The "nice" picture looks like an architect's restoration plan.  The "half-nice" one (with windows in the right side only) may be a photo of the current state.

Still no new announcements on Huobi's homepage, as far as I can tell.  Will they gox it?

Say @mah87, does your sponsor pay you for each post? (Mine will pay only if and when all the bitcoiners are kneeling in front of their Central Banks, wearing sackcloth and ashes in their hair, wailing and begging for mercy and forgiveness.  Looks like it will take a bit longer than I thought.  )

Saw many years ago in some nature documentary: two mosquitoes feeding side by side on someone's arm.  Then the guy squashes one of them.  The other one keeps feeding, does not even blink twitch an antenna.

That scene comes to my mind every time I think of Chinese bitcoin traders... 

(Did I post this already? If so, sorry, old age is, well, you know...)

Here is a free and gratis prediction: when (if?) the Chinese exchanges shut down, the volume in the Western exchanges will drop by ~50% due to loss of the arbitrage trade with China.

They may be dying, but are not dead yet. Daily volumes for the last 5 days (today's incomplete) in kBTC:

  Bitstamp:   6.3   8.3   4.1   8.9   3.8
  BTC-e:      4.2   4.2   2.8   3.6   2.3
  Bitfinex:   3.5   3.1   3.7  10.7   3.2
  Huobi:     40.6  34.6  24.2  33.8  22.3
  OKCoin:    54.1  44.7  38.0  42.9  30.4

Huobi had 350 kBTC once, ~60 kBTC average until Apr/30...

EDIT: perhaps the number of transactions per day is much smaller now.

Looking at the order book at Huobi I had a sudden craving for taffy, I don't know why.

Quite the opposite.  If MtGOX is liquidated by the court, there may be a criminal investigation, initiated by the liquidators or by clients.  If Sunlot takes over, who knows.

We do not know who will do the audit. We know that Sunlot will distribute and spend the remaining coins without waiting for a criminal investigation.  We know that they will have no obligation to release all the audit data so that the public can check it. We know that they will let Mr. Gay-Bouchery off the hook even before the audit.  We know that their PR person has not answered when asked whether they will "pardon" Mark too.

The court certainly will care.  Sunlot will not care about deposits/withdrawals, it will use the account balances.

We are on page 6666. Not even the Beast can escape inflation.

Perhaps this will make things more clear:

Suppose there were only two clients, J and M.

In reality, when MtGOX collapsed, J had 200'000 BTC balance in his account, M had zero BTC, and MtGOX had 200'000 BTC in their wallets.  Then if those 200'000 BTC were distributed proportional to the balances, J would get 200'000 BTC, M would get nothing.

But, according to the doctored database, J still had 200'000 BTC, M had 600'000 BTC.  J checks the balance and says it is correct.  Then MtGOX should have had 800'000 BTC in their wallets, but unfortunately 600'000 were stolen by invisible goblins so only 200'000 are left.  Now, if those remaining 200'000 BTC were distributed proportional to the balances in that database, J would receive 50'000, and M would receive 150'000.

If MtGOX were liquidated by the court instead, the 200'000 BTC would be split between J and M according to their deposits and withdrawals, which are much harder to doctor since they can be checked against bank records and the blockchain.  So perhaps J would get most of the 200'000 and M would get close to nothing.

Is that clear enough, or should I use a bigger font?

Thanks for the compliment.  It must have been my team-sized paranoid imagination that made me write that MtGOX was obviously insolvent (because it did everything that every insolvent company does), back when most seasoned bitcoin experts insisted that everything was fine.  Because, one could not assume then that all (or a majority of) the MtGOX management and their improvised auditors had malicious motives.

IMHO the most interesting part of rhis article is at the end, where they describe how the Chinese exchanges make money with 0% trading fees.  If I understood correctly the Google Translate gibberish, it includes (1) high interest rates in leveraged trading, (2) insider trading on their own exchanges, exploiting advance knowledge of good and bad news about regulations, and (3) doing most or all the HFT trading at their own exchanges.

I don't know how my experience with accounting compares with yours, but it seems that I have a bit more imagination. 

That is the point: what criminal investigation?

Perhaps the problem will be easier to understand if explained in a bigger font:

What makes you think that they really want to find the lost funds?

No further questions, Your Honor.  

Images used in the Chinese Slumber plots, for whathever they are worth:
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/temp/bitcoin-icons/
Generally,
  "{XXX}-edit.png" edited image with transparent background.
  "{XXX}-edit-{NNN}.png" version of the same, reduced to {NNN} pixels wide
  "{XXX}.jpg" original image
  "{XXX}-source.txt" URL of original image

When the source is not given, the original is from the Wikimedia Commons.

I will donate the images to the community. 

As explained in the plot legend (see link), it is only the latter.    For now.  

Chinese Slumber Method (non-)prediction for Monday May 12

There is no prediction for Monday.  In fact there will be no more Chinese Slumber Method (CSM) predictions. [ Waiting for the hoorays to subside. ] A short report about it is in the works, and the conclusions are disappointing: while CSM is more accurate than the banal predictor "tomorrow is like today" (TLT) on about 60% of the days, on the other 40% is so much worse that it loses to TLT, by most other measures.

Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Sunday 2014-05-11, 02:04 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Sunday 2014-05-11, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~17 hours later)

Foiled again again again by the treacherous Chinese:

Huobi's predicted price: 2823 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2687 CNY
Error: 136 CNY (~22 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 456 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 438 USD
Error: 18 USD
 




[ Plot legend ]
 
NOTE:
  "Erasmus Darwin had a theory that once in a while one should perform a
  damn-fool experiment. It almost always fails, but when it does come
  off is terrific. Darwin played the trombone to his tulips. The result
  of this particular experiment was negative."
    -- J.E.Littlewood

Is that true?  I know some places where one can download chart data -- OHLC price and total volume, in 1-minute intervals.  Do you know any place that saved the individual trades?

Obviously this proposal is not much concerned with credibility.    Seriously, if clients do not find the result of the Sunlot investigation convincing, what can they do? They will have only 16.5% equity at best, so they cannot prevail on management by vote.

People can fake Rembrandts and Hitler diaries well enough to fool many experts.  With a computer, one could do amazingly complicated doctoring of the database.  The stakes are much higher than the price of a Rembrandt.

The doctoring need not alter other people's balances, only inflate those of certain "friends".   As you pointed out yourself recently, there are many accounts with substantial BTC and/or money balances that have not had any activity for years.  I cannot imagine who would "forget" hundreds of thousands of euros, unless the owner died or that money was "dirty" in some way.  Some of those accounts could have been used to doctor the database -- e.g. by switching the balances of a dead account and that of a friend.

Money deposits and withdrawals can only be verified by obtaining MtGOX's bank accounts, many of them closed long ago.  Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals cannot be verified independentlry without knowing the addresses used by MtGOX.  It is not obvious that the new management will have access to those records -- all of them -- and they have no obbligation to release them -- all f them -- to the clients.  

Moving the discussion to a higher level:  the proposal implies that the clients will put their 800'000 BTC (the 200'000 that are there and the 600'000 that disappeared) and a lot of cash under control of certain people.  It is extremely naive to trust that those people will do what they say they will do, without making sure that they will go to jail if they don't do it.  This requires reading the proposal very carefully, keeping in mind that they may be dishonest (perhaps even the thieves themselves) and very smart.  Namely, if there is a loophole that will let them take some or all of that money without going to jail, you must assume that they will use it.  

Something I found on another thread of this forum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Mavrodi

Other sources say he is a mathematician ("brilliant" even).

[troll]Could Satoshi Nakamoto be ... Sergei Mavrodi? (Hm, what did he do during those four years in Siberia?)[/troll]