates on the header line are UTC. Specifically, "01/15" means "from 01/15 00:00:00 UTC to 01/15 23:59:59 UTC". (Beware that Bitcoinwisdom uses your local time, so the date may appear to be off by 1 day.  For example, if you are 2 hours west of Greenwich, it may show "01/14 22:00" when the UTC time is "01/15 00:00".)

Chinese Boring Even With Dinosaurs Slumber Method prediction for Monday Mar/10

Prediction valid for: Monday 2014-03-10, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 3938 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 656 USD.

Huobi

The red and green strokes are actual Huobi hourly prices.  The current prediction is the rightmost magenta square.  The blue square is the last prediction (see below), and the light blue-gray squares are the previous ones.  The orange and grey dots are the Slumber Points, the mean Huobi prices at 19:00 UTC every day.  Each point is a Glyptodon if the hourly volume V_h for 19:00--19:59 UTC is less than 0.005 times the daily volume V_d 00:00--23:59 UTC; and is an Albertosaurus otherwise. The grey lines are trends fitted a posteriori to the Glyptodon Points. The orange line is the trend that was assumed for the prediction. The Germanodactyl (hereby assumed to be an ancestor of Bos primigenius) indicates that the trend is ascending.

Today again was a Glyptodon, again barely (V_h/V_d = 0.00487 < 0.005).  This point is obviously not on the same trend as the Mar/04--06 Glyptodons, so it seems reasonable to assume a new trend, the straight line defined by the last two Glyptodons; namely, p(d) = A+B*(d-8), where d is the day of the month, A = 3668 and B = +135. 

Bitstamp

The red and green strokes are actual Bitstamp hourly prices.  The dots, dinosaurs, mammals, lines, and squares are Huobi's Slumber Points, dinosaurs, mammals, trends, and predictions, scaled by the currency conversion factor R.

The actual price ratio between Huobi and Bitstamp has been has been below 6.00 for most of last week:

Therefore it seems necessary to adopt a new value of R in order to map the predicitons from one to the other. Accordingly I am now using R = 6.40 for Feb/07--09, R = 6.00 since Mar/04, and R = 6.12 for all other times before.  This new value of R was used to map the points and trends above, and the new prediction (the magenta square), but not the past predictions.

Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Saturday 2014-03-08, 21:54 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Sunday 2014-03-09, 19:00--19:59 UTC

Huobi's predicted price: 3596 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 3803 CNY
Error: 207 CNY (~35 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 588 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 641 USD
Error: 53 USD

NOTE: Back to chicken-chasing mode, it seems

The "bitcoin community" is haunted by zombies -- people and entities that should have been expelled and forgotten long ago but are still walking around doing damage.   Mark Karpeles and the Shrem Karpeles & Friends Foundation are the two egregious examples.  (The former founder of Brazil's  BitcoinRain is our local example here.)

It seems that being "a respected member of the bitcoin community" is more like a nobility title than a job.  Once you become one, you remain one for life, no matter what mess and damage you do.

Two-bit idiot accused two members of the Board of having had privileged access of some sort at MtGOX.  Now he says that he is backing down because the community closed ranks around those people, and because he does not want to give ammunition to "bitcoin's formibdable enemies".   Can't he see that by doing so he is doing just that? 

MtGOX could be dismissed as a scam by done by a single-person, it the community had been quick to disown him as soon as his management of the exchange became suspicious and harmful to his clients. Instead we saw many "respected members of the community" support him.

See for instance Roger Ver's emphatically vouching for the solvency of MtGOX, when he must have been conscious that he had not enough evidence of it.  Was he motivated by his friendship to Mark, or by his belief that preserving the image of MtGOX was important to preserve the public image of bitcoin?  Either way, he apparently thought that such  motive was more improtant than preventing investors from putting their money and bitcoins into a dubious business.   In the end, his testimonial only hurt the image of bitcoin even more:  "Is there anyone in that community that we can trust?"

The about-face of the Two-Bit Idiot seem to be another instance of that mentality, and to me has the same effect as Ver's testimonial...

Wow, some REAL DATA at least! Even if it is for a dead exchange...

When was that snapshot taken?

What are the total balances in BTC, US, JPY, etc?


That is quite interesting, so there were people who had huge amounts of BTC in an exchange and did not use them for years.

Could that be true for other exchanges, now (after the demise of MtGOX)?

I think the two classes of transactions can be distinguished in theory. Class A ( "payment for goods and services using bitcoin") is transfer of bitcoin from a customer's address to an address belonging to someone who sells goods and services unrelated to crypto-coins, in exchange for said goods and services being provided to the customer. 

Class B is pretty much everything else, such as transfer to/from a bitcoin exchange's wallet, transfers between people or companies in exchange of cash or other coins, etc.

Right now, purchasing with cryptocoins may involve up to three blockchain transfers: customer buys crypto at an exchange with dollars, sends to merchant, the merchant sells them for euros.  I would count only the middle transaction as "class A".  The other two could be put in a separate class C, "bitcoin transfers directly connected to class A"; but since they can be widely separated in time and lumped with other transfers, it doesn't seem to be a useful idea, even in theory.

Purchasing "with cyptocoins" today may also involve zero transfers, if the customer gives dollars to a "bitcoin-based" payment processor who then gives euros to the merchant, without actually moving any bitcoins.  I would not count those (non)transfers in Class A, since the payment processor is acting just like a traditional bank.

Thanks!

Indeed.

When I was watching Fukushima, I was amazed at how little data there was about the state of the reactors (and most of it later turned out to be bogus).  And yet the stakes there were huge -- millions of people at risk, tens of billions of dollars in cleanup costs ...

I feel the same about the bitcoin market scene.  There seems to be no reliable data about the most important variables, like the number of people actually trading or using bitcoin (not just open accounts at exchanges), how much money is in the traders' accounts, demographics of traders, ...  Volume is a very poor indicator of importance.  How can people invest and trade in the dark like that?

Coindesk(?) recently did a survey of venture capital invested on bitcoin services,  that was a notable exception.  There should be more of that...

Huobi looks real to me, OKCoin looke strange. Yes, the lack of transaction fees could explain their high volumes (and should also attract/retain more clients).


Ah! I did not know that. Yes, could be.

Could That be also be explanation for the price jump on Mar/02?

Is there a way to estimate, from the blockchain or other sources, the number and size of bitcoin transactions that are payments for goods and services, rather than due to speculation, investment, hot/cold storage transfers, etc?

Dinosaurs are always popular with kids.  They may even trump cute puppies. 

I have not seen evidence of fake traffic at Huobi, but I suspect that there may be fake traffic at OKCoin.

First, traffic at OKCoin slows down at night, but does not stop completely like at Huobi; there is a steady backgrount traffic 24/7.

Second, most Huobi transactions occur randomly at the two ends of the current spread, as one would expect from buyers and sellers independently moving to meet each other's position; whereas many of those at OKCoin seem to occur in at random places in the middle of the real spread, as if the buyer and seller had a rendez-vous there.

OKCoin also seems to have an excess of small transactions.  (I should make a histogram to confirm that.)

Here is a plot of a few minutes's worth of transactions.  Each dot is a transaction (except that transactions with same timestamp and price may hide each other).  Dot size is proportional to BTC volume.


Am I seeing things?

The total trade volume today (Sat Mar/08 00:00--23:59 UTC) on the exchanges that I monitor was ~302 kBTC.  That is 14% more than yesterday's and 40% more  than last Saturday's.

Volume outside China fell 44% compared to yesterday's (from 54 to 31 kBTC), and was almost the same as last Saturday's (33 kBTC).   Bitfinex fell 14% (to 11 kBTC), Bitstamp fell even more (to 9.7) and lost its first place, while BTC-e  (8.7) remained third.

On the other hand, volume in the Chinese exchanges increased 28% (from 211 to 271 kBTC).  For the fourth day in a row, OKCoin had more volume than Huobi (54% vs. 44%). 

As a result, China's slice of the total trade volume increased again, from 80% to 90%.

Daily volumes of BTC trade to/from USD and other national currencies (in kBTC):


             !    Sat !   Sun !    Mon !    Tue !    Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !
  EXCHANGE   !  03/01 ! 03/02 !  03/03 !  03/04 !  03/05 !  03/06 !  03/07 !  03/08 ! Currencies considered

  BitFinEx   |   8.62 |  3.13 |  50.92 |  25.03 |   8.38 |   7.06 |  17.23 |  10.97 | USD
  Bitstamp   |  14.30 |  6.44 |  64.91 |  28.03 |  12.72 |  10.40 |  21.45 |   9.70 | USD
  BTC-e      |   9.55 |  4.58 |  41.71 |  28.83 |  11.19 |   5.69 |  13.54 |   8.71 | USD,EUR,RUR
  Kraken     |   0.39 |  0.32 |   2.82 |   1.81 |   0.87 |   0.71 |   1.20 |   0.55 | EUR
  Bitcoin.DE |   0.31 |  0.32 |   1.34 |   1.02 |   0.40 |   0.34 |   0.38 |   0.31 | EUR
  CaVirtEx   |   0.15 |  0.19 |   0.55 |   0.33 |   0.22 |   0.22 |   0.24 |   0.12 | CAD
  CampBX     |   0.08 |  0.07 |   0.28 |   0.14 |   0.04 |   0.03 |   0.07 |   0.03 | USD

  SUBTOTAL   |  33.40 | 15.05 | 162.53 |  85.19 |  33.82 |  24.45 |  54.11 |  30.39 |

  OKCoin     |  73.29 | 34.99 | 126.48 | 137.35 | 286.05 | 139.37 | 109.70 | 146.46 | CNY
  Huobi      | 104.12 | 40.64 | 253.71 | 268.47 | 196.00 |  92.40 |  96.37 | 119.46 | CNY
  BTC-China  |   5.02 |  2.64 |  16.59 |  15.36 |   8.04 |   5.58 |   4.87 |   5.08 | CNY
  Bter       |   0.30 |  0.24 |   0.67 |   0.64 |   0.31 |   0.32 |   0.32 |   0.28 | CNY

  SUBTOTAL   | 182.73 | 78.51 | 397.45 | 421.82 | 490.40 | 237.67 | 211.26 | 271.28 |

  TOTAL      | 216.13 | 93.56 | 559.98 | 507.01 | 524.22 | 262.12 | 265.37 | 301.67 |


All numbers were collected by hand from the site http://bitcoinwisdom.com. Beware of possible errors.

For each exchange, the numbers include only the trade volume to/from the currencies listed in the rightmost column. Trade between BTC and other cryptocoins, such as LiteCoin, is NOT included.

Dates on the header line are UTC. Specifically, "01/15" means "from 01/15 00:00:00 UTC to 01/15 23:59:59 UTC". (Beware that Bitcoinwisdom uses your local time, so the date may appear to be off by 1 day.  For example, if you are 2 hours west of Greenwich, it may show "01/14 22:00" when the UTC time is "01/15 00:00".)

How Leah McGrath Goodman discovered the real identity of Superman using forensic techniques:

  Step 1.  Make a list of all citizens of Metropolis whose name begins with "S" and ends with "man".

(Two days later, young reporter Lois Lane received a surprise call from the Daily Planet, offering her the job she had just been told that had been already filled.)

Chinese Extinct Creature Slumber Method prediction for Sunday Mar/09

Prediction valid for: Sunday 2014-03-09, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 3596 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 588 USD.

Huobi

The red and green strokes are actual Huobi hourly prices.  The current prediction is the rightmost magenta rectangle.  The blue rectangle is the last prediction (see below), and the light blue-gray rectangles are the previous ones.  The orange and grey dots are the Slumber Points, the mean Huobi prices at 19:00 UTC every day.  Each point is a Glyptodon if the hourly volume V_h for 19:00--19:59 UTC is less than 0.005 times the daily volume V_d 00:00--23:59 UTC; and is an Albertosaurus otherwise. The grey lines are trends fitted a posteriori to the Glyptodon Points. The orange line is the trend that was assumed for the prediction.

Today was a Glyptodon, barely (V_h/V_d = 0.00437 < 0.005). This point is roughly aligned with the three previous Glyptodon points (and even with yesterday's Albertosaurus), so it seems reasonable to use the least squares straight line defined by those four Glyptodons; namely, p(d) = A+B*(d-4), where d is the day of the month, A = 4056.20 and B = -91.97.

(This Glyptodon point may also be the start of a new trend, after yesterday's Albertosarus; but this hypothesis would not allow a prediction for tomorrow.)

Bitstamp

The red and green strokes are actual Bitstamp hourly prices.  The dots, dinosaurs, mammals, lines, and rectangles are Huobi's Slumber Points, dinosaurs, mammals, trends, and predictions, scaled by the currency conversion factor R (6.40 for Feb/07--09, 6.12 for all other times).

Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Saturday 2014-03-08, 01:00 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Saturday 2014-03-08, 19:00--19:59 UTC

Huobi's predicted price: 3891 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 3668 CNY
Error: 223 CNY (~36 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 636 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 614 USD
Error: 22 USD

NOTE: Apologies for the delay in implementing the pterodactyls and icthyosaurs, but they are stuck because of a bug in the bitcoin protocol.

I hope you are joking...

Just in case: in Japanese culture the sons, especially the firstborn, are expected to take care of the parents.  Sending them off to old people homes is not the Japanese way, at least for people of Dorian's generation.

Thanks. They do seem to have helped, I did not expect that.  Thanks to @Walsoraj for the suggestion.   

Maybe... I will keep trying, we'll see how it goes.