Taking money from ignorant people by lying to them is not honorable either.

But then, what is "honorable" about bitcoin?

Bt the wy, have you all read about this earlier event in Bitcoin Foundation Founding Father Karpelès business career?
http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/03/03/exclusive-tibanne-co-ltd-sentenced-2013-mark-karpeless-lies-new/

At least it is a possibility... Some rich Ukranian or Russian buying bitcoin at any price?

But the placement of the orders at Bitstamp seemed to be engineered to drive the price up, wasn't that the general conclusion?
 

Let's say that an "active trader" is one who makes at least one transaction per day, in days like today when there is a 100 US$ rally.

Then N active traders should make N/(24*60) transactions per minute. 

By this definition and math, Bitstamp should have at most 7200 active traders, and Huobi at most 35,000.

The truth is probably much less than that.

Some numbers that may be interesting, collected over ~15 minutes short while ago:

                                    Bitstamp    Huobi
                                    -------- --------
average transactions per minute         4.97    23.98
average transaction size (BTC):         4.19     6.26 
average trade per minute (BTC):        20.91   150.38

All of a sudden, like that? 

A new perfume perhaps?

Does anyone have an idea of how many active traders (by some definition of "active") there are in each exchange?

Huobi's CEO claimed 10,000, so my guess is less than 5,000 for Huobi and OKCoin, less than 1000 each for Bitstamp, BTC-e, and Bitfinex.

Too low?

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


             !    Sun !    Mon !    Tue !    Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !   Sun !    Mon !
  EXCHANGE   !  02/23 !  02/24 !  02/25 !  02/26 !  02/27 !  02/28 !  03/01 ! 03/02 !  03/03 ! Currencies considered

  Bitstamp   |  20.87 |  51.84 | 115.76 |  49.11 |  17.05 |  22.63 |  14.30 |  6.44 |  64.91 | USD
  BitFinEx   |  15.80 |  27.16 |  94.55 |  37.71 |  12.04 |  15.29 |   8.62 |  3.13 |  50.92 | USD
  BTC-e      |  14.24 |  20.78 |  73.86 |  33.61 |  14.60 |  12.74 |   9.55 |  4.58 |  41.71 | USD,EUR,RUR
  Kraken     |   1.06 |   1.06 |   2.23 |   1.87 |   0.89 |   1.34 |   0.39 |  0.32 |   2.82 | EUR
  Bitcoin.DE |   0.50 |   0.73 |   2.23 |   1.00 |   0.50 |   0.70 |   0.31 |  0.32 |   1.34 | EUR
  CaVirtEx   |   0.23 |   0.30 |   2.15 |   0.32 |   0.31 |   0.33 |   0.15 |  0.19 |   0.55 | CAD
  CampBX     |   0.22 |   0.37 |   0.42 |   0.36 |   0.05 |   0.07 |   0.08 |  0.07 |   0.28 | USD

  SUBTOTAL   |  52.92 | 102.24 | 291.20 | 123.98 |  45.44 |  53.10 |  33.40 | 15.05 | 162.53 |

  Huobi      | 185.15 | 163.47 | 352.76 | 250.64 | 123.38 | 122.00 | 104.12 | 40.64 | 253.71 | CNY
  OKCoin     | 141.90 |  84.03 | 275.68 | 150.41 |  83.60 | 129.17 |  73.29 | 34.99 | 126.48 | CNY
  BTC-China  |  10.42 |  13.12 |  27.72 |  14.72 |   6.71 |   7.17 |   5.02 |  2.64 |  16.59 | CNY
  Bter       |   0.62 |   0.53 |   1.10 |   0.53 |   0.31 |   0.29 |   0.30 |  0.24 |   0.67 | CNY

  SUBTOTAL   | 338.09 | 261.15 | 657.26 | 416.30 | 214.00 | 258.63 | 182.73 | 78.51 | 397.45 |

  TOTAL      | 391.01 | 363.39 | 948.46 | 540.28 | 259.44 | 311.73 | 216.13 | 93.56 | 559.98 |


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".)

So, is there a consensus about what caused todays sudden price increase (~100 USD on Bitstamp, ~90 USD on BTC-e, ~500 CNY on Huobi)?

The large buys at Bitstamp pushed the price up, the "sheep" followed, and they did not return to the previous levels just because they had no reason to?

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Tuesday Mar/04

Since today (Mon Feb/03) was a False Slumber Point, to play by the rules I cannot use it for the preditction.  So I will use the same straight trend line used yesterday, determined by the last four True points (Feb/27--28, Mar/01--02), namely p(d) = 3521.20 - 30.30*(d - 27), where {d} is the day number since Feb/01 (which is 32 for Mar/04). Thus

Prediction valid for: Tuesday 2014-03-04, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 3370 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 551 USD.

The prediction is the blue rectangle almost outside the right margin in the chart below.  The orange and grey dots are the True and False Slumber Points, and the orange line is the new trendline.


NOTE: Extrapolating this trend, I predict that on February 01, 2015 anyone found in possession of bitcoins will be fined at the rate of 1097 USD per BTC owned.

Checking the Chinese Slumber Method predictions for Mar/03

It seems that the Baron pulled too hard on his bootstraps today :

Prediction posted on: Monday 2014-03-03, 02:35 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Monday 2014-03-03, 19:00--19:59 UTC

Huobi's predicted price: 3400 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 3825 CNY
Error: 425 CNY (~69 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 556 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 671 USD
Error: 115 USD

It must be said however that the trade volume V_h in the official Slumber hour (19:00--19:59 UTC) was 12.6 kBTC, whereas the total volume V_d for the day is unlikely to exceed 400 kBTC. Therefore, the prediction is not supposed to apply anyway becuse this was a False Slumber Point.

The Huobi prediction in question is the rightmost blue rectangle on the chart below.  The light blue-gray rectangles are the previous predictions.  The orange and grey dots are the True and False Slumber Points, the mean Huobi prices at 19:00 UTC every day.  The orange line is the trend that was assumed for the prediction.


The following chart shows the Bitstamp prices and predictions. The orange and grey dots are Huobi's prices at 19:00 UTC every day, divided by R = 6.12.  The orange line is the trend used in the prediction, which is Huobi's trend divided by R (6.40 for Feb/07--09, 6.12 for all other times).


The ratio of Huobi's price to Bitstamp's price was about 5.7, much lower than the usual R = 6.12.

Trade volume at Huobi, China times:

   Tue Mar/04, 03:00--03:59 (1 hour): 12,636.60 BTC
   Sun Mar/02 08:00 -- Mon Mar/03 07:59 (24 hours): 40,636.62 BTC


Note:
Sun Mar/02 08:00 China time = Sun Mar/02 00:00 UTC
Mon Mar/03 07:59 China time = Sun Mar/02 23:59 UTC
Tue Mar/04 03:00 China time = Mon Mar/03 19:00 UTC

It is 3:30 am but this time Huobi's traders are not asleep at all.  They may trade more in this hour than in all of yesterday.

Meanwhile it seems that, for the last hour, Bitcoinwisdom has no data from Bitstamp other than the price.  Is there a chart site that is still working on them?

Bitcoinwisdom apparently is not getting timely data from Bitstamp.  It skipped several minutes just a little ago.

Note that bitcoinwisdom does not display a gaps when there is missing data, they just plot the data they have without gaps.  You can detect that by drawing a slanted straight line; the missing data creates steps in the line.  (I think this is terribly confusing to readers, but the owner sees it as a feature...  )

I can predict aleady that many Chinese will be late for work tomorrow morning. 

Perhaps the brits are coming in, now that the UK government forfeited the VAT on bitcoin trading?

Is this correct: this rally was started by a whale buyer on Bitstamp, then Huobi and BTC-e went into panic buying, but they are still struggling to catch up with Bitstamp?

The mouse wheel changes the horizontal resolution of the chart.

Huobi clients trade with robots. Bitstamp clients trade with moai.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai

Seriously, I usually downloa data files from bitcoincharts, but they do not cover Huobi and OKCoin. Bitcoinwisdom covers them but has no download option that I know of.  Since it is only ~10 numbers per day...

The name is ˜Karpeles" not "Karpelez", right?