Let's see if I understood: every time a user solves that puzzle, he collects a slok reward, and that slok is appended to to the slokchain; correct?

Ragazzini sciocchi, credete che i Nostri Signori Rettili non vi capiscano se sbuffonate in italiano?  Meh!

You think it could in Braille, and be read without being seen?

Have you seen Kurt Vonnegut's little poem, "Tiger got to hunt, / Bird got to fly; / Man got to sit and wonder, / 'Why, why, why?'  //   Tiger got to sleep, / Bird got to land; / Man got to tell himself, /  'I understand.'"?

In that paragraph I was not including the futures' markets like BitVC and 796.com (which, IIUC, are the only ones doing double-counting).  But the volumes during those two days were huge either way.

Volume at OKcoin  was 429 kBTC on 2014-11-12, 609 kBTC on 2014-11-13.  The previous high was 286 kBTC on 2014-03-05; typical volume for several months until 2014-10-03 (start of last recovery) was ~50 kBTC/day, and 110 kBTC/day in the few weeks until 2014-11-11.

The numbers at BTC-China on those two days were 371 kBTC and 508 kBTC.  The previous high was 132 kBTC on 2013-12-07.  Typical recent volumes were ~7 kBTC/day until 2014-08-13 (when they removed the trading fees?), then growing steadily to 90 kBTC/day by 2014-11-11.

The numbers at Huobi were more modest, 211 kBTC and 232 kBTC, against a previous high of 352 kBTC on 2014-02-25.  Typical volumes were ~35 kBTC/day before 2014-10-03 and ~90 kBTC/day during the last recovery.

Bitcoin futures at BitVC (the international branch of Huobi) and "796" were also huge on those two days, on the order of 1 million BTC/day.  

I have not looked at the other big Chinese exchanges that are not listed at BitcoinWisdom.

My best guess at what happened is still that statement by the OKcoin tech guy, that "a three billion euro hedge fund is going to be trading on our platform".  Bitcoin news sites and many traders interpreted that as "the fund will start trading bitcoin", but there was no confirmation, and many were skeptical.  To me, the words "on our platform" (rather than "at our exchange") mean that they will be using OKcoin's software and/or servers to trade their shares, not bitcoin.  That would be great for OKcoin but irrelevant to bitcoin.  If this interpretation is correct, it could explain why the price crashed right after the rally, and is now returning to the pre-rally levels.

Whatever the cause, this 3-day rally and crash generated trades totaling over 1 million BTC at OKCoin, several million BTC overall.  The exchanges must have collected several million dollars in fees and interest, and arbitragers (possibly the exchanges themselves) must have made many millions too.  

If the "hedge fund" explanation is correct,  it may have been the most profitable misunderstanding in the history of bitcoin.

Just to make you feel better (?):

Forex Investors May Face $1 Billion Loss as Trade Site Vanishes
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-13/forex-investors-may-face-1-billion-loss-as-trade-site-vanishes.html?hootPostID=30ceb1967be98ed871bb8c50375b9e96


That is twice the loss at MtGOX. 

Amazing how people send their life savings to companies that have no address and whose owners and managers are not known and reachable.  But, as MtGOX and Neo & Bee showed, even when the owners are known, no one bothers to spend ten minutes checking their past with Google.  Sigh...

A hedge fud? 

Has anyone seen a confirmation or futher details on that statement "hedge fund will start trading on OKCoin's platform"?

All the news I found with Google, a few hours ago, were entirely based on that phrase from that audio file.

Has anyone seen anything about that on OKCoin's site?  They have a forum/bboard somewhere in there... 

Thanks for the thought, but no, I would rather persevere on my chosen trading strategy for a while. 

Please consider donating the BTC to some other cause or person.  All the best...

Indeed, news that are only relevant outside China (such as stores accepting bitcoin, the NY regulation process, etc.) seem to have no visible effect on the price.

On the other hand, most of the major price movements since last Decemer were obviously immediate reactions to events and news that were relevant to the Chinese traders: the PBoC decrees in December, the announcement by Mark of a "bug in bitcoin", the rumors and leaks of the PBoC circular in March, the passage of the 15 April deadline without the expected blockages, etc..

There were a few major moves without obvious cause, but it may be that there were causes (such as inside information) that we did not get to know.

To me, it is obvious that it is still the Chinese traders who define the price of bitcoin.  The lags between the exchanges during this last rally may not be proof, but are at least quite consistent with that claim.

I don't know... people claim that SMBIT buys off the exchanges, so those buys should not affect the price immediately.  Also, miners create 4000 BTC per day, so those 15 kBTC are 4 days' worth of miners output.  Is that enough to start a 100$ rally?

Perhaps the mine disaster in Thailand forced SMBIT or some other entity to buy at the exchanges instead of from those miners.

There was also news of a new NCR point-of-sale terminal that would have native support for bitcoin payments.  But that news was not relevant to China, since stores there cannot accept bitcoin, AFAIK.

It is not a "conclusion", only the best explanation I can think of at the moment.  Clues:
* The timing of the rally is consistent with traders gradually becoming aware of the "hedge fund" rumor.
* Comments here and elsewhere show that many traders thought that the fund would push price to the moon.
* OKcoin led the rally, at one time 100 CNY above Huobi, with the West behind both.
* There was obvious feedback: traders buying simply because the price was going up, "this is the next bubble!".
* The rumor was not confirmed, and recent comments on reddit show skepticism.

My guess: many traders heard "three billion hedge fund will be trading on OKkoins platform" and understood that it would be trading bitcoin. So they bought like crazy, expecting the price to go to the moon when the fund would start buying.  But the rumor was not confirmed, and people are now doubting it  So the traders are all selling like crazy, to cut their losses while they can.

But perhaps there will be another good rumor tomorrow, who knows.

The last two buys are deduced from changes in the published total USD value of the bitcoins owned by the fund (TAV  column; "Net Assets" item in their homepage) and the current bitcoin price.  Each estimated buy corresponds, withing the range of error, to a  round 2.5 million USD of investment by clients.  The round numbers and isolated increases may indicate that a single client made both investments. 

I suppose that you all know the story of how "Jeff" from BFL bought the Buttcoin.org website and replaced the BFL-critical articles with glowing reviews.

The site was bought in "Jeff's daughter" name.  The article above does not tell her name. I wonder if she really his daughter, or some other BFL person.

Seriously, here is one of the reasons why I can't take most TA seriously:

An n-day moving average (MA_n) is the average of n consecutive prices.  Charting the moving average instead of the price reduces the random day-to-day noise while preserving the longer-term variations.

An exponential moving average (EMA) is  similar, but gives more weight to the recent behavior -- and is easier to compute if you are using pencil and paper or a slide rule. 8-)

The difference between two MAs with different periods -- say, 7 and 21 days -- is basically a smoothed version of the second derivative of the price.  If MA₇ is higher than MA₂₁, the trend of the price is bearish, curving downwards: it is braking while going up, then accelerating down.  Conversely, if  MA₇ is lower than MA₂₁, it means that the trend is bullish, curving upwards: braking while going down, then accelerating up.   When the two graphs cross, then, the trend is changing from one mood to the other.

Good so far. However, the average of the last 21 prices tells what the price was 10 days ago, not today.   But analysts always plot the MA₂₁ value at the final date of the 21-day interval, not at the central date.  So, the traditional MA₂₁ plot is displaced 10 days to the right relative to its logically correct position (and you can see that clearly when it is plotted over the daily price chart).  Similarly, the  MA₇  chart is shifted 3 days to the right.  Therefore, the two plots cross at the wrong dates; if they were drawn at the correct dates, crossings might appear or disappear.

TA folks even understand this problem, but they have been plotting their MAs and EMAs that way since the lower Paleolithic, and cannot be convinced to change their habits.  There may also be a psychological factor: plotting the MA_n values at the correct dates makes it obvious that the analysis is based on information that is 10 days old; whereas plotting it the traditional way gives the impression that the analysis is hot from the ticker's mouth.

There is also the problem that the crossings depend on the arbitrary choice of the MA periods.   It is like computing the ROI of bitcoin investment: one gets completely different results depending on the time scale considered.

Finally,  this MA-crossing analysis depends on the hypothesis that there is an underlying price trend that can be revealed by smoothing the price.  That may be true in ordinary stocks, where the price is partly determined by fundamentals that change slowly with time (such as the overall economy and product sales).  It is rather questionable with bitcoin, since its "fudamentals" are isolated unpredictable events (like PBoC decrees and rumors).  We see that in the charts, where rallies and crashes often start suddenly, out of nowhere.

I learned, from an unimpeachable source, that in Beijing there is a school of English that caters specifically to bitcoin traders.  Every day, as homework, the students are required to dump enough bitcoins to cause the price to crash, and then copy and translate all the insults, expletives, and obscenities that appear on this thread.


 

Well, I also created this article and a few others on spirituality, quack remedies, etc.  


Of course.

My best guess at the moment is the "three billion hedge fund started trading on our platform" rumor.  It is consistent with OKCoin being the leader, leaving even Huobi behind.  

But it may be TA, indeed: namely people expecting "the next bubble" because of the 5-year WorldCom extrapolation plot and/or analogies with 2011 or 2013.  I.e. a case of self-fulfilling prophecy.

That may be just the usual traders believing the rumor and acting on it.  Or them expecting "the next bubble" by comparison with 2011 or 2013, and trying to get ahead of it.  Or some other reason that we haven't heard of.

The rise was remarkable, but not unique. On March 03, 2014, the price wen up by +110$ from ~560$ to ~670$. (And it dropped again by that same amount, from ~580$ to ~470$, on March 27).