Indeed their record  has been "rather mixed" as another poster delicately put it.

But I don't know whether they are to blame.  There are some industries where standars work, others when they don't.  Why can't one put a Ford engine in a Chevrolet car?  Or use an HP cartridge in a Canon printer? Why can't one run a Unix binary on a Windows system, or correctly correctly edit a ".doc" file on Unix?  Why can't an identi.ca user receive tweets from a tweeter.com user?

In many of those industries, while users would benefit immensely from interoprability and compatibility, the suppliers profit more by "locking in users with incompatible, proprietary products.  Thus, instead of a free market, one has a bunch of monopoly markets, one for each supplier.

It depends on the nature of the market, I suppose.  Or on pressure by government, either through legislation/regulation of through its purchasing power.

Din't you write something sometime about starting a school of Used Barnwood Meditation or something?  Not an idea to scoff at...

Fixed link (coindesk not bitcointalk)

"The market" means "all the traders".

Sorry guys but "bit" is already taken, for a much more important concept (which is even used all the time when describing the protocol.)  Surely a bunch of bright lads and lassies like y'all could think up a clever name for µBTC, rather than stealing other people's clever idea. 

No, he died from ebola, and to avoid contagion he was suspended from a rope and washed with a hose while workers built the room around him; for, how did he get into the room, if it had no doors and no windows?

Well, if you say so...  


Indeed...

What should I be -- a plan, a canal, Panama?

Wow, are we witnessing the birth of another Off Topic Unending Debate? 

I had a quick look, here is what I understood:

Their raw data is the price and the first few order book entries at OKCoin, at 10-second intervals, from Feb/2014 to Jul/2014. 

To predict the change in price in the next 10 seconds, they take the last 180 to 720 data points (30 to 120 minutes' worth of their data set) and look back in history for occasions when the price wriggled in similar ways.  They look at what the price did just after those occasions, and use that information to predict what it will do next. The complicated math is details of how to compare the recent wriggles with the historical wriggles, and combining the "past futures" into the "next future". 

They did not actually trade on the exchanges.  They used the first 4 months of data to adjust the parameters of their method, and then simulated how it would have performed over the last 2 months (Jun-Jul/2014).   

Some comments:

I may have misunderstood, but it seems that they did just ONE test run, using the last 2 months of data.

The performance in that test (doubling the USD capital in 50 days) would be impressive for stock market trading, but for bitcoin trading it seems quite modest, given its hight volatility.  If God traded every 10 seconds, as in their simulation, He would probably get that return in a few hours. 

In fact, doubling the capital in 50 days may be within the noise level.  That is, if several traders traded at random, once a second, for 50 days, some of them may well double their capital, some may lose it all.  (I don't know whether this is true, it would have to be checked.)

So, here is one thing that may be wrong with the paper.  The method has several parameters. Some of them are meant to be ajusted by "training" the mthod on part of the data, as they did.  Others are ostensibly fixed, like the duration of the windows used ("30, 60 and 120 minutes").  But the latter are arbitrary, and they probably tried several values until they got values that seemed to work.  But in doing so they may have only selected a "random trader" that was lucky in that test. 

They may have discussed this potential flaw in the paper, in the parts that I skipped.

Thanks! 

But, of course, now big traders will immediately implement their algorithm, and that will make it ineffective. 

Comments about the plots per hour:

The first pair of plots (USD volume per hour) show a maximum of tradeing volume
around 15:00 UTC (09:00 Central US time,  23:00 China time)
and a minimum  around 03:00 UTC (21:00  Central US time, 11:00 China time).  This may indicate that
most of the volume at Bitstamp is due to European traders, or perhaps to a mix of American traders
and arbitragers with China.  Hard to tell.

The shape of the USD volume plots is the same for Jan-Apr and May-Sep, but the latter has been
only 200 k$/hour while the former was about 450 k$/hour.  Given the overal price drop over the
period, it seems that the BTC volume has changed little.

The second set of plots seems to say that the average price change is nearly indepependent of the hour of
day.  The ups and down seem to be just artifacts of the relatively small sample (273 days).  That is, there
are no "bullish hours" not "bearish hours".

The third set of plots (RMS price change) has a minimum around 19:00 UTC, which is  China slumber time.
This is consistent with the claim that the price changes have been mostly defined by the Chinese
exchanges.

However, that effect is quite clear only on the first four months Jan--Apr,
while from May--Sep the volatility seems to be much smaller and nearly independent of
the hour of day.  This could mean that China is no longer defining the price --- but then,
neither is the West.  Perhaps the big traders who define the price, in China or in the West,
now use autonomous robots that work 24 hours a day.  Maybe.

Some plots that may be interesting, or not.

The following plots show the trade volume and the price variation for Bitstamp (BSTP) as a function of the hour of day (UTC).  The plots on the left show these quantities averaged over the last nine complete months, Jan--Sep 2014.  The plots on the right show the averages computed separately for the first 4 months Jan-Apr (red) and the next 5 months May--Sep (blue).  (Click on images for larger versions.)

The first set, below, shows the average USD trade volume around each hour.  For example, the dot on the hour marked "6" is the USD volume V traded per hour from 05:00 to 07:00 UTC, averaged over all days of the period in question (273 days on the left, 120 and 153 days on the right) with no weighting:

 

The second set, below, shows the average change in price at each hour.  For example, the dot on the hour marked "6" shows the result of taking the logs Y0 and Y1 of the weighted mean prices P0 from 05:00 to 06:00 UTC and P1 from 06:00 to 07:00 UTC, computing the difference D = Y1 - Y0, averaging D weighted by V over the days in question, and taking the anti-log.   The ordinate "0.993" for that dot means that, on average over that period, the price dropped 0.7% between 05:00 and 07:00 UTC.  Note that, on these plots, a large price increase in one day will tend to cancel a large price drop at the same hour on some other day.

 

The third set, below, shows the root-mean-square change in price at each hour.  For example, the dot on the hour marked "6" shows the result of taking the logs Y0 and Y1 of the weighted mean prices P0 from 05:00 to 06:00 UTC and P1 from 06:00 to 07:00 UTC, computing the difference D = Y1 - Y0, averaging the square D² weighted by V over the days in question, and taking the square root and then the anti-log.  The ordinate "1.029" for that dot means that, on average over that period, the price changed by 2.9%, up or down, between 05:00 and 07:00 UTC.  Note that, on these plots, changes in opposite directions (at the same hour on different days) are added, rather than cancelling out.

 

I hope the plots are correct.  In any case here are the essentials:

Raw data (Bitstamp's volume and price data, 1 hour intervals, 2014-01-01 to 2014-09-30)

Averaging script (gawk)

Perhaps this thread should have a "(NOT!)" appended to the name.  Or a big red warning on the original post, "caution, read this thread up to this post before replying to the post below".

Legal interventions and bankruptcies always take many months, if not years.   First, the court must decide whether the intervention must happen, especially if management is against it. (BFL is still at this stage, it seems.)  Then the "executioner" (receiver/liquidator) must gather all assets, including those that management may have tried to hide, and money due to the company.  He must also gather and validate all claims before paying any of them.  If the company does not have enough cash, the executioner must auction non-cash assets. (I would guess that BFL's bitcoins will have to be auctioned too, for legal and practical reasons.)   And each step must be done with the proper forms, legalese, signatures, stamps, staples, etc.

How much customers will get back depends on how much money the executioner can recover (minus various costs and fees).  For MtGOX, the current outlook is less than 20 cents to the dollar on average, since only 20% of the total account balances has been recovered.  (perhaps the police will be able to identify the thief, catch him, and convince him to return the other 80%; but I would not bet on that.)  For BFL, since they have been mining with customer's hardware, perhaps enough assets can be recovered to refund everyone in full.

Deciding how much each customer is entitled to seems relatively simple in this case.  The prices were quoted in dollars, even if paid in bitcoin, so in principle the refund due is what was paid.  (For MtGOX the  issue is much more complicated.)

Hey, thanks, how did it get there?

I don t know; are such double aliases like those wins who finish each other sentences?

If a user creates a second alias, will each alias get only half of his wisdom and experience?

Without the next 24 hours, Tuesday would be severely compromised, and Wednesday may have to be rushed into service before it is fully tested and debugged.  I don't know how much you care about the orderly passage of time, but that seems pretty serious to  me.

Well, sorry, but it looks like no one has a serious response to offer...

Well, I had understood that they promised to accept donations only through a specific address, precisely so that everybody could check their accounting.   

But that is indeed an interesting philosophical question: how can we get to trust a Foundation devoted to the cause of a trustless anonymous payment system.