OK so you must be referring to Cavirtex or some other Canadian exchange -- not to Bitstamp (Slovenia?), Bitfinex (Hong Kong), BTC-e (Bulgaria), or LakeBTC (Hong Kong?) -- which, last time I looked, accounted for almost all trade outside China. 

What are the Canadian regulations that apply to the bitcoin trading services of Cavirtex and other Canadian exchanges (apart from common laws, such as fraud, property theft, money laundering, etc.)? (Serious question.)

What country?

There is no regulation that prohibits the exchange owner from stealing the coins of all clients and blaming it on "hackers".  (Serious reply.)

Common property theft laws would apply in the latter case, but they are hard to enforce if the exchange is in a foreign country and the owners are anonymouous,  The laws against insider trading do not even apply, the exchanges are not registered or regulated as markets.

Not sure, it seems that arbitrage traders are very quick; price movements at one exchange are copied over all exchanges within minutes if not seconds.  (They must be fast, else other arbitrage traders will steal their opportunities.)

MtGOX must have had little influence on the mood of Chinese speculators, since most of them could not trade there.

Also the Chinese exchanges look "different" so the Chinese probably feel that "it could not happen here". (Like the US nuclear industry dismissing Chernobyl because "our designs are different".)

MtGOX is sometmes mentioned in the Chinese news, but I haven't seen any mention of Chinese losing money in it (wheras we still see much of that in the West -- e.g. in last week's "so long and thanks for all the coins" message by the Neo & Bee vanished CEO.).  There may have been Chinese among the MtGOX victims, but I doubt that they were significant in number or money.

When MtGOX finally admitted collapse, the BTC price had been on a steady descending trend for almost a month, and that trend has continued unchanged to this day.

That trend may be due to many possible reasons -- the Chinese getting bored with bitcoin speculation, the steady stream of coins mined in China, growing disenchantment with bitcoin' long-term prospects, competition by Litecoin and other altcoins, and so on.  

Whatever its cause, that trend, like almost every movement of the price since last October or earlier, is clearly a Chinese phenomenon copied to the West by arbitrage.

In addition to that trend, the BTC price had a sudden permanent drop by some 100--300 CNY after the first MtGOX announcement on Feb/10 -- but quite likely because Mark claimed that there was a "bug in the protocol", not for any implication about the MtGOX insolvency (which, at that time, was still vehemently denied by its faithful clients).

The second MtGOX announcement on Feb/20, and its final collapse a while later, did not seem to have had any permanent effect on the price in China, and therefore on the price everywhere else.  

In addition to that trend, the only significant price events with permanent effect were the mysterious jump upwards by ~700 CNY on Mar/03, and the net drop by ~300 CNY on Mar/27 after the Caixin leak.  There was a temporary "bump" during the New Year holidays Jan/29-Feb/06 (when banks were closed and volume was minimal), and another one on Apr/02--Apr/06 (when people were still wondering whether the bank part of the Caixin leak was real).  The persistence of the latter bump is not clear yet.

In summary, I do not think that MtGOX's collapse had a significant influence on the BTC price since late December.  China still defines the price, and they did not care much about MtGOX.  For that reason, I cannot guess what will happen to the price if and when the Chinese market closes.

What will happen next to the price?

In spite of the reassuring words by that PBoC official (who, if I understood correctly, did not mention the ban), it seems fairly certain that the bank accounts of the Chinese exchanges will be blocked in a week or two at most.  Presumably, most of their clients will sell their coins and take the cash out before that time

With such pressure to sell,  the price is more likely to go down than up.  Arbitragers will buy the cheap coins dumped by the Chinese and imemdiately sell them on the Western exchanges, thus bringing the price down here too. 

I cannot guess what will be the price when China is finally over, nor what will happen after that.

I suppose that one should be holding money rather than crypto when the price is more likely to go down than up.
And vice-versa if versa-vice.

You are just doing your part. In day trading, some people must lose so that others can profit. 

All should be able to liquidate, but only after 6 months.  That would not be a problem if the backing asset paid dividends or was expected to increase in value.  It is quite risky for bitcoin (but that was not so clear in September).  

The fund has some advantages over buying the bitcoins directly: the investor does not have to deal with the exchanges, nor worry about hackers stealing his coins; and he can use certain retirement funds that he cannot use to buy bitcoins with.  The main disadvantage is that the investor cannot sell the bitcoins during those 6 months, neither to profit from price spikes nor to cut losses in a downtrend.

EDIT: it also has the disadvantage of entry, exit, and maintenance fees.

The company that manages the fund makes a profit from those fees, whether the BTC price goes up or down. (They could make additional profit in other ways, some less honest than others.) The investors make a profit only if the price goes up between their entry and exit times.

Well, we just had a small preview of what would happen to the price in that case.  (And their exchanges may still close by Apr/18, and the price may still go back to where it was aiming to.)

Isn't amazing how much damage they can do with volume that is 95% fake? 

There is a thread monitoring that fund: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=337486.0

It seems that the earliest investors, who joined in September, can now liquidate. The shares are nominally worth 0.1 BTC at the current BTC/USD price; so those investors paid ~13 USD/share and may liquidate now at ~45 USD/share, a nice profit.

On the other hand, investors who bought in late November paid up to 110 USD for shares that are now worth ~45 USD.  I suppose that they will be allowed to liquidate only in June; their gain or loss will be determined by the BTC price at that date.

From the table in that thread, I computed that the total money invested in the fund (minus the amount liquidated) must be now a few million USD more than the total nominal value of all extant shares (worth ~40 USD each as of yesterday).  If that computation is correct, the average gain among all investors, if they all liquidated today, would be a bit negative.  The averag loss of course will be larger if the BTC price falls further below 40 USD.

Perhaps people (including the Chinese) are reading too much into that PBoC official's statement.  The PBoC is only one of the agencies that authored the december decrees, and it may be that the bank closure order was requested by other agencies.

As of a month ago, the exchanges were sufficiently "fenced" to prevent undesirable flow of money.  Chinese nationals could deposit CNY into the exchanges, trade them for BTC, export the BTC, and sell them abroad. 

Yet, from the PBoC point of view, that was not "capital export".  The CNY merely changed hands among Chinese nationals. Neither the CNY nor any material good left the country, only "worthless" virtual money did.    The dollars that the Chinese traders got in the foreign exchanges did not come from China; they were taken from foreign traders, swapped for those worthless coins.  Since that operation did not harm China's  economy or their monetary policy, the PBoC had no reason to prevent it.  Ditto for the reverse operation.

However, the exchanges could still be used for things that other agencies would not like at all.  A person or entity X could pay some other Y in bitcoins, that Y would then convert into CNY by selling at the exchange.  The government would see that Y withdrew the cash, but could not easily tell whether it was the result of smart trading or of a bitcoin payment. (Note that, in any case, the CNY would come from other unwary Chinese traders at the exchange.)

This channel could be used for all sorts of illegal and undesirable activities - tax evasion, bribing, drug traffic, money laundering, paying subversives and spies, etc..

So, I think it is possible that it was the police and national security agencies that asked the PBoC to block the bank accounts. That may perhaps explain the lack of official statements by the PBoC, as well as the ban itself.

Recently someone mentioned that OKCoin was introducing some alternative deposit method.  Could that be the cause of the bounce?  Didi it start at OKCoin or at Huobi?

Adding the "Net Assets" as of  14-Nov-13 (21.8 M$) and the "Estimated New Investment" column of the table since that date, I get 54.49 M$ on 10-Apr-14, which is ~13 M$ more than the "Net Assets" of the latter date.  Does that mean that the current investors as a whole have lost money?  (Of course those who invested  before 14-Nov-13 are still positive)

A couple of months ago they started using some proxy/filter service for the images.  It seems to have a short timeout so that my images often appear truncated in my posts.  There is a thread about it in the "Meta" sub-forum.  I have complained there but the response has been "duhhhh".

Weird. Huobi is showing current price > 2300 but all transactions are below 2250.
My mistake, sorry

I'd better be quiet for now.  (And no Slumber prediction today, obviously.)

But maybe it is worth reminding people that it is the Chinese who are dumping (or should be); the dumps on BTC-e and Bitstamp are only reactions to the Chinese dumps and/or arbitrage from China,  Therefore price MAY continue to fall, at some unknown pace and to some unknown level until the Chinese situation stops getting worse; that is, until all the bank accounts of the exchanges are closed, on Apr/18 perhaps. 

It seems that the last time Bitstamp was this low was around  November 13, 2013.

Readers of /The History of Bitcoin/ may now skip the /Mainland China/ chapter.

Maybe I am wrong, but I recall that their plan was to offer bank-like savings accounts combining euros and bitcoins in some way.

If they were planning to take euros from clients, shouldn't they fall in the scope of the bank regulations?  One cannot evade regulations simply by using a different name for the business....

Actually it is only ONE bank in Australia; and AFAIK there are no exchanges with significant volume in Australia, are there?

Perhaps I picked the wrong time to post that, sorry.  

However, sweet bogus theories cannot be good for anyone.  Investors should be aware of the limitations (to put it mildly) of such extrapolations.  

For Enron, OGX, MtGOX, and many other examples like Worldcom, the trends eventually changed because of external events that obviously could not be predicted by looking at the price history.

Same with Bitcoin.  The major rallies and crashes were not generated by some mathematical property of bitcoin or of its price; they had obvious external causes whose timing and effect could not be predicted.   One cannot assume that there will be a major negative event and a major positive one every so many months, or that they will affect the price always by X% over the next Y days/weeks/years.

Exponential growth can be due to "contagion" (including media attention), re-investment of profits into production capacity, etc.

There are some patterns in price charts that have a logical explanation, like the bounceback after an isolated "whale" sale or buy.   Also rallies and crashes are usually followed by a few large oscillations until the price stabilizes, and in the absence of major external  the price remains stable.  In each of these cases, the market itself is reacting, without external inputs, to a singe major external event isolated in time.  But it is not reasonable to expect that those external events will follow some pattern, too.

Since December, bitcoin has been in a phase of persistent gradual decline combined with some sudden negative steps, and a couple of positive ones.  Each of these features has external causes.  Some are known, some are less clear (such as the March/03 jump and the persistent decline).    To guess what the price will do next requires guessing whether the external cause of the decline will continue, and what other events will happen next.

EDIT: exponential growth is not endogenous but exogenous of course.