Businesses and professional auction-goers will probably bid below market.  But we cannot rule out much higher bids by rich individual investors.  People sometimes waste a lot more money in unexplainable whims. 

They said that, and even officers from the People's Bank of China said that.  One officer said that, for them, bitcoins are like stamps.  And OBVIOUSLY bitcoin was never banned, otherwise the exchanges would have been shut down immediately.

(But note that the PBoC is only one of the five government agencies that issued the December decree.  The PBoC worries only about stability of the yuan and of the financial system, and is the agency that deals with banks and payment processors; so any decisions about these entities are issued trough the PBoC, out of respect for the government's organogram.  Like central banks in many other countries, the PBoC does not regulate the bitcoin exchanges, and apparently would rather not to -- they are too small for them.  Other Chinese government agencies worry about money laundering, bribing, foreign subversion, illegal trade, tax evasion, etc.; and they certainly could shut down the exchanges, without going through the PBoC, if they decided to.)

How could they say that?  Even the US government may ban bitcoin next week...

One Chinese exchange, at least, shut down because of the PBoC restrictions.  The CEOs of the other exchanges were quite worried that they would have to shut down, several times, but when they found workarounds they immediately reassured their clients and the press.  And they STILL may be shut down eventually.

Huobi's CEO said so himself on his very first interview by CoinDesk.  (Which, by teh way, is certainly not an "official site" of anything.  More like a press release distribution service.)

Come on! Why should they?

FUD is supposed to be "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt"
* Fear is the proper thing to feel when you know of a possible future event that may be bad for you.
* Uncertainty is what you necessarily have when you do not have enough information to be certain.
* Doubt is what you should always have about any statement by someone who wants your money.
So it is good to have some FUD now and then.  FUD is always better than SHT (Sales Hype and Tripe).
 

Read the USMS notice and their FAQ.  That is all the information there is.

If you had bothered to read the last few pages you would have found the answer, several times.

The changes to the deposit methods were announced on their homepages, as they happened over the past four months.  I posted at least a dozen links to the notices in Chinese with Google Translations, others posted human translations, as well as Chinese media articles.  Obviously they could not explain 4 months ago the changes that they were forced to make 2 months ago. 

In contrast, only months after Huobi had become the largest exchange by volume in the world did CoinDesk get up from their desk and arrange an interview their CEO. (And in that article they stated that China had 60% of the trade volume in the world, when in fact it had closer to 90%.)  It took them a couple more months before they bothered to interview the CEO of OKCoin.   Yet they don't spare screen space when they are interviewing "bitcoin entrepreneurs" who have only rosy promises to show.  Have you ever seen them express any doubts about the soundness of a bitcoin venture, or the credibility of its proponents?

Does anyone know how the FBI/USMS handles seized "virtual" property, such as shares of US or foreign companies, tickets for big games, or Linden Dollars?  Presumably they followed the same model.

User @Phinnaeus_Gage (who has by far the largest number of posts on this forum) has been inactive since 2014-06-17, 18:38:34 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=24792

They did. Blame the bitcoin media (and those who believe them) for pretending that China did not exist.

I suppose that the interview must have been news for those readers who have put everyone here on ignore.  For the others, it has only confirmed what has been said many times here.

The "China problem" is that bitcoin cannot be used as currency for e-commerce.  Also people cannot deposit money directly through Alipay or bank transfers, they must use an indirect route (the accredited brokers, for OKCoin).

The only news (old though) is that bitcoincharts is finally including OKCoin in their volume piecharts.  However, they still don't include Huobi and several other Chinese exchanges that we barely know about. Oh well.

I am no lawyer, but my reading is that Exemption 4 applies to information about private transactions that someone may give to the government -- e.g. tax filings, or sales of controlled substances by a chemical supplier to their customers.  I don't think that it applies to information about transactions of a private company with the government.  So the auction results, in particular, should not be blocked by it.

In auctions of material goods, like cars or houses, the USMS contracts a private company to keep custody of the goods and allow inspection by prospective bidders.  Check their pages for prior auctions.

Is that true, are USMS auction results made public in general?

I imagine that they have been pressed to keep those results private.  A car maker would not like people to know that a model X in perfect condition has been auctioned for half the recommended sales price.  A used car dealer or real estate agent would not like his clients to know how much he paid for the item that he is trying to sell them.

Thanks. I cannot imagine any excuse for withholding the winning price.  They may perhaps contend that the identity of the winners is private information, but even that seems unlikely.

Does that law mean that the Bitcoin Network now needs a money transmission license from California to accept transactions from that state? 

(This is not entirely a "" question... having bitcoin classified as money may bring problems as well as benefits.  And doesn't it contradict the IRS stance that bitcoins are property, not money?)

That law looks like something that Brock Pierce (California resident AFAIK, and former boss of the game money market) may have wanted.

It says so clearly in their announcement and FAQ:
http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/
http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/faqs.pdf
People may perhaps get the winning price through a FOIA request, but who knows how long that may take.

This is not the USMS auction, but a "sub-auction" organized by SecondMarket to assemble bids for the auction.  I gather that, among those 186 bids (for 264 BTC on average), SecondMarket selected the highest bids adding up to 29,600 BTC, grouped them into lots of 3000 BTC, and submitted bids to the USMS for those lots, at suitable mean prices.

We can assume that few if any of those bids were above market price. People who want only a few hundred BTC could get them from the exchanges.

Presumably  Silbert, SecondMarket, and SMBIT have not placed any bids of their own to the USMS, either directly or through the syndicate.  There would obvious ethical problems if they did that.

Is it permissible to provide answers as part of the questions here?

Wait, we still have 2 days to go.  Did you see that red spike at Huobi, around 12:52 UTC -- the price going down 10% in a single trade? One minute of such trading is all it would take to reach $10.  (Unfortunately, that spike was later declared a glitch and erased from the charts, but even so it scared many traders into real dumping.  You may still see comments about it on the Wall Observer thread of this forum.  And, anyway, it is the spirit that matters.)

By the way, "the first half of 2014" is more like July 1st or July 2nd, since February had only 28 days and there is one extra 31-day month after July.  So there is plenty of time yet.

I would love to see that profs's face when the price falls to $11 on June 30 but stays there until July 3rd before dropping to $10.  He will be the laughing stock of his university and of all economists in the world, har har.

   ( <--- do I need to put this here? )

Did no one who captured a leprechaun ever think of asking as the third wish that he be allowed to capture two more leprechauns the next day?

I have noticed some annoying inconsistencies in Bitstamp's trade log, as reported by BitcoinWisdom (in the lower right sub-window of the clart).  Some past entries of the log change quite a bit when the chart is hard-reloaded. More details here.  Note, for example, that in this section of the logs one trade for 0.036 BTC became 0.34 BTC after reloading the chart.

The problem seems limited to Bitstamp.  BitcoinWisdom's owner says that Bitstamp's chart data API does not provide the trade type ("buy" vs "sell") so he has to guess it somehow; and the entries also have some timestamp/order problems that explain why the ordering and timestamps change after reloading. I don't understand yet how those shortcomings of their API could cause the BTC amounts to vary, as noted above. Anyway, they should fix those bugs, otherwise clients who notice those retroactive changes may get the wrong (or right?) ideas.

If the Shrem Karpeles & Friends Foundation (aka Bitcoin Foundation) was worried about building public trust, they would define minimum transparency standards for exchanges, including full and immediate disclosure of the complete history of bid/ask orders and all trades, accurately ordered and timestamped; and they would monitor exchanges for compliance.  But if pigs had wings...

One thing that would improve transparency a lot would be to attach a scrambled client ID to each bid/ask submission, and the two IDs to each trade.  That would not reveal the identity of the clients, but would allow other clients to check the logs for suspicious behavior by other clients or by the exchange owners.  (Professional auditors could later certify, under NDA, that those IDs are mapped to the actual clients in 1-1 fashion.)