Today Sunday Feb/23, the BTC trade volume outside China (excluding MtGOX) was ~53 kBTC, practically the same as yesterday.

On the other hand, the trade volume in China was ~338 kBTC, 20% higher than yesterday's.  OKCoin grew more than Huobi.

As a consequence, the Chinese shre of the total volume in all the exchanges (excluding MtGOX) was 86%, up from yesterday's 83%.

Bitstamp was still the leader outside China (~21 kBTC), followed by Bitfinex (~16) and BTC-e (~14)

Daily volumes of BTC trade to/from USD and other national currencies (in kBTC):


             !    Sat !    Sun !    Mon !    Tue !   Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !    Sun !                     
  EXCHANGE   !  02/15 !  02/16 !  02/17 !  02/18 ! 02/19 !  02/20 !  02/21 !  02/22 !  02/23 ! Currencies considered

  Bitstamp   |  20.76 |  26.40 |  19.90 |  14.83 | 20.76 |  34.97 |  29.61 |  18.08 |  20.87 | USD                 
  BitFinEx   |  10.83 |  16.75 |  15.69 |   8.47 |  4.71 |  25.27 |  28.46 |  14.73 |  15.80 | USD                 
  BTC-e      |   9.16 |  21.75 |  15.07 |   8.08 |  5.84 |  23.37 |  23.64 |  18.68 |  14.24 | USD,EUR,RUR         
  Kraken     |   0.41 |   0.91 |   0.89 |   0.51 |  0.38 |   1.60 |   1.15 |   1.08 |   1.06 | EUR                 
  Bitcoin.DE |   0.22 |   0.57 |   0.57 |   0.38 |  0.54 |   0.70 |   0.76 |   0.61 |   0.50 | EUR                 
  CaVirtEx   |   0.15 |   0.15 |   0.15 |   0.21 |  0.11 |   0.75 |   0.60 |   0.20 |   0.23 | CAD                 
  CampBX     |   0.05 |   0.07 |   0.28 |   0.10 |  0.14 |   0.73 |   0.24 |   0.26 |   0.22 | USD                 

  SUBTOTAL   |  41.58 |  66.60 |  52.55 |  32.58 | 32.48 |  87.39 |  84.46 |  53.64 |  52.92 |                     

  Huobi      | 122.80 | 110.57 | 130.41 |  74.04 | 34.12 | 131.14 | 187.12 | 154.12 | 185.15 | CNY                 
  OKCoin     |  51.45 |  63.63 |  63.05 |  51.46 | 26.29 |  53.49 | 140.75 |  87.71 | 141.90 | CNY                 
  BTC-China  |   7.55 |   9.08 |   7.86 |   3.86 |  2.04 |  10.97 |  15.23 |   9.29 |  10.42 | CNY                 
  Bter       |   0.74 |   0.56 |   0.48 |   0.35 |  0.37 |   0.77 |   0.63 |   0.48 |   0.62 | CNY                 

  SUBTOTAL   | 182.54 | 183.84 | 201.80 | 129.71 | 62.82 | 196.37 | 343.73 | 251.60 | 338.09 |                     

  TOTAL      | 224.12 | 250.44 | 254.35 | 162.29 | 95.30 | 283.76 | 428.19 | 305.24 | 391.01 |                     

  MtGOX      |  60.15 | 104.46 |  65.69 |  63.50 | 40.75 | 127.48 | 103.06 |  89.24 |  46.66 | USD,EUR,GBP,AUD,JPY 



All numbers were collected by hand from the site http://bitcoinwisdom.com. Beware of possible errors.

For each exchange, the numbers include only the trade volume to/from the currencies listed in the rightmost column. Trade between BTC and other cryptocoins, such as LiteCoin, is NOT included.

Dates on the header line are UTC. Specifically, "01/15" means "from 01/15 00:00:00 UTC to 01/15 23:59:59 UTC". (Beware that Bitcoinwisdom uses your local time, so the date may appear to be off by 1 day.  For example, if you are 2 hours west of Greenwich, it may show "01/14 22:00" when the UTC time is "01/15 00:00".)

NOTE: MtGOX has suspended withdrawals of Bitcoins and national currencies.  Therefore it is essentially isolated from other markets, and its price is completely out of the norm.  The trade volumes above may be meaningless.

poof

I suppose that there is no training or exam required in order to trade at Bitstamp, right?  One can learn by doing?

All I need to do is open an account, transfer in my 500,000 BTC, click on random buttons and see what happens; right? 

   <-------- just in case.

Yes, that is what "fiat" means in Europe (and here).  

But that Neo video really seems directed to bitcoiners, not to common folk.  Are they selling stock?

Oh. THAT is what you folks mean by "fiat"?

All the time I was thinking of THIS



No wonder I did not understand what bitcoin was all about.

Now I have to go back and re-read all the 5022 pages of this thread. 

I won't comment on the selling of Bitcoin as a way to "escape volatility" of the Euro.  You already know my opinion on that,

I will just note that the video seems to have been produced for the already converted.  It uses the bitcoiner slang "fiat" to refer to ordinary money, for example; that will send frissons down the spine of the faithful, but should be lost on the common folk that the bank aims to (aehm) attract, no?

I was almost expecting it to end with "CCMF!" 

On the first press release by MtGOX (Feb/10) the price at Huobi fell permanently by ~350 yuan (about 50 dollars).

On the second update (Feb/20) it fell again by ~350 yuan, but appears to have recovered over the last four days.

Are you sure you want another MtGOX update tomorrow?

Geeze, thanks for the tip!

But you should have used a smaller font, the walls have eyes. 

End of Chinese Slumber Stuff.  Stop skipping posts.

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Monday Feb/24

Today Feb/23, Huobi's volume for 19:00 -- 19:59 UTC (3:00--3:59 AM China Standard Time) was only 364 BTC, which, by the criteria I have been using, makes it a True Slumber Point. 

That creates a trilemma for the next Huobi price prediction:

  (A) We consider the Slumber Points of Feb/21 and Feb/23 as the first two True points of a new (strongly ascending) trend line; or,
 
  (B) We disregard the Slumber Point of Feb/21, and, since Feb/23 was not too far from the old (moderately descending) trend line of Feb/10--19, we use that old trendline for the prediction; or
 
  (C) We disregard the Slumber Point of Feb/21, and consider Feb/18, Feb/19, and Feb/23 to be the first three True points of a new (almost constant) trend line, which is a continuation of the old one but with a smaller slope.
 
The last alternative seems more reasonable.  That new trend line has the equation p = 3871.10 - 2.57*d, where p is the price and d is the day number.   For Bitstamp, as usual, I will use Huobi's prediction divided by R = 6.12.

Therefore:

Prediction valid for: Monday 2014-02-24, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 3809 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 622 USD.



NOTE: The plane has an infinite number of straight lines.   Sometimes we choose the wrong one.

Checking the Chinese Slumber Method predictions for Feb/23

Prediction posted on: Saturday 2014-02-22, 22:05 UTC
Prediction valid for: Sunday 2014-02-23, 19:00--19:59 UTC

The prediction for today (Sunday Feb/23) was again way off the mark.  The rally that started on Feb/22, presumably triggered by the (false) rumor that MtGOX had started testing their new software, continued through Feb/23.

However, the actual price at the predicted time was close to the trendline of the Slumber Points between Feb/10 and Feb/19 inclusive.  It is as if the three previous Slumber Points (Feb/20--22) were all False, including Feb/21, in spite of its low volume.  That is, it is as if the four days Feb/20--23 had been one single "trading session" --- like Feb/11--12, Feb/13--14, and Feb/16--17 --- during which the price veered off the trend line, only to return to it at the end.

Lesson learned: never try to draw a trend line with only one data point.

Anyway, here are the numbers:

Huobi's predicted price: 3368 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 3810 CNY
Error: 452 CNY

Bitstamp's predicted price: 550 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 623 USD
Error: 73 USD

The Huobi prediction in question is the rightmost blue rectangle on the chart below.  The light blue-gray rectangles are the previous predictions.  The orange and grey dots are the True and False Slumber Points, the mean prices at 19:00 UTC every day.  The orange line is the trend that was assumed for the prediction.


The following chart shows the Bitstamp prices and predictions. The orange and grey dots are Huobi's prices at 19:00 UTC every day, divided by R = 6.12.  The orange line is the trend used in the prediction, which is Huobi's trend divided by R.

Warning - Chinese Slumber Stuff following (next 2 posts)

From http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ymwzj/mtgox_still_authoring_invalid_transactions/
(According to an earlier post on that thread, user @nullc is Gregory Maxwell, one of the core developers)


Are there any news newer than this one, about the "MtGOX is testing" rumor?

Good luck to them.

However, "1-2 million BTC" is an estimate for what MtGOX owes its clients, not of MtGOX's assets. 

MtGOX's assets are the real BTC it has in its orporate wallets (and whose keys are not lost  ) and the money it has in its corporate bank accounts. From those assets one must subtract that 1-2 million BTC of account balances (ie. ~1 billion dollars), in order to get the company's net worth.

Mark's personal wallets and bank accounts are not MtGOX assets.  To get hold of them, I suppose one must convince Mark to invest in the New MtGOX, or sue him; and only the creditors (including his clients) can do the latter.
 
So, MtGOX's net worth may be anywhere between plus a few million dollars and minus a billion dollars or more, with several lawsuits for dessert.

Moreover, who knows how many of those "1 million accounts" are active and/or have positive balance.  My guess is less than 10,000.

If that project succeeds, it may go down in history as the, ahem, weirdest company takeover ever...

Indeed, bitcoin trading is still wild west territory...

But, if you know that the law will not help you, you should care a lot more about the history of your banker, shouldn't you?

Perhaps you mean that most bitcoin investors don't know that the law will not help them?

Your guess, I didn't write that.  But, as they say down here, "if the hood fits..." 

Perhaps you saw a similarity due to articles like this one:
http://defendaseudinheiro.com.br/a-verdadeira-historia-do-mercadobitcoin/



Only two people, at most, really know if that is true: the (ex)owner of the fund, and the thief.

So how do you know? You read it in a forum, and assumed it was a fact, too?



He may have, but what difference does that make to the issue?

The point is that the person opens a bitcoin investment fund that promises incredible profits (how could that work?), collects a few thousand BTC, then tells clients "Sorry, I have been hacked and all your coins are gone." Yet people still keep depositing coins and money into his exchange.  That is what I find amazing.

By the way, selling the exchange only made the thing worse.  Now he surely says "your lost coins are not my problem anymore, I sold everything"; while the new owners will say "we only bought the exchange, we had nothing to do with the fund."


I don't get it.  You are saying that investors trust their money and bitcoins to shady exchange owners, because scamming is the foundation of capitalism?  It does not make sense at all.

One way of estimating how much MtGOX owes to their clients is to guess the typical "mobility" m of their accounts; which is the sum of all transactions that a client did in a month (say) divided by the current balance of his account.

Suppose that, in the last month, a client bought 8 BTC, sold 2 BTC, and now has 20 BTC and 12,000 USD in his account.  Then the  "mobility" of his account (assuming market price 600 USD/BTC) is (8 BTC + 2 BTC)/(20 BTC + 12,000 USD) = 10/40 = 25% per month.

If we have a good guess for m, we can estimate the total balance of MtGOX accounts (the main part of their debt) by Q/m where Q is their total trade volume for the past month.

So, what would be a reasonable guess for m?  

For an active trader, m can be a lot more than 100%; but most clients must be occasional traders, or just "hodlers" who buy once in a while and never sell.

For this purpose, the denominator must be only the coins and money currently deposited in the exchange's account, excluding any coins in the client's personal wallets and any money in his own bank account.

Is that right? 

According to bitcoincharts, the average trade volume there was (very roughly) 10 M$/day from March to May 2013, 20 M$/day in December,  10 M$/day in November and January.  It may have been 1 M$/day for the rest of 2013 and 2014, and practically nothing before that.

What are their trading fees? Are they applied to all clients?

If their commission is 0.5% on all transactions, then in Dec/2013 they may have made 100 k$/day, but perhaps only 10 k$/days on the average since Jan/2013.

On the other hand, if they make 500 k$/day,  as you claim,  then their clients must be trading 200 times as much, that is 100 M$/day; and the sum of all their account balances must be much larger than that, perhaps 1 G$. 

Either way, their revenue from fees must be a small fraction of the total amount they owe to their clients (M + N above). 

But why don't they give us these numbers?  It would be a first step towards restoring the confidence of their clients and of the rest of the world.


I can think of three ways, not totally implausible, that they could have lost most of their clients' coins without people outside realizing it.  And theft is not one of them.

Look at other classical collapses - Enron, Worldcom, Lehmann Brothers, Madoff...  They all seemed "too big to fail", and yet...

I am still confused.  From the comments in that reddit thread, I understood that there is not a single bit of new news about MtGOX: they did not start testing, they did not resume withdrawals, there have been no reports from them or anything.  Did I understand it wrong?