"Rare" does not imply "high demand".

BTC-China is now at 3400 RMB, back at the Nov/18 level, before the First November Bubble.
It lost more than 50% since the Nov/30 peak (7600 RMB)

Today BTC-China fell 21%, bitstamp fell 21%, MtGox only 13% (and started out 40 USD higher than bitstamp).

Perhaps they choose the wrong branch when the Universe forked some time ago.

He he.

To me it seems that Gox is as dead as a Norwegian parrot.   No serious trade there, just a bunch of stubborn sellers who cannot bear the thought of telling their wives what they did with the kids' college money, and a bunch of speculators that bid at price minus 50 to catch the occasional fresh fool and promptly retreat when they see the Ask Mountain coming down their way.

Actually it shows how the bids and asks charts changed over the last 1 hour, every few minutes.

The most recent situation is at front.

You can see here, for example, that someone had ~900 BTC for sale at 850 USD, but cancelled the offer at ~14:10.

A few minutes later another sell offer of ~100 BTC at 845 USD was cancelled.

Over the last half-hour, someone who was offering 50-100 BTC for sale at 880 USD gradually lowered the ask price to 850 USD.

At ~14:15 someone else cancelled a bid to buy ~700 BTC at 800 USD.

And that is pretty much what happened at Mt Gox during that hour.  

The "current price" oscillated between 840 USD and 810 USD but on very small transactions.
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Police here in Brazil just busted TelexFree, a huge pyramid scheme that sold crappy Skype-like phone credits.  Tens of millions used all their savings and borrowed money to get in before it collapsed and the organizers were jailed.  Victims who lost everything are still begging the courts to let them continue trading.

Yes, Bitcoin may have a future here.  8-(

BTC-China fell from 5320 to 5060, and is back to the low price of 18 hours ago.  Yet Bitstamp and Mt.Gox are stuck at the hight of a few hours ago.  If they had followed China, Bitstamp should be at 820 USD (not 850) and Mt.Gox should be at 860 USD (not 900).

Bitstamp and Mt.Gox seem to be quite dead.  Are their transactions real, or is there some manipulation going on?

Are there any published statistics on Bitpay transactions, such as country-to-country matrix, evolution through time, etc?

Well, then, why do people worry so much about the economy?  We can just all change our perception and say that the dollar is worth a thousand euros, and problem is solved.  And and if people who own basebal cards agree to refuse to sell them for less than a quintillion dollars then they can buy the world with one card.

So the guy did no productive work, but just by sitting on his Bitcoins he got so fabulously wealthy that he can buy the US Gross National Product wth only half his wallet.

Don't you feel that there must be something wrong with this scenario?

Being rich means that you own a disproportionate slice of the world's real wealth. You cannot increase your slice without reducing that of someone else.

The Bitcoin cabal cannot force people to use Bitcoin to buy things or services.  If doing so means giving their slice of the world to the Bitcoin cabal, people will use some other currency.

Large Bitcoin holders may do that and of course they will want their "reborn Bitcoin" to remain the dominant currency.  But why would the rest of the rest world follow suit?  People who buy digital currencies only for trade will not care about tradition or the welfare of bitcoiners; they will consider any currency that the merchant is willing to accept, and choose the one that has the smallest spread, simpler/faster protocol, was recommended by Oprah, etc.

It is also possible that a big bank or a consortium of merchants (say Microsoft, Apple, Walmart, Virgin, ...) will launch their own crypto currency iCoin, initially offering a 5% discount for purchases made with it. Of couse they will start off with a large stash of pre-mined iCoins.  Why is this unlikely to happen?

My interpretation of those charts:

1. The people who believe that a bitcoin will be worth a zillion in a few years are not in those charts.  They are holding all the bitcoins they have, and whenever they can get or borrow any more money, they immediately buy bitcoins at the current ask price.  Since we do not see much of the latter happening, it means that the believers that remain have largely run out of money.

2. The people who have posted offers to sell (the red "ask" mountain at right) are

   2a. people who bought bitcoins at 900-1200 USD.  They are waiting for the price to return to the same level, so that they can get out without losing money.  Many will probably hold their offers at those levels even if the  price falls off the bottom, because they would ratehr keep hoping for the impossible rather than admit their mistake.  Only very reluctantly they will lower their ask price and accept a loss.   On the other hand, if the price ever returns to the 900-1200 range, the smarter ones will sell out and quit.

   2b. miners and other people people who bought coins at much lower price, and bet that the price still may get up to the 900-1000 range.  They are likely to profit even if they sell well below that, but will try for that level only for greed.  They are likely to lower or raise their ask price as the price moves, and will sell as  the chances of higher prices seem more remote.

3. Most of the people who have posted offers to buy below the current price (the green "bid" mountain at left) do not believe that the price will get much higher than that.  They  are assuming that if the current price is (say) 900 USD, then it will probably remain in the 850-950 range for a while.   So they offer to buy at (say) 850 and wait for the occasional customer who "must" sell a bunch of bitcoins at any price.   Then they immediately post an offer to sell those same bitcoins at (say) 900-950, and wait for the random guy who "must" buy bitcoins at any price.  By repeating this move they could make 5% profit on their capital, several times a week.   However, this strategy only works if they keep their offers to sell at the front of the "ask" queue.  So they will watch the market carefully, and if they see a large number of sellers lowering their ask prices to (say) the 850-950 range, they will immediately lower their bids do buy to 750-850 range.  

Thus:

  A. The mountain of sell offers asking 900-1200 USD cannot be taken as an indication that the market has faith in bitcoin;

  B. The mountain of buy offers which is always 50-100 USD below the current price is not a buffer against a massive drop in ask prices, because it will recede with it.

Does this make sense?

I have seen some pie charts claiming that the market is split roughly equally among BTC-China, Mt.Gox, Bitstamp.  However, by these charts
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg2zigHourlyztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv
the traded volume (say, per hour) at BTC-China is almost 10 times larger than either of the other two.

What is the truth?

My guess:

Imagine that the cumulative bid and ask plots are the sides of a valley. (Turn that part of the chart 90 degrees counter-clockwise)  Fill the valley gradually with water. At each level of the water, mark the midpoint between the left and right banks.

That plot would be read as follows: suppose that we pair up the highest bids with the lowest offers, at a price that halfway both.  As you do that, record the current price on one axis, and the total amount traded so far on the other axis,

Makes sense?

Trading volume seems to be decreasing (15,000 BTC daily at MtGox/USD and Bitstamp/USD) , and most of it seems to be speculative rather than commercial.

At MtGox the price seems to be jumping up and down by 10 USD, more than once per minute, but on very small volume; while most bid/ask orders are still.  Is that attempts to drive the price across the bid/ask gap? Or to "jog" it so that the charts are not all red?

Thanks!

Why would they do it that piecewise, rather than all at once?


I don't know.

Suppose that instead of bitcoins he had the money deposited as Swiss francs in a Swiss bank account, and the FBI got hold of the bank account number and password.  Could they just transfer the francs to another account in the same bank and auction them, or convert them to USD?

Or suppose that he had placed a large bet on the outcome of World Soccer Cup 2018.  Would the FBI auction his betting ticket?

Wouldn't there be bureaucratic hurdles in that?  Have there been auctions of similarly immaterial property before? (Say, author rights, real estate on the Moon, club membership rights, etc?)

I wonder how they will do it, exactly? They will need the current owners' private keys, right?

I do believe bitcoin is technically sound and I do understand the value of bitcoin if it worked in practice as its proponents hope.

However I do not believe that it will work, for economic reasons, not technical ones.  These objections have been made by many, and I have not seen them answered.