The price at Huobi suffered a sudden and permanent drop of ~350 yuan on Feb/10 (first MtGOX press release) and on Feb/20 (second MtGox press release).  Looks like today there will be another one today?

Equivalent drops of course occurred in all functioning exchanges, but they may be harder to see because of their higher "noise" level (short-term volatility).  

There was an earlier quantum drop at all exchanges on Feb/06.  I do not recall what incident could have been the cause, does anyone?

Curiously, at Bitstamp there was no persistent drop on Feb/10, apparently because the drop on Feb/06 was larger than at other exchanges.  Indeed arbitrage between Bitstamp and Huobi apparently stopped between Feb/06 and Feb/10, or used a much higher currency factor (~6.40 CNY/USD instead of ~6.10) during those days.  It is as if Bitstamp foresaw the Feb/10 "Karpeles Catastrophe" and played it out in advance.

EDIT 350 yuan is about 60 dollars.

The news say that MtGOX lost 750,000 BTC belonging to clients but has only 80 million USD in "liquid liabilities".  That means 1 BTC = 100 USD approximately.  Are they valuing each BTC deposit with the price at the time the deposit was made?  Or are they using the MtGOX price at closure? 

The first option might make some sense (i.e. any virtual profits made by clients inside MtGOX would be ignored, only their actual investments would matter).  However it seems hard to implement since many of those coins have been exchanged by USD by trading inside MtGOX.  E.g., the guy who deposited 500$ and used that to buy 1 BTC, that someone else deposited when price waas 100$, should be counted as a 500$ creditor, not a 100$ creditor.  I don't see hou that mess could be sorted out.

The second option would be quite unfair, to say the least, since the price at the time of MtGOX's closure was the result of some clients who guessed the situation desperately trying to convert their BTC to dollars in order to improve their chances.  (It may be much worse than that, if MtGOX themselves were trading so as to drive the price down -- as some "rumourporters" have suggested.)

There's one difference between MtGOX and the many previous bitcoin scams like it (apart from sheer size).  This time it was not some unknown guy in China or Brazil, but a major player in the bitcoin community, one of the founding members of the Bitcoin Foundation.

Seen from here, it seems that all the "core developers" and other key figures in Bitcoinland were, to some degree, friends of Mark, and had much admiration for him and MtGOX.

Now I wonder if there is anyone in that community that can be trusted.  Are their statements, leaks, and deductions genuine --- or are they merely half-truths and lies intended to offset their previous support of MtGOX, perhaps even cover-up their own complicity in the "operation"?   

We have a plague of black blocks in Brazil, they turn every pacific protest into a violent confrontation with the police. A few days ago, they killed a TV reporter, investigations got somewhere. They are poor from slums who get paid about 100$ for their "services" by the right-wing opposition.

So the guy in that picture is soliciting foreign donations to support a revolution in Ukraine.  How sweet. 

Bitcoin does not need any enemies, bitcoiners thmselves are doing an excellent job at destroying their own creature...

Bitcoin investors should be thankful to China, it gave them two rallies and it is still holding the price up at the current level.  Why do they treat it with such disdain, and call it "fake"?

BBC News, Dec 4, 2013
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25217386

But who started it, really? 

On Bitstamp there were transactions of 50 BTC at 03:24 and 100 BTC at 03:26 (UTC).  Huobi (over?)reacted at 03:27, 03:28, 03:29 with ~300 BTC each.   Then it seems that each keep scaring the other into dumping...

Where are you getting that? 

According to bitcoinwisdom,  daily volumes for Feb/27 UTC were 12.04 kBTC for Bitfinex, 14.38 for BTC-e (USD).  Perhaps a different time interval?

Total trade volume for today Thursday Feb/27 UTC was ~259 kBTC, less than half of yesterday's (~540) , and little more than 1/4 of Tuesday's (~948, possibly the historical record?).

Volume outside China fell more than in China; it was ~45 kBTC, about 36% of yesterday's (~124) and 15% of Tuesday's (~291).

As a result, China's slice of the total volume grew again, to 83% (from yesterday's 77%).

The price in all markets was remarkably constant too.

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


             !   Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !    Sun !    Mon !    Tue !    Wed !    Thu !                     
  EXCHANGE   ! 02/19 !  02/20 !  02/21 !  02/22 !  02/23 !  02/24 !  02/25 !  02/26 !  02/27 ! Currencies considered


  Bitstamp   | 20.76 |  34.97 |  29.61 |  18.08 |  20.87 |  51.84 | 115.76 |  49.11 |  17.05 | USD                 
  BTC-e      |  5.84 |  23.37 |  23.64 |  18.68 |  14.24 |  20.78 |  73.86 |  33.61 |  14.60 | USD,EUR,RUR         
  BitFinEx   |  4.71 |  25.27 |  28.46 |  14.73 |  15.80 |  27.16 |  94.55 |  37.71 |  12.04 | USD                 
  Kraken     |  0.38 |   1.60 |   1.15 |   1.08 |   1.06 |   1.06 |   2.23 |   1.87 |   0.89 | EUR                 
  Bitcoin.DE |  0.54 |   0.70 |   0.76 |   0.61 |   0.50 |   0.73 |   2.23 |   1.00 |   0.50 | EUR                 
  CaVirtEx   |  0.11 |   0.75 |   0.60 |   0.20 |   0.23 |   0.30 |   2.15 |   0.32 |   0.31 | CAD                 
  CampBX     |  0.14 |   0.73 |   0.24 |   0.26 |   0.22 |   0.37 |   0.42 |   0.36 |   0.05 | USD                 

  SUBTOTAL   | 32.48 |  87.39 |  84.46 |  53.64 |  52.92 | 102.24 | 291.20 | 123.98 |  45.44 |                     

  Huobi      | 34.12 | 131.14 | 187.12 | 154.12 | 185.15 | 163.47 | 352.76 | 250.64 | 123.38 | CNY                 
  OKCoin     | 26.29 |  53.49 | 140.75 |  87.71 | 141.90 |  84.03 | 275.68 | 150.41 |  83.60 | CNY                 
  BTC-China  |  2.04 |  10.97 |  15.23 |   9.29 |  10.42 |  13.12 |  27.72 |  14.72 |   6.71 | CNY                 
  Bter       |  0.37 |   0.77 |   0.63 |   0.48 |   0.62 |   0.53 |   1.10 |   0.53 |   0.31 | CNY                 

  SUBTOTAL   | 62.82 | 196.37 | 343.73 | 251.60 | 338.09 | 261.15 | 657.26 | 416.30 | 214.00 |                     

  TOTAL      | 95.30 | 283.76 | 428.19 | 305.24 | 391.01 | 363.39 | 948.46 | 540.28 | 259.44 |                     



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".)

NOTE: MtGOX is now closed.

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Friday Feb/28

Trade volume for today Feb/27 volume (~123 kBTC) was about half of yesterday's (~251 kBTC), and apparently broke the seven-day spell of hectic trading at Huobi where the price, even at Slumber times, seemed to have no definite trend. It is as if the seven days Feb/20--26 had been one single "trading session", like Feb/11--12, Feb/13--14, and Feb/16--17.

The price at the official Slumber hour (19:00--19:59) hardly changed from yesterday's: from 3543 CNY to 3533 CNY.  Even though today was nominally a False Slumber Point, it suggests a rather simple pattern that seems to fit most of the True Slumber points since Feb/06.

The general form of the trend is a shifted decaying exponential, p(d) = A + B*Q**d, where A,B,Q are constants and d is the day of the month. The ratio Q, fitted by hand computations to the Slumber Points Feb/6--9, is about 0.66 (i.e. a 34% decay for each day of the part of the price above the constant A).  Since Feb/20 the term B*Q**d is so small that the trend can be approximated by a horizontal line p(d) = A.

That trend is broken into three pieces by two sharp and permanent down-steps, one by ~232 CNY on Feb/10 (the first press release by MtGOX), and the other by ~372 CNY on Feb/20 (the second press release).  Each piece has different values of A and slightly different values of B, which can be found by least squares fitting on the True Slumber points.  See the figure:


The prediction for today (blue rectangle) is obtained by extrapolating the last part of this stepped-exponential trend line --- that is, practically repeating today's value:

Prediction valid for: Friday 2014-02-28, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 3533 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 577 USD.

For Bitstamp, as usual, I used Huobi's prediction divided by R = 6.12.

NOTE: As you can see, predicting the past is much easier than predicting the future.

Checking the Chinese Slumber Method predictions for Feb/27

Prediction posted on: Thursday 2014-02-27, 04:04 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Thursday 2014-02-27, 19:00--19:59 UTC

Recall that I had given two predictions, one for bulls, one for bears.  The actual price was between the two, closer to the bullish one:

Huobi's bearish predicted price: 2781 CNY
Huobi's bullish predicted price: 3802 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 3533 CNY
Error of bullish prediction: 269 CNY

Bitstamp's bearish predicted price: 454 USD
Bitstamp's bullish predicted price: 621 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 585 USD
Error of bullish prediction:  36 USD

The price ratio between Huobi and Bitstamp had its normal value R ~ 6.12.  It seems that arbitrage trading has been restored.

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.

Chinese Slumber stuff coming next.  Run for your livers.

Are you trolling me? 

Perhaps you weren't yet reading this thread when the Bitcoinrain/MercadoBitcoin case was discussed here.

We already have "bitcoin investment" here, thank you.

Some links to get you started:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46750.msg556437#msg556437
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46750.msg3607991#msg3607991
http://defendaseudinheiro.com.br/a-verdadeira-historia-do-mercadobitcoin/

AFAIK, the account balances in various national currencies that a client had at MtGOX (or at any other typical exchange) were just numbers in an internal ledger.  All trades were executed by simply changing those numbers.

The actual money that appeared to be in the clients' accounts was kept, all mixed together, in the corporate bank accounts; and the totals for each type of currency did not have to match up.  To execute a withdrawal, the proper amount was taken from a corporate account, converted to the currency that the user requested, if necessary, and wired to the customer's bank account.

In principle one could mix the bitcoins too into that common corporate assets pool, either as BTC or converted to any national currency.  That would be risky, because of possible price fluctuations; but It would not be illegal, and arguably not even unethical -- as long as the exchange kept executing the BTC  widthrawals with due speed.

Indeed, that is why I said "the loss of those coins, per se".

I think that overall it may have a negative effect, by reducing the trust in all exchanges and therefore driving people away from bitcoin.   

However, the market price seems to be determined in good part by a relatively small set of active speculators (in the tens of thousands worldwide, perhaps?) whose sentiment may be very different from that of the general public.  So, if that loss of coins somehow makes those speculators more confident, the price may go up.

Is that so? 

Surely there is efficient arbitrage between the Chinese and the Western exchanges.  And surely most of the trade there is robots.

However, trade at Huobi is falls gradually to zero by 3:00 am and slowly rises again after 5:00 am local time.  It also changes as expected during local holidays.  That would argue against robots being remotely controlled from the US, wouldn't it?  It seems more consistent with Chinese humans and human-driven robots/scripts...

I haven't been paying much attention to OKCoin, but I believe that their traffic follows the same patterns, except that there is a part of the traffic that continues nonstop through the night.   Are you referring to OKCoin specifically?

Traffic at BTC-China is weird, I do not know what is going on there.  Perhaps ONLY arbitrage against a single market-maker?

I see unicorns. All the time.

https://www.google.com.br/search?q=%22alleged+theft%22+%22cover+up%22

We have something much more interesting than a stupid semi-cow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saci_%28Brazilian_folklore%29

I did consider that case, I think it makes no difference:


Think of losing the keys as a theft by the Devil (or by God). 

How cool! Thanks!