Nit picking: It is both, actually.  Malleable means it can be hammered to a very thin sheet, ductile means it can be pulled through dies to make very fine wires. 

Slow there, you are comparing it to an ultra-hyper-inflationary currency. Better use one that is just inflationary:

https://coinplorer.com/Charts?fromCurrency=DOGE&toCurrency=USD

 

Two bits:

* Many of Huobi's customers are still trading even though it is 4:00 am there.  Usually they are all asleep at this time.

* Arbitrage seems to be working again.  For example Bitstamp and Huobi are again moving together, at the apparent rate 6.50 CNY = 1 USD.  (The official exchange rate is 6.09 or so.)

* Whatever bitcoin gurus may say, the crash cannot have had a positive effect on the average investor.  Since yesterday there must have been more people cashing out and leaving the open market than entering it, all over the world.  If that is true, today there must be less money in the exchanges, but still the same number of bitcoins.  Lower prices is almost a mathematical conclusion.

So, the general position of other exchanges seems to be "our software did not have MtGOX's bug, and now we have removed it".   

What could be the motivations of whoever is doing this? 

To exploit an MtGOX-like bug on any exchange or system that may happen to have such a bug?

below are the minute-by-minute price and volume plots from Bitcoinwisdom.com during the Feb/10 "Karpeles crash" at six exchanges (Huobi, OKCoin, Bitstamp, BTC-e, BitFinEx, and M:tGOX).

In each plot I tried to mark the times when (1) the crash started, namely the volume increased and the price started to fall); (2) when the fall resumed with a much faster pace after a short pause; (3) when the price hit bottom, and (4) when it bounced back. 

   

   

In some cases, the time of each event is hard to decide; other people may pick different moments.

In the plots for BTC-e and BitFinEx, the bottom hit (to about 100 US$) and the following rebound are not shown; they would be just off the right edge of the chart.  If they were included , the scale of the chart would automatically change in such a way that the other details would become invisible.

I think that the simplest explanation is good enough.  Someone had thousands of bitcoins sitting in his BTC-e account.  He reads the MtGOX release, undesrstands it to mean that Bitcoin is finished, so he rushes to sell it all, at any price, before other traders read that release and pull out all their bids.

Either him, or someone else who reasoned like him, had another large pile of coins at Bitfinex and did the same.

Actually many people did the same in all markets, that is why the price crashed.  The only difference is that no other panicker had as many coins as those two.

In that situation, a trader either gets convinced that bitcoin is finished, or dismisses the claim as absurd and believes that the bug will eventually be fixed and forgotten.  The latter will probably guess that others will panic and there will a temporary crash, but is confident that the price will rebound; therefore he will wait, and will buy when the price gets low enough.  The former can only conclude that the price is about to fall to zero and will stay there forever, so for him the most rational decision is to sell everything he can, while there are still traders who did not realize that.

Owning a lot of bitcoins does not turn one into an expert in bitcoin algorithms.  It is not even a proof of intelligence.

That dump was a loss only if the coins were bought for more than 200 $ or so.  If they were bought at 10$, the trader still made 2000% profit from his investment.  Sure, he could have made more, but that does not make him a loser.  (People who still hold bitcoins that they bought six months ago could have sold them for 1200$... )

As for the government, if they wanted to kill bitcoin they would simply declare it subject to SEC rules.  No assets, no revenue, no dividends? You cannot sell it.

As for the FBI-seized coins, I see no reason why the the government would not sell them through public auction, as required by law.  The money will go to the Treasury, so they will not go out f their way to get the best price.   At most, they will split the stash into a dozen separate lots to make the auction sufficiently competitive.  And they do not care at all about the effect of the auction on the price (which should be small anyway, given the number of coins in already in the market).   

New investors who do not know of the exchange's problems may be tempted to buy coins there.  Then MtGOX keeps their cash and tells them that coin withdrawals are suspended until next never.

Until last week new investors would be tempted to sell coins there.  Then MtGOX would keep their coins and take one geological era or two to send them the cash.

It is a disgrace that they are allowed to operate at all.  Why is the Bitcoin community so tolerant of bad businesses and scammers?

Why is the community still allowing the Shrem Karpeles & Friends Foundation to speak for them?

Because of the "Karpeles crash", volume today (Mon Feb/10 UTC) was very high in general, comparable to that of last Friday Feb/04, when the banks reopened in China. 

As on Friday, Chinese and non-Chinese exchanges were almost tied at ~220 kBTC. 

Outside China, Bitstamp led with 72 kBTC followed by MtGOX at 50 kBTC.

Thanks to the crash, BTC-China had 18 kBTC of trade today; but otherwise seemed rather dead as usual.
 

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


             !   Fri !   Sat !   Sun !   Mon !   Tue !   Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !    Sun !    Mon !                     
  EXCHANGE   ! 01/31 ! 02/01 ! 02/02 ! 02/03 ! 02/04 ! 02/05 !  02/06 !  02/07 !  02/08 !  02/09 !  02/10 ! Currencies considered

  MtGOX      |  4.45 |  5.13 |  2.28 |  3.37 |  5.40 |  8.20 |  21.54 |  58.89 |  26.82 |  23.48 |  50.07 | USD,EUR,GBP,AUD,JPY 
  BTC-e      |  4.65 |  6.30 |  4.74 |  5.75 |  4.51 |  6.55 |   9.72 |  31.84 |  11.67 |  12.51 |  47.04 | USD,EUR,RUR         
  Bitstamp   |  7.73 |  8.30 |  4.07 |  4.93 |  7.59 |  8.48 |  20.65 |  42.79 |  13.50 |  15.06 |  71.86 | USD                 
  BitFinEx   |  3.91 |  4.54 |  3.15 |  3.45 |  3.36 |  5.22 |  21.11 |  66.36 |  11.12 |  12.07 |  41.98 | USD                 
  Bitcoin.DE |  0.35 |  0.33 |  0.35 |  0.51 |  0.27 |  0.31 |   0.61 |   1.30 |   0.37 |   0.47 |   1.54 | EUR                 
  Kraken     |  0.20 |  0.23 |  0.15 |  0.21 |  0.29 |  0.23 |   0.59 |   1.45 |   0.37 |   0.45 |   1.45 | EUR                 
  CampBX     |  0.05 |  0.23 |  0.16 |  0.10 |  0.12 |  0.16 |   0.21 |   0.82 |   0.27 |   0.24 |   0.37 | USD                 
  CaVirtEx   |  0.24 |  0.24 |  0.20 |  0.08 |  0.17 |  0.18 |   0.39 |   1.07 |   0.57 |   0.23 |   0.77 | CAD                 

  SUBTOTAL   | 21.58 | 25.30 | 15.10 | 18.40 | 21.71 | 29.33 |  74.82 | 204.52 |  64.69 |  64.51 | 215.08 |                     

  Huobi      | 15.26 | 28.86 | 26.27 | 24.77 | 18.65 | 19.55 |  39.97 | 131.91 |  77.00 |  64.08 | 134.09 | CNY                 
  OKCoin     | 17.11 | 20.38 | 20.00 | 18.09 | 12.77 | 12.33 |  26.07 |  74.37 |  37.63 |  34.63 |  70.49 | CNY                 
  BTC-China  |  1.17 |  2.31 |  2.21 |  1.70 |  1.33 |  1.54 |   4.09 |  17.66 |   6.86 |   5.75 |  18.23 | CNY                 

  SUBTOTAL   | 33.54 | 51.55 | 48.48 | 44.56 | 32.75 | 33.42 |  70.13 | 223.94 | 121.49 | 104.46 | 222.81 |                     

  TOTAL      | 55.12 | 76.85 | 63.58 | 62.96 | 54.46 | 62.75 | 144.95 | 428.46 | 186.18 | 168.97 | 437.89 |                     



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.

Coinbase is said to use Bitstamp for currency conversion.

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".)

The exchange Crypto-Trade was dropped today from Bitcoinwisdom's charts.  Its volume used to be around 10 BTC/day.

Well, which exchange do you think will be the next MtGOX? Do you recommend that I donate my money to the very shy owners of Bitstamp https://www.bitstamp.net/about_us/ , to the brilliant but anonymous hackers of Bitfinex https://www.bitfinex.com/, to the faceless and stateless Alex[a-z]*s of BTC-e http://www.coindesk.com/btc-e-recent-issues-caused-surge-users/, ... 

It seems that arbitrage trading stopped after today's crash.  Each market seems to be going its own way.

The crash put the markets momentarily at hugely different prices, from 100 USD to 600 USD.  It must have been a great stress test for the arbitrage robots, and they may have made some stupid and costly mistakes.  Programmers now at work?

I can think of at least five ways:

1. They were hacked and tons of their bitcoins were stolen.
2. The police seized a large chunk of their assets as part of crackdown on criminal use of bitcoins.
3. They wasted a fortune buying bitcoins at 10-20% above market.
4. They sold the clients' bitcoins at 100 USD to invest, price rose to 700 and they could not buy them back.
5. They reformatted the hard drive that had the only copy of their private keys.

And there are surely many more.  The imagination of incompetent managers is amazing.

Among the many, many things that MtGOX's press release did not explain:

 * When did the BTC withdrawal bug start happening?
 * If the bug was alway there, why didn't it cause problems years ago?
 * If the bug is recent, why did they replace a validation code that worked by that buggy one?
 * Clients have been complaining for months about the errors. Why wasn't the bug found and fixed before?

They could also have at least stated (even without showing evidence)  the basic numbers of their financial position:

  * how many bitcoins they have in their wallets and how much money they have in the bank;
  * how many bitcoins and how much money they owe to their clients (ie. the sum of balances of all accounts);
  * how many bitcoins and how much money clients have asked to withdraw but have not been allowed to.

The answer to the last question seems to be in the tens of millions of dollars at least.

I take their unwillingness to give these basic numebrs as strong evidence that they are insolvent.

Not clear yet... Bitstamp has recovered but on a very thin volume and not very strong bid support.  Other exchanges are still quite a bit lower than pre-crash levels.  Bitstamp is also higher than Huobi/OKCoin at the nominal exchange rate; it used to be lower. 

Some interesting bits:
* Finally an article that admits Huobi exists, and even that it is the largest exchange in the world.
* They plan to trade on Litecoin, and are keeping an eye on the unmentionable one too.
* They have "over ten thousand" active clients.

You can get that from bitcoinwisdom,com :

Select the 1-day chart of the exchange you want

Place the vertical line of the crosshair cursor over the candle for today

The volume (in BTC) is displayed at the top of the chart after the "V:".

Beware that bitcoinwisdom displays dates and times in your local time zone, even though the sampling intervals are in UTC (~Greenwhich time).  Thus if you live 2 hours west of Greenwhich, bitcoinwisdom whould display the candle's date as "2014-02-09 22:00" (your local time) when in fact the volume and price numbers refer to the day 2014-02-10 UTC, from 00:00:00 UTC to 23:59:59 UTC (i.e. from the date above to 2014-02-10 21:59:59 in your local time).

That would be confusing to everyone who reads about the incident and tries to find it in the charts. 

However it would be nic if bitconwisdom provided a way for the user to change the min price on the vertical scale...

I like the style of bitcoincharts and highly appreciate their "raw data" feature.  However they simply ignore the two largest exchanges in the world -- Huobi and OKCoin -- which account for almost 3/4 of all bitcoin trade, and arguably are the main forces that determine the price of BTC worldwide.

I do not know whether the omission is for some ideological reason, or because those two sites do not provide the data in quite the way bitcoincharts requires.

Anyway, without those two exchanges, the market share data and piecharts provided by bitcoincharts are quite misleading.  By trade volume, BTC-China is still 1/10 of Huobi and 1/6 of OKCoin, for example.