In case people missed:

One interesting implication of that chart is that FDR + Bush = Hitler + Stalin

What is the point of my "Chinese Slumber Method" predictions?

I do believe that the price of bitcoin is basically unpredictable, apart from it following the "geometric Brownian" model with variance modulated by trade volume.  That is, the market does not care about past prices, only about the current price; hence it has no "trends" based on the price itself.

However, I thought that there may be underlying trends that persist for several days, due to "external" variables such as the amount of money and bitcoins in the exchange, the exit of old investors and recruitment of new ones, and persistent trader sentiment modified by news and price evolution.  I had the hunch that those trends would be best seen by considering the price at Huobi at some fixed time in the early morning.

Why Huobi?  First, until recently it was the largest exchange by volume, and thus more likely to influence other exchanges than be influenced by them.   Second, it is a simple market: one product (BTC), one currency (Yuan), input and output of currency only through Chinese banks, and a clientele largely confined to China and so presumably more uniform that that of other exchanges.  Third, because its clieants all but stopped trading at small hours of the night.

Why look at Huobi's price in the early morning?  Because, looking at the charts, it seemed to me that the price at those times followed simple trends, over several days, whereas the price during the day often deviated from such trends.  Asa  possible explanation, I though that perhaps many traders tried to return to their preferred BTC:CNY positions before going to bed, after having deviated from those positions during the day; and that somehow  brought the price back to some "natural price" determined by those hypothetical exeternal variables.

The daily predictions are a crude attempt to verify this impresion.  I choose 19:00--19:59 UTC (03:00-03:59 China time) as the sampling hour ("Slumber Time"), since volume was minimum around that hour.  I picked a threshold volume at that hour (500 BTC at first, then 0.5% of the total daily volume) to exclude data points when trade continued well into the night (the "Abertosaur" points).  Again by looking at the charts, it seemed to me that, on those "long days", the price often deviated from the trend line even at slumber time.  Moreover, breaks in the trend line seeemed to occur mostly on those days.  Then I tried to fit simple trend formulas to strings of consecutive "good" data points (the "Glyptodons"); either continuing across the bad ones, or breaking at them.

For trends spanning a few days, it does not make much difference to work in linear or log scale.  The general trend formula I use is the shifted exponential P(d) = A + B*Q**(d-d0), where A, B and Q are parameters to be determined, d is the day of the month, and d0 an arbitrary starting day.   That formula can be used when there are at least three data points; the value of Q can be estimated from the price differences between consecutive days, and then A and B can be fitted by the least squares method.   A special limiting case of that formula is the straight line P(d) = A + B*(d-d0).  The justification for that formula is that  it is the expected behavior of many simple sistems, such as a reservoir where the input flow is constant and the output flow is proportional  to the water level.  (Think of new investors joining, and traders becoming discouraged and leaving, for example.)

This approach is not very "scientific" of course.  A more serious analysis of the idea should, for starters, use a weighted average of the prices and volumes during the night, say from 18:00 to 20:59 UTC.   Instead of classifying the data points into "good" and "bad" by an arbitrary threshold, one should map the slumber-time volume to a numeric "slumber weight", 1.00 for days of near-zero volume and tending gradually to 0.00 as the volume increases beyond that threshold. Then one should use weighted least squares to fit the trend lines, and dynamic programming to choose the most likely breaks.   However, I don't know enough statistics to determine whether the trends obtained by such a complicated process are statistically significant or not.

Anyway, it does not seem to be worth going to all that trouble, considering that Huobi may goxify at any moment... 

Total trade volume today (Mon Mar/10 00:00--23:59 UTC) in the exchnges that I monitor was ~251 kBTC, which is 7% less than yesterday's and 55% less than last Monday's.

Trade volume outside China increased  34% over yesterday (from 25 to 33 kBTC).  The leaders are still Bitstamp (13.4 kBTC), Bitfinex (11.6) and BTC-e (7.16).

Trade volume in China decreased 11%. OKCoin retains its advantage over Huobi (55% of the Chinese volume against 44%).

China's slice of the total volume fell from 91% to 87%.

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

EDIT: Volumes of Huobi and OKCoin were swapped.


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

  Bitstamp   |  64.91 |  28.03 |  12.72 |  10.40 |  21.45 |   9.70 |   9.12 |  13.40 | USD                  
  BitFinEx   |  50.92 |  25.03 |   8.38 |   7.06 |  17.23 |  10.97 |   8.29 |  11.60 | USD                  
  BTC-e      |  41.71 |  28.83 |  11.19 |   5.69 |  13.54 |   8.71 |   6.52 |   7.16 | USD,EUR,RUR          
  Kraken     |   2.82 |   1.81 |   0.87 |   0.71 |   1.20 |   0.55 |   0.64 |   0.57 | EUR                  
  Bitcoin.DE |   1.34 |   1.02 |   0.40 |   0.34 |   0.38 |   0.31 |   0.20 |   0.39 | EUR                  
  CaVirtEx   |   0.55 |   0.33 |   0.22 |   0.22 |   0.24 |   0.12 |   0.15 |   0.13 | CAD                  
  CampBX     |   0.28 |   0.14 |   0.04 |   0.03 |   0.07 |   0.03 |   0.02 |   0.05 | USD                  

  SUBTOTAL   | 162.53 |  85.19 |  33.82 |  24.45 |  54.11 |  30.39 |  24.94 |  33.30 |                      

  OKCoin     | 126.48 | 137.35 | 286.05 | 139.37 | 109.70 | 146.46 | 136.24 | 119.00 | CNY                  
  Huobi      | 253.71 | 268.47 | 196.00 |  92.40 |  96.37 | 119.46 | 103.51 |  95.10 | CNY                  
  BTC-China  |  16.59 |  15.36 |   8.04 |   5.58 |   4.87 |   5.08 |   4.24 |   3.34 | CNY                  
  Bter       |   0.67 |   0.64 |   0.31 |   0.32 |   0.32 |   0.28 |   0.21 |   0.27 | CNY                  

  SUBTOTAL   | 397.45 | 421.82 | 490.40 | 237.67 | 211.26 | 271.28 | 244.20 | 217.71 |                      

  TOTAL      | 559.98 | 507.01 | 524.22 | 262.12 | 265.37 | 301.67 | 269.14 | 251.01 |                      


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".)

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Tuesday Mar/11

Two predictions for today:

Predictions valid for: Tuesday 2014-03-11, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)

Huobi's predicted price for bulls: 4073 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price for bulls: 679 USD.

Huobi's predicted price for bears: 3597 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price for bears: 600 USD.

Huobi

The red and green strokes are actual Huobi hourly prices.  The current predictions are the rightmost magenta squares.  The blue square is the last prediction (see below), and the light blue-gray squares are the previous ones.  The orange and grey dots are the Slumber Points, the mean Huobi prices at 19:00 UTC every day.  Each point is a Glyptodon if the hourly volume V_h for 19:00--19:59 UTC is less than 0.005 times the daily volume V_d 00:00--23:59 UTC; and is an Albertosaurus otherwise. The grey lines are trends fitted a posteriori to the Glyptodon Points. The orange lines are the trends that were assumed for the predictions. The Germanodactyl and Ophtalmosaurus indicate which direction is up and which is down, respectively.

By the arbitrary criterion I have been using, today was defintely an Albertosaurus (V_h/V_d = 682/95100 = 0.00717 > 0.005).  However, volume in the preceding hour 18:00--18:59 (02:00--02:59) was only 274 BTC, so it should have been a Glyptodon.

Anyway, since by the rules today's point is not a valid datum, we again have no clear trend.  In order to fill what would otherwise be a huge blank space on the forum's page, I considered two straight-line trends p(d) = A+B*(d-d0), where d is the day of the month: the least-squares line fitted to the last five Glyptodons (Mar/04--06,08--09; A = 4022.56, B = -60.63, d0 = 4), and the traight line through the last two (Mar/08--09; A = 3668, B = +135, d0 = 8 ).

Bitstamp

The red and green strokes are actual Bitstamp hourly prices.  The dots, dinosaurs, mammals, lines, and magenta squares are Huobi's Slumber Points, dinosaurs, mammals, trends, and new predictions, scaled by the currency conversion factor R (6.40 for Feb/07--09, 6.00 since Mar/04, and 6.12 for all other dates).

Checking the previous prediction

Since today was an Albertosaurus, the prediction is officially void.  But, just for the curious:

Prediction was posted on: Monday 2014-03-10, 01:47 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Monday 2014-03-10, 19:00--19:59 UTC

Huobi's predicted price: 3938 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 3784 CNY
Error: 154 CNY (~26 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 656 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 619 USD
Error: 37 USD

NOTE: These predictions are guaranteed to be correct only in some parallel universes.  Be sure you choose the right one.

EDIT: fixed a "d0 = 8 )" that accidentally turned into a "d0 = "

It occurred to me that the most remarkable thing that the Colonies did in 1776, that set them apart from many other revolutions, was that they not only implemented their ideal kind of government, but took care to write clear documentation for it. 

Thanks for taking the time to look into it.  Well, those two hours display as "0" anyway.

If it is an octal/decimal problem, it may occur in a string-to-integer conversion function rather than in the compiler.  I found this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/850341/how-do-i-work-around-javascripts-parseint-octal-behavior

A complaint from another thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg5621248#msg5621248

Ah!  Thanks...

Rather: the guy you bought from (if he got for free) won 300$, you won 300$, the chap you sold to won 300$, ahd the chap he sold to lost 900$.

You won 300$, the chap you sold to won 300$, and the guy you bought from lost 600$

I wonder if there has been ever in recorded history, anywhere on Earth, a group of people living together for more than a few weeks without some form of government, laws, and taxes. 

Every transaction has two parties, a winner and a loser. So, there is no good or evil in this realm.

 

Just for the curious: two transactions that happened at Huobi at 3876 and 3783.8 CNY, jumping over dozens of bids that were in the order book between that value and ~3797 CNY.

3.5107   08:00:28 3796.1
2        08:00:25 3796.98
5.4129   08:00:19 3797
4.4855   08:00:15 3797.02
2.439    08:00:08 3797
3.1587   08:00:05 3797
0.0303   08:00:02 3783.8 <---
0.0977   08:00:01 3786   <---
0.26     07:59:52 3798.02
0.76     07:59:51 3799
3.082    07:59:51 3798.34
0.05     07:59:46 3799.98
1        07:59:44 3799.98


(From Bitcoinwisdom's charts.  Times are Brazilian times, so it is actually 11:00:01 and 11:00:02.)

Since they are the first transactions in the 11:00 hour block, perhaps they are bogus ones, say inserted just to prevent an empty 1h record in the charts?  Add a race bug...

I would be happy with a gross estimate of ClassA:ClassB split.

My feeling is that classB (non-commerce) has grown a lot since the price started to rally above the 20$ level, when it became attractive to day-trader types.  On the other hand, ClassA may have shrunk: because the higher price means less BTC are needed to pay the same amount, and because the use of BTC for drugs and other illegal trade probably decreased a lot after the Silk Road bust and all that.

Today 90% of the trade volume at the exchanges is in China, where the use of bitcoin in commerce must be very small.  But of course trade volume does not translate into blockchain transactions, so the question remains...

From http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zz21j/mtgox_2014_hack_database_revealed_live_from_mark/, presumably derived from the database leak:


Note that, if this is legit, it does not show what MtGOX had, but what it owed to its customers at the time the database snapshot was taken. (Is this right?)

EDIT: markup

 

We should not get ahead of the tribunals, but have you read the document?
http://www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/January14/SchremFaiellaChargesPR/Faiella,%20Robert%20M.%20and%20Charlie%20Shrem%20Complaint.pdf
(Check the details of Count Four, specifically.)

The issue is not whether Shrem is innocent or not, but what is sensible policy for a Foundation or other people who wish for bitcoin to succeed.  Like in the case of MtGOX, it seems that people cannot separate personal friendships from the promotion of bitcoin; almost if "bitcoin" was a specific group of people, rather than a computing/economics project.

Total trade volume for today (Sun Mar/09 00:00-23:59 UTC) on the exchanges that I monitor was ~269 kBTC.  That is 11% less than yesterday's, but almost 3 times the volume of last Sunday Mar/02.

Volume outside China fell 18% (from 30 to 25 kBTC).  Bitstamp (with 9.12 kBTC) was again above Bitfinex (8.29), and BTC-e (6.52) was still third.

Volume in China fell  across all exchanges, by 10% in total (from 271 to 244 kBTC).  OKCoin remains well ahead of Huobi (today 56% to 42% of the Chinese volume).

China's slice of the total volume increased slightly, from 90% to  91%.