Wait, wasn't there a conjecture that Jed's "big XRP sell-off" threat caused a major BTC price move?  When/what was that, anyone remembers?

The official AMT thread got several postings by new accounts  who report receiving miners from AMT.  One enthusiastic guy wants to buy 10, maybe 12.  All he asks for is a photo of the 10 cases, and he will send his money.

I give up.  I have concluded that God has sent a legion of his dark angels to Earth, to punish bitcoiners for their greed and arrogance; and they are doing their job with ruthless efficiency.

(But there is something wrong with a forum that allows scammers to set up a thread where they can keep pushing their scams on readers, with power to delete any warnings that former victims may put up.  If justice worked, the forum admins should be considered accessories to any scams that are carried out through such a thread.)

"Is that a trick question?" -- Calvin

Are you aware of his doings in the UK, before moving to Cyprus?

I would not say that Neo&Bee was "an attempt to be a 2 bit CEO", but rather a big step up in his real "career".

I suppose that he is neither in the UK nor in Cyprus.  Who knows what will be his next step.  He may not even have to change his name.  If Neo&Bee investors did not think of checking his past before giving him their money, why would the next crowd do it?

Can there be a question that is NOT dubious?

Thanks!  Well, between the authors of that study, who saw no arbitrage opportuities, and those two traders, who made piles of money with arbitrage, I would rather trust the latter.  Don't know why, just a hunch.  

By the way, the flaw noted by the critics -- that the study only looked at closing prices every 24 hours -- is also present in the paper from a Czech (?) author that was cited here a while ago,  that "proved"  that China dit not lead the price changes.  That paper did not specify the time resolution of its data; but since it was downloaded from Bitcoincharts.com, it could not be less than 1 minute, and probably was more than that.

As those two traders note, arbitrage between bitcoin exchanges is quite fast: it usually propagates large moves in less than one minute.  (Smaller moves may not propagate at all, and trend reversals may be delayed by the spread.) So it is not surprising that he could not detect a clear leader from that data...

Another problem with both the Czech article and the bank report is that they omitted Huobi and OKCoin, using instead BTC-China as representative of the "Chinese" market.  But, if (as I believe) the November bubble was due to the adoption of bitcoin by the Mainland Chinese speculators, then BTC-China was more likely to be one of the followers, rather than the leader.  Moreover, after last December BTC-China became a very minor player in the Chinese market.  

Because of their no-fee policy, OKCoin and Huobi usually have very narrow spreads, and track each other very closely (often les than 0.50 USD apart), down to the smallest bumps and dips, except for very short fast spikes.  That can only be due to very efficient arbitrage between them, possibly by the exchange owners themselves.

From all I have seen, I still believe that Huobi and OKCoin are the market leaders, who have been defining the BTC price, since last November; and that the other exchanges mostly follow them through arbitrage.

That is ~2800 BTC.  Not a lot, in terms of market, I would say.  (Because of arbitrage, the effect of a bitcoin sale on the price depends on the combined order books of all exchanges in the world, even if Bitpay only sells at one exchange.)

I have seen it demonstrated, yes.   (I have been following threads on two famous mining rig manufacturers who do it in an industrial scale.  Oh boy.)

But some businessmen still care about their reputation.  Tim Draper's bid *may* be leaked one day, e.g. through a FOIA request or by anyone who saw his bid; if he had lied about it then, he would risk being marked as a liar.

When I find that someone told me a flat-out lie, I will stop believing anything that says, and I would not do business with him if I can avoid it at all.  I believe there are still many people who react this way to lies.

In fact, the thing I find most amazing in those threads is that clients of those companies still pay attention to what the CEOs write -- clients who prepaid 6000$ or more for a miner and have been told "it will be there next week" for the last 9 months.

Well, it has been widely speculated that the Earth was flat and the Sun traveled around it.    

It seems likely that the price Draper paid was somewhat below market (574--590$ on Bitstamp, Jun/27, 06:00--18:00), partly because it would be a rational bid, but mostly because if he had paid at or above market he would probably have said so, to support the price.  Said another way, one possible explanation for why he and Siebert refused to reveal their bids is that the price they offered would have been "bad news" for the market.

As for the other end of the range, we have only one bid that was revealed, in the low 400s.

So, it could be anything between those two numbers.  My guess is that it was between 500$ and 550$.  It would have given him a 10--20% profit, if he sold at market in the following weeks.

Did Curiosity really kill the cat?

Why do you want to know?

Someone claimed that the photo of that Ferrari was cropped out from an advertisement. Better check.

You mean, like, one more "why do you want to know" gets appended to the question every six minutes or so?

Or quote instead something from Jimmy Buffett... 

I have browsed through their sites, what are you referring to specifically?

(Sorry for the stupid question about gambling.  But, on that topic, is there any estimate on how much BTC transaction volume is due to gambling?)

Sorry, I don't gamble so I don't know how online gambling sites work.  You mean that they only take bitcoins, is that correct?

Why do you want to know why he wants to know why he wanted to know whatever he wanted to know, may I know?

I have the feeling that the Mainland Chinese exchanges are winding down.  Just a feeling, no concrete news.

I asked several times what could have convinced some traders to buy in spurts and take the price from 450$ to 630$.  General answer was "who cares".  Well, my guess is still that those traders had learned of some impending event that might start a new rally. If so, perhaps they now have been disappointed and are just selling back what they bought.    But, who cares?

I recall them saying that they processed 100 million USD in payments in 2013.  No idea how they are doing now.

I wonder how much of that is actually purchasing concrete goods and services.  Do people use Bitpay/Coinbase for online gambling?  Do people use them, instead of the exchanges, to turn bitcoins into dollars? (Just register with them as a merchant and but a Nothing from yourself in BTC, have it delivered as dollars?)

You should check his bio in Wikipedia first...

He made his fortune buying a company that was in bad shape and managed it for several years until it became profitable again.