I understand that eBay will allow buy/sell cryptocoins ads, but will not use Bitcoin themselves.

How much will it cost to place an ad in that section?

That Classified Ads section will probably be a very slow and very inefficient cryptocoin exchange.  

Is there trade in other commodities going through eBay?

[edited for typos]

This thread (Wall Observer...) has now 82265 messages.  Is there any other thread with 1/10 of this volume?

Clearly this thread is THE bitcoin forum.  All the other threads are just footnotes. 

Please note: the second set of statements is not what I think of bitcoin, but what I understand that many bitcoiners think of it.

Glad to know that there still are bitcoiners who are true and pure of heart. 

Sorry for not being clear. "Worth it" means "you need to pay for something, and using bitcoin is cheaper/faster/safer than any other method."  Not as speculative investment.


Perhaps Dogecoin is (or will be) spoiled by speculators too, but I have seen "official" sites that explicitly discourage hoarding.  My feeling is that the Dogecoin community is nowere as obsessed about price as bitcoiners seem to be.

I hope everyone noticed the irony in that "petition".


Perhaps because Dogecoin is what Bitcoin should have been?

There are a number of economic reasons that make me skeptical about Bitcoin's chances of success.  But there is one reason that makes me wary of it: the fact that its is being "marketed" more as an investment than a payment system.

Here is what a true Bitcoin believer, pure of heart, should be saying:

  * Our goal is cheap, easy, unrestricted international payments;
  * We will succeed if everybody uses uses crypto, we will fail if no one uses it;
  * Other cryptocoins are welcome and we hope they prosper.
  * Our hope is that SOME crypto will succeed; it doesn't have to be Bitcoin.
  * We do not know how much a Bitcoin will be worth, and it does not matter.
  * However, the value of a cryptocoin should be as stable as the dollar's value is now.
  * The sooner the price stabilizes, the better.
  * Hoarding or speculating with cryptocoins is evil as it defeats those goals.
  * Large cryptocoin-based financial institutions are just as evil as dollar-based ones.
  * Our priority is to convince merchants to accept crypto as payment method.
  * People should change dollars for crypto only if and when it is is clearly worth it.

Instead, here is what Bitcoin enthusiasts seem to be saying, here and in other forums:

  * Our goal is to get rich.
  * We will succeed if Bitcoin's value rises to the Moon, fail if it goes down to cents.
  * Other cryptocoins are unwelcome competition and we must speak out against them.
  * Our hope is that BITCOIN succeeds, we will be mad if some other crypto crushes it.
  * One Bitcoin must be, and surely will be, worth at least 1000 USD.
  * The price should keep rising in the long run so that Bitcoin hoarders can have a steady income.
  * Large price oscillations are good now because one can make money or grab more Bitcoins.
  * Hoarding and speculating with Bitcoins is what the thing is all about.
  * Large cryptocoin-based institutions are welcome because they will want to push the price up.
  * Our priority is to convince everybody to change all their dollars for Bitcoins and hold them fast.
  * People should pay for things and services with Bitcoins even if it is not worth it.

That unfortunatey is the mindset that fuels bubbles and Ponzi schemes... 

Huobi's volume is VERY low today (Sunday jan/19 UTC).  Presumably the Chinese New Year holidays have started?

There was no such drop in previous Sundays, nor during the Christmas/Jan 1 holidays. (I suppose that Chinese employees generally don't have weekends off, do they?)

Curiously OKCoin's volume does not seem to be affected by this drop, or by Sundays in general. But it was very low from Fri Dec/20 to Tue Jan/02 UTC, inclusive. 

Both exchanges show reduced activity in the same hour rage every day, from ~17:00 to ~22:00 UTC that corresponds to ~02:00 to ~07:00 am in Beijing, I believe.  However Huobi's volume is VERY low in that interval, while OKCoin only drops by ~50%.

Are those drops due to exchange-specific events (e.g. problems with banks), or to different holidays and work hours by different user populations?

Or are they due to different volume-faking robots?   

Hm, that may be the problem... The 3 second timeout seems too short for an internet transfer of up to 3 MB.

My images are about 100-200 kB at most.  I use the department's HTTP server that has to fetch the file from the department's NFS and then send it out through the internet connection shared by the whole university.  It is a very broad connection that is usually fast enough, but sometimes it does take a few seconds to complete.

I presume that there may be delays also at the proxy's end if it gets too many image requests at the same time.  This forum must have thousands of readers, the average page has dozens of images, the proxy may be used by many other services...

The broken/truncated image problem is VERY common and is not specific to my images. (The creator of that thread posts automatically generated charts every hour.  After the proxy was enabled sometimes his chats are broken, rather randomly. )

But the problem is not reproducible, and the same image may be truncated at different places, or not at all, when the page is refreshed.

In any case, if the proxy fails it is better to display "invalid image" than a truncated image.  The latter confuses readers, e.g. if the plot shows but the labels at bottom are cut off.
 

 

Another random plot:



This plot shows the mean yearly rate of increase for the USD price of 1 BTC at Bitstamp since various past times to the present (specifically, to about jan/17/2014 23:00 UTC).

For example, the graph reads ~1000 around oct/17/2013.  It means that the average price increase from that date to the present is equivalent to 1000-fold (9,990% increase) per year.  More specifically, if we compare the price at that date (138.38 USD) and the price at jan/17/2014 (795.89) and extrapolate that rate of growth to one full year, we would get ~1000 times the starting price -- that is, ~795,000 USD by jan/17/2015.

On the other hand, the graph reads ~0.1 at about nov/30/2013.  It means that between that date and jan/17 the price fell to such an extent (from ~1100 to ~795) that, extrapolated to one year, would give a factor of ~1/10 (a 90% decrease); namely, a prediction of ~79,5 USD/BTC by  jan/17/2015.

If we look instead at the change from ~jan/06 to ~jan/17/2014, we get a factor of ~0.001, that is, a prediction of 0,795 USD/BTC by jan/17/2015

Finally, the graph reads 1 at about nov/24/2013.  It means that the price at that date was the same as it is now, i.e. the rate of (non-)increase since then was 0% per year.

Presently I believe that this sort of analysis is quite useless.  The market does not seem to care for past prices, presumably because experienced traders believe that other experienced traders do not care for them, and so on recursively.  

The graph seems to justify this indifference.  Logically, the price at nov/29 should be more relevant than that of oct/17.  But, depending on the time span considered, the analysis may yield from very positive to very negative predictions.  Which time span is the right one to use?

As other have noted, Saturday 01/18 UTC was a slow day: volume down ~35% China, ~50% outside China.

On that day China apparently got ~75% of all the BTC trade volume. BTC-China's share share of it is small and dwindling.

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


  EXCHANGE     !  01/15 !  01/16 !  01/17 ! 01/18 ! Currencies considered

  Bitstamp     |  12.27 |   8.22 |  17.11 |  5.49 | USD
  BTC-e        |   9.79 |   7.22 |  12.82 |  7.22 | USD
  MtGOX        |   7.54 |   5.91 |  12.23 |  6.20 | USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, JPY
  BitFinEx     |   7.17 |   3.68 |  11.47 |  3.81 | USD
  Kraken       |   0.35 |   0.29 |   0.68 |  0.28 | EUR
  Bitcoin.DE   |   0.51 |   0.38 |   0.61 |  0.27 | EUR
  CaVirtEx     |   0.45 |   0.26 |   0.31 |  0.01 | CAD
  CampBX       |   0.16 |   0.12 |   0.16 |  0.04 | USD
  Crypto-Trade |    .   |   0.01 |   0.01 |   .   | USD

  SUBTOTAL     |  38.24 |  26.09 |  55.40 | 23.32 |

  Huobi        |  91.40 |  67.37 |  74.21 | 43.60 | CNY
  OKCoin       |  22.24 |  24.82 |  32.28 | 25.31 | CNY
  BTC-China    |   5.58 |   3.54 |   4.55 |  1.77 | CNY

  SUBTOTAL     | 119.22 |  95.73 | 111.04 | 70.68 |

  TOTAL        | 157.46 | 121.82 | 166.44 | 94.00 |



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

For each exchange, the numbers include only the trade volume to/from the currencies listed in the rightmost column.  They do not include trade between BTC and other cryptocoins such as LiteCoin.

The MtGOX volume now includes (retroactively), besides the trades to/from USD, also to/from GBP, AUD (both relatively small), EUR, and JPY (around 1 kBTC each).  The JPY volume was obtained from bitcoincharts.com.

The Coinbase volume is not available at Bitcoinwisdom.

Dates on the header line have been corrected so that now they are UTC rather than Brazilian local time (which is what Bitcoinwisdom uses). Specifically, "01/15" now means "from 01/15 00:00:00 UTC to 01/15 23:59:59 UTC". On previous posts the same column was labeled "01/14" meaning "01/14 22:00:00 to 01/15 21:59:59 BRST".

USD or CNY?

Some of the plots I have posted here (as PNG files) appear truncated on this site.  Like this one

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg4556363#msg4556363

https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ic.unicamp.br%2F~stolfi%2Ftemp%2Fworldcomm-closing-price-log-extrap.png&t=536&c=WA3sNDQidG_reA

However they are OK when fetched directly:

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/temp/worldcomm-closing-price-log-extrap.png

Is there an image size limit?  Could it be a server speed problem?

In terms of daily volume, it seems the Western exchanges have recovered some gounds relative to China.

Or at least they have learned how to fake volume too  .

In the case of traditional corporations, external auditors and government bodies like the US SEC try to ensure that production and sales figures have not been inflated to mislead investors.  Unfortunately there are no controls whatsoever for cryptocoin exchanges (and some insist that any such controls would defeat the purpose of the initiative).

In 2011 I spent many hours typing and plotting the temperature, pressure, and water level data for the Fukushima reactors that were released by TEPCO several times a day.  After a few months TEPCO finally admitted that the fuel had melted its way through the bottom of the reactor vessels, so that those numbers were totally meaningless.

I suspect that I will soon have the same disappointment about the bitcoin market volume data... 

Volume of BTC trade to/from USD and other national currencies (kBTC):


  EXCHANGE    !  01/14 !  01/15 !  01/16

  Bitstamp    |  12.27 |   8.22 |  17.11
  BTC-e       |   9.79 |   7.22 |  12.82
  MtGOX       |   7.19 |   5.49 |  11.47
  BitFinEx    |   7.17 |   3.68 |  11.47
  Bitcoin.DE  |   0.51 |   0.38 |   0.61
  CaVirtEx    |   0.45 |   0.26 |   0.31
  Kraken      |   0.35 |   0.29 |   0.68
  CampBX      |   0.16 |   0.12 |   0.16
  CryptoTrade |    .   |    .   |    . 

  SUBTOTAL    |  37.89 |  25.66 |  54.63

  Huobi       |  91.40 |  67.37 |  74.21
  OKCoin      |  22.24 |  24.82 |  32.28
  BTC-China   |   5.58 |   3.54 |   4.55

  SUBTOTAL    | 119.22 |  95.73 | 111.04

  TOTAL       | 157.11 | 121.39 | 165.67
 


Numbers were collected by hand from the Bitcoinwisdom 1-day charts, may be wrong. 

They do not incluce trade between BTC and other cryptocoins such as LiteCoin.

MtGOX volumes in previous posts failed to count BTC/EUR and BTC/GBP trade, they have been corrected now (01/14 6.4 --> 7.19 kBTC, 01/15 4.7 --> 5.49 kBTC).

Huobi's volume for 01/15 was wrong too and has been corrected (70.2 --> 67.37 kBTC).

The Coinbase volume is not available at Bitcoinwisdom.

Perhaps I did not look in the right places, but the sources above do not even list Huobi or OKCoin.  (Rather strange since these two Chinese exchanges seem to have about 80% of the total trade in BTC.)

Is there a place where one can download historical trade data (price and volume, daily or otherwise) for those two exchanges, even if only for the last month or so? 

I could use their APIs (Huobi at least has one), but where do I find a basic script to copy/hack?

Thank you very much.

I mean in general, there is an obvious correlation between price changes and volume in any market, isn't there?  For example.:



So, which is the chicken, and which is the egg?   

(I supose that for this question one must look at the data from Huobi and OKCoin, since they may have 80% of the total trade volume and appear to be the main price setters.)

O Market Pundits: is the volume low because the price is stable, or is the price stable because the volume is low?

MtGOX has a lot of transactions of 0.01 BTC that bounce randomly in the gap ("spread") between the lowest ask and the highest bid.  Here is a short sample, copied earlier today from the Bitcoinwisdom page:



The times are UTC.

The blue dots are all the transactions of exactly 0.01 BTC in those ~10 minutes.  There are 155 transactions, or about 15 per minute, adding to 1.55 BTC.  At this rate, they will add up to 216 BTC per day.

The red dots are all the other transactions.  The dot's area (above a certain minumum area) is proportional to the transaction's volume; the total volume is ~18 BTC, largest ones are about 2 BTC each.

I presume that those "ping-pong" transactions are generated by the exchange itself.  I wonder what could be their purpose? To make the spread visible? To avoid empty intervals in the charts?

I suppose  that the current format for the order book summary is somewhat standard, but I think that it would be more useful if it were provided in "reverse" form.

Currently, it shows how much bid/ask volume there is down/up to certain "round" prices, multiples of a fixed step, such as 4850, 4900, 4950, 5000, ....

The proposed alternative is to show what price would be reached by selling/buying certain "round" amounts of BTC: 10, 20, 50 100, 200, 500, 1000...

That is, this "reverse" order book summary would look like

    ...
    4867 100
    4830 50
    4815 20
    4807 10

4803.22

    4795 10
    4788 20
    4772 50
    4721 100
    ...


or with the columns reversed, like this:


    ...
    100 4867
     50 4830
     20 4815
     10 4807

4803.22

     10 4795
     20 4788
     50 4772
    100 4721
    ...


It may be useful also to have those prices plotted on the main chart as alternative indicators ("order book altitude contours") instead of the running averages).

It would have to be an option, I suppose.

What do you think?

The 247 million indonesians probably care.