The file is nothing complicated.  Each line is a trade on the Huobi.com exchange, as reported by Bitcoinwisdom.com's chart (lower right corner). The columns are date, time, the price in CNY (yuan), and the amont of BTC traded.

That data may be useful to people who find such data useful.    E. g. to compute trades per minute, average transaction size, etc..

I still don't know of any place that offers such logs for download.  One could get them throgh the charting API, I suppose, but that requires some programming anyway; maybe I will do that some day, hopefully before Huobi closes for good.   Copy-paste from the chart seems simpler for short samples.

Needless to say, most of those "advantages" are killer disadvantages to most people (and to all governments, including highly democratic ones).  Like "there are no age requirements" --- guess who wanted those reqirements in the first place.

Others are demonstrably false or misleading, eg. "it is more difficult to be used as surveillance", "it can be used to resist corruption",  "it can be extremely hard to steal", "it allows movement across borders", ...

And, as usual, it says "bitcoin" when all those properties hold for any cryptocurrency with similar protocol, and many of the good ones hold even for cryptocurrencies with centralized management.

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Thursday May 08

Prediction valid for: Thursday 2014-05-08, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2838 CNY
Bitstamp's predicted price: 460 USD





[ Plot legend ]

The data point for today May/07 was good (S = 0.0029, W = 0.857).  Now that we have two data points since the last assumed break, it seems reasonable to assume a straight line trend defined by them.  Namely, A + B*(d-d0), where (d-d0) is the number of days since May/06, A = 2672, B = +83.

(Another option would be a shifted exponential trend defined by the last three points, May/05--07; but that would expose me to jeers and taunts from the audience for being overbullish.)

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, taken to be 6.17 CNY/USD.  Its value was 6.16 today (May/07), but 6.23 yesterday, and 6.18, 6.16, 6.17 on the previous good sample times.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Tuesday 2014-05-06, 21:29 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Wednesday 2014-05-07, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~22 hours later)

The predicition was bad, as expected from the banal extrapolation:

Huobi's predicted price: 2672 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2755 CNY
Error: 83 CNY (~13 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 430 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 450 USD
Error: 20 USD
 
NOTE: Extrapolating the current trend, by the end of June the date will be May 61, 2014.

I would think that the commercial Chinese miners can easily sell their coins in the Western exchanges or to Western clients, using Western bank accounts, all legally.  The closure of Chinese exchanges may be a problem for small independent miners, perhaps.

If anyone is interested: I saved about 1 hour of Huobi's transaction log from earlier today (2014-07-07) centered on 02:54 UTC.  That's in the middle of the small hump that preceded today's mini-rally.

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/temp/2014-05-07-0254-HUBI.txt

The file has 879 transactions.  It was built by repeated copy-pasting from Bitcoinwisdom's chart (which shows only the last 200 transactions) reformatted and cleaned by a couple of gawk scripts.  Beware of possible gaps or errors.

Unix users may be interested in the scripts too:

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/temp/cleanup_bitcoinwisdom_trans_log.gawk
Basic reformat/cleanup script.  Click on the chart, then CTRL-A CTRL-C, then paste into a file,
then pipe the file through, for example,

  gawk -f cleanup_bitcoinwisdom_trans_log.gawk -v curr=CNY -v ex=Huobi -v dt=2014-05-07

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/temp/remove_dup_trans.gawk
A script to merge several files obtained as above, with overlapping time intervals.
Save each CTRL-A CTRL-C to a separate file, run the cleanup fillter above on each file,
then concatenate the files in chronological order (most recent last), and
pipe the concatenation through

  gawk -f remove_dup_trans.gawk
 

Mark first delayed withdrawals without admitting it.  Then, when people began to realize what he was doing, he blocked all withdrawals by surprise. Doing so he trapped half a billion USD worth of coins and cash, without giving the users a choice.

I suppose that the Chinese exchanges will never block BTC withdrawals, and will give advance warning of the end of yuan withdrawals.  So, when the latter happens, I expect that only a few traders will be left, and most of them will have means to withdraw, e.g. in cash.

However, the bank statements may be read as barring the exchanges from having bank accounts at all, even if they are for internal use only and clients cannot deposit there.  If this interpretation is correct, then the exchanges will not be able to keep clients' yuan at all (they would not hold cash in a safe, I suppose), and will have to close, like FXBTC did.

In any case, most traders will probably sell all their bitcoins and cash out, others will buy those bitcoins, withdraw them, and transfer them to Western exchanges or hoard them.   That shoudl cause the price to drop in China and in the West together.

Just to irritate the extrapolators and pattern matchers:

A really fake transaction is possible only within the real spread, so it cannot change the price beyond those bounds.  I believe MtGOX did that to suggest that the price was rising when there was no volume, OKCoin does that perhaps to increase volume, and other exchanges do that to mask the absence of real trades.  That may be why the charts of Bitstamp etc. look like broad bands rather than thin staircases (like BTC-China used to be in the voucher era).

To stop the price from rising beyond a certain limit the exchange would have to do real sales of BTC at that chosen price.  That would cost the exchange an unbounded amount of BTC, since every buyer who was willing to pay a higher price would buy into the exchange's wall.  Ditto for the other direction.

After one of the large crashes (forgot the year), real stock exchanges implemented a safety switch that stops trading automatically if the price changes too much too fast.  But that cannot be abused: the exchange's job is to make trading possible, if the clients want the price to be X the exchange must let them do it.

PS. Re Huobi's volume: it has suddenly resumed.  Perhaps the robot pilots were expecting fees to start immediately, and only now they have read the attachment that says "starting May 10th ..."

I have no idea, I can't even understand exactly what the note says.  However, today Huobi's volume was abnormally low up to 09:30 local time (01:30 UTC), it usually starts to pick up at 07:00.  Perhaps they have already curbed some robot trading. 

Please suspiciate at will.    As I said many times, I will buy bitcoin if and when I believe that it will be worth the trouble, compared to credit card etc.  I will not buy "just to try", not for investment, not "just in case it becomes worth a zillion some day". 

(By the way, I consider that last argument a sleazy sales trick to get thousands of small buyers, not only to raise the price - 100'000 people buying 0.1 BTC is 10'000 BTC taken off the market - but also to claim "increasing adoption".)

Huobi posted the "five exchanges agreement" notice on their homepage, and also added the following attachement explaining their new/upcoming fee policy for high-frequency trading:


Google Translate, with a few fixes (Fire coins network --> Huobi.com):

Não vou discutir isso, mas so notar que a "comunidade bitcoin" elogiou muito o projeto, e Andreas Anotonopolous, um dos gurus da comunidade, inclusive deu consultoria para a Neo & Bee e a avalizou. 

Agora descobriram que Danny Brewster, o inglês que lançou esse projeto, era um vigarista habitual com histórico  de várias empresas falidas na Inglaterra. 

Infelizmente os "crentes" do bitcoin são no geral muito ingênuos  Basta que um cara fale bem do bitcoin e eles imediatamente acreditam que ele é boa pessoa, e investem no projeto dele sem mesmo entender direito do que se trata, sem investigar o passado do sujeito, e sem ler direito o contrato.

Além disso muitos bitcoineiros "compram" junto com bitcoin a ideologia libertariana, segundo a qual governo, lei e polícia são bandidos, e quem a polícia persegue é herói.  Então, quando um vigarista dá o golpe, em vez de denunciá-lo à polícia os bitcoineiros lesados ficam lamenttando nos fóruns, e os outros ficam culpando as vítimas por terem sido bobas.

Por tudo isso, o que mais dá no "mundo bitcoin" é vigarista... 

Yes, but I wonder about that BitFund.pe.

The Summit seems to be a marketing event to legitimize that specific (offshore?) investment fund.

The Chinese exchanges apparently pulled out of it.  Their recent joint statement seems to promise that they will refrain from questionable marketing, among other things. Could they be referring to that Summit?

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Wednesday May 07

Prediction valid for: Wednesday 2014-05-07, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2672 CNY
Bitstamp's predicted price: 430 USD





[ Plot legend ]

The data point for today May/05 was very good (S = 0.0011, W = 0.974).  It was signficantly above the previously assumed trend, so it seems that the trend was broken again.  With only one data point, we must use the banal "tomorrow like today" prediction.

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, taken to be 6.22 CNY/USD.  Its value was 6.23 today (May/06), but 6.18 yesterday, and 6.16, 6.17, 6.08, 6.11, 6.22 on the previous good sample times.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Monday 2014-05-04, 21:33 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Tuesday 2014-05-06, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~22 hours later)

The predicition for Huobi was not that wrong, considering the swings of the day:

Huobi's predicted price: 2635 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2672 CNY
Error: 37 CNY (~6 USD)

The prediction for Bitstamp was more accurate, due to an unexpected change in the R factor:

Bitstamp's predicted price: 427 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 429 USD
Error: 2 USD
 
NOTE: There is nothing notable today.

Why, those three points are a short and lucid summary of the bitcoin community and market situation today.  (Although a bit pessimistic. It is only the linear extrapolation that gives 0$ by Sep/2014; the log extrapolation can't go to zero ever.  )

Thanks for posting, I will tell my patrons to send you a small comission too. 

Ahem, ahem, my Masters thesis in 1979 was on garbage collection.  So THAT is something I am competent at.  

You should see my office if you don't believe it.  

EDIT fixed [ quote ]s

Are you refering to BTC-China?  When did Huobi and OKCoin open?

On Bitcoinwisdom, BTC-China's data starts 2011-06-09 with ~1.5 BTC/day, OKCoin's data starts on 2013-06-12 with 0.004 BTC/day, Huobi's starts on 2013-09-01 with 134 BTC/day.  BTC-China always charged trading fees; I am not sure about OKCoin, but I think I read that they initially charged fees until Huobi came up with its zero-fee policy and they had to follow.  So maybe it was the zero-fee trading by Huobi, specifically, that attracted the Chinese habitual speculators.


There can't possibly be other people like me.  

It is not me who is saying that "bitcoin is the coin of crime", that is still a common perception out there.  But on the other hand, based on what people write here and in other forums, I would think that at least 10% of the bitcoin enthusiasts still love it because they (naively) think that it will allow them to make illegal payments and protect their illegal money from confiscation. ("Illegal" here in the literal sense of "prohibited by the laws of the land and times."  That includes tax evasion, bribes, contributing to outlaw organizations, etc.)

Well, then that leaves only BTC-China and those YouTube videos.

By the way, Wikipedia says that "Company CEO Bobby Lee [ who had experience in Yahoo Exclamation and Walmart China ] approached the then two-person company in early 2013, and after investing his own money and attracting investors, oversaw the company's rapid expansion and marketshare growth by the end of the year."  Which seems to fit quite nicely with the timing of the April 2013 bubble...

The bitcoin market now is still probably >95% speculation.  Dumping by miners and buying for long-term investment must be a small fraction of the exchange's volume, and buying for use in commerce must be almost nil.

I agree that mere "news" have little influence in the market.   The things that moved the market since Dec/2013 were not "news" but hard facts (sometimes false): the December five-agency decree, the Huobi and OKCoin workarounds, the "bug in bitcoin", the bank account closures.  News were merely the channel through which the market learned the facts.  

On the other hand, many of the "positive developments" that people keep mentioning here were just news (rather: thinly edited commercial press releases) which did not materialize.  

I see venture capital and established investors shunning bitcoin per se and investing instead in services like Bitpay, bitcoin fund management (SMBIT, PBP), and exchanges, which are profitable independently of the price of bitcoin.

Bitpay for example claimed to have made 100 M$ of payments last year.  Their revenue is the fees on that, a few million dollars.  They must still be lucrative in spite of the 50% BTC price loss since January.   But how much of that volume is new bitcoin adopters, and how much is bitcoiners who have piles of cheap old BTC and are spending some of them?

EDIT fix bad [ quote ] marks

They certainly do not own 90% of all bitcoins, but it seems quite possible that the Chinese speculators (active exchange clients) own 80-90% of all the bitcoins owned by speculators worldwide.  (Of course there is no sharp divide between speculators and investors, but you get the idea, I hope.)

Most of the bitcoins that exist are probably owned by Western hoarders and long-term investors.  Which should be another reason to worry, besides the closing of the Chinese market: if a small fraction of those coins were to be dumped on the public market, they could easily push the price below 100$/BTC.  There is no dispute on this point, I suppose?

Agreed, that "10x demand" is just a very rough guess, based not only on the price increase but also on the demographics of the market as some articles have described it (not nerds, but mostly amateur speculators with no computer expertise, who used to speculate on other things - a profile that seems to be common in China but not in the US).

What is your guess for the number of coins that Chinese speculators have bought to speculate with -- 2x, or 50x, the Western number?