I should have no expectations or wishes for the price going one way or another, but that gif is one of the things that makes me actually root for further dumps.  That and the Tinkerbell sketch.   

Funny, that is what I would say of most libertarians and ancaps... 

AFAIK the BIT shareholders have not yet received the digital certificates or whatever that they need in order to put their shares up for sale.  So there are no sell offers yet.  Those bids that are posted seem to be symbolic (100 shares = 10 BTC = 2200 $), perhaps just ways for the level-2 brokers to "plant the flag", or to prime  the market with some good-looking numbers.

Maybe they are highlighted to show that they are both tied at the top.  Or they both raised their bids recently.

If the culprit was not China, perhaps it was this:

BitPay releases figures for 2014
IBTimes article
IBTimes Infographic
A thread on reddit's /r/bitcoin, and another one
Thread on reddit's /r/buttcoin

BitYes is an exchange set up by Huobi (in Hong Kong, IIRC) to cater to non-Chinese clients.  It trades in USD instead of CNY and is accessible to foreign banks, I beleive, but not (easily) to mainland Chinese.  It was created last year at a time when Mainland Chinese exchanges expected to be closed at any time by PBoC.  It was called BitVC initially but then changed its name.

OKCoin did the same at about the same time. Their old exchange in Beijing is okcoin.cn, the foreigner-oriented version is okcoin.com.

The payment for the 2014 taxes is due April 15, 2015, yes.  But the numbers that go in the 2014 tax statement - revenues, losses, deductibles, etc. -- must have happened between 2014-01-10 and 2014-12-31.   So, in particular, one cannot claim losses incurred on trades made this year.   Isn't that so?

There was this post. I do not know if the person has any official connection to the fund.

EDIT: there were also some tweets by Barry Silbert.

IIRC, the deadline for tax selling was Dec 31, 2014.  April 15 is only the deadline for filing the 2014 tax statements.  Isn't that so?

Brawker (competitor to Purse.io) closes for lack of customers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/32lx9j/brawker_shuts_down_because_growth_rate_did_not/

Note that I was estimating what the price would be if there was no speculation, and therefore no hoarding; i.e. all 14 million coins in circulation, held only for as long as needed to spend all that is earned (or save it by buying some other store-of-value asset, such as gold, real estate, treasury or loan bonds, etc..)

As I noted above, the "estimated USD transaction volume" from blockchain.info is known to be much higher than the volume of e-payments.  (At some point, PrimeDice betting alone was 40% of the blockchain traffic, in some metric).  We do not know the real number, unfortunately.   The little evidence I have seen tells me that it is probably on the order of 5 M$/day.

You cannot trust the number 187 $/BTC because it depends on the amount of holding, i.e. speculation -- and speculation is unpredictable.

Yes, definitely.

If we had no speculation, only demand for e-payments, the price would follow the equation P = V * T / N, where P is the price ($/BTC), V is the volume of e-payments ($/day), T is the mean time between successive payments with the same coin (days), and N is the number of currency units in circulation (BTC).  

Assuming N = 14 million, guessing T = 14 days, and V = 5 million $/day, gives P = 5.00 $/BTC only.  

The guess T = 14 days assumes that most coins that someone receives in payment for something, or buys to spend, are sold or used to pay for things at various times within one month.   (BitPay sells all the coins that they receive within a day or two, for example.)

The guess V = 5 million $/day is based on various bits of evidence that indicate that BitPay has been handling about 1 million $/day of payments over the last year.   Since they are believed to be the largest bitcoin payment processor by volume, a factor of 5 seems to be a fair guess for the total volume of e-payments.  This estimate includes other processors and raw bitcoin payments, but excludes illegal trade, since that is being curtailed and cannot be relied upon as a sustainer of the price.  (Anyway, it seems unlikely to be more than 1 million $/day).

It is not correct to use for V the total USD transaction volume extracted from the blockchain, because most of the latter (probably more than 90%) is movement of coins between wallets that belong to the same person, or that is not payment for goods or services -- such as tumbling, hot/cold wallet flow, deposits and withdrawals at exchanges and similar sites, gambling, etc.

Clearly, the current price (~220 $/BT) is still largely sustained by speculation and speculative holding.

I suppose everyone has seen this document, available at the OTCQX site:

http://www.otcmarkets.com/financialReportViewer?symbol=GBTC&id=133827

After the financial report there is a lengthy and detailed official description of the fund and its rules.

(It seems I am a criminal, since I referred earlier to this (or some similar document) as "the SEC filing". Sorry for that.)

$310 M USD Cryptocoin-based Ponzi Busted in Thailand
http://www.coinbuzz.com/2015/04/13/arrests-in-ufun-crypto-currency-pyramid-scheme/

The article says "an operating system designed for use by hackers".  That can only be Windows. 

Can anyone direct me to the forum where Facebook stockholders discuss how to convince their parents and friends to use Facebook, in order to prevent its share price from falling?

Maybe one of these:

Bruce Fenton new Exec Director of the Shrem Karpelès & Friends Foundation:
https://blog.bitcoinfoundation.org/the-bitcoin-foundation-welcomes-bruce-fenton-as-executive-director/

Bitcoin Baron arrested for hacking:
http://www.komu.com/news/man-who-claims-he-hacked-columbia-komu-websites-jailed-in-az/

 

"Fundamentals" of an ordinary stock are the profits and capital assets of the underlying company.  When you own a stock certificate, you literally own a slice of the company, so you own a slice of its capital assets and you are entitled to a slice of their profits.  The fundamentals define the long-term price of a stock, although there can be a significant speculatiive element added to it in shorter time scales.

Bitcoin has no "fundamentals". A bitcoin is like a share of a company with no product or service, no revenue, no capital assets.  If you own a bitcoin you don't own any assets, and you are not entitled to any dividdends.  The only thing you own is the certificate itself, whose only merit is that its current ownership is regstered in a supposedly ultra-safe registry that no government can tamper with.  The only thing that fixes it price is speculation: your only hope of getting a profit out of it is finding someone who is willing to pay for it more than you paid.

There has been perhaps a billion dollars invested into mining equipment, but bitcoin owners do not own a single screw of it.  The mining industry has abut 800 k$/day of revenue, and some miners still make substantial profit; but not a penny of that money will go to the bitcoin owners.  More than half a billion dollars has been invested in exchanges, payment processors, and other bitcoin-related companies; but, again, bitcoin owners do not own any piece of them.  On the contrary, all the revenue of miners and bitcoin-related companies will come from the pockets of those who buy bitcoins.

As for the difficulty: the market price determines the revenue of the miners, that determines the total hashpower, that determines the difficulty -- all indirectly, with substantial delays and distorted by accidents and errors of judgement.  There is no reverse control channel: the difficulty has no influence whatsoever on the price.

Where is that? Poland?