Well, it seems that Danny Brewster's past (before he became the bitcoin financial genius who would save the Cypriots from their banks) was not that mysterious after all:

It seems that he organized a huge music festival in the UK, that did not happen:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=529946.msg6500610#msg6500610

And he had also headed another 4 failed companies:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=529946.msg6503255#msg6503255

Amazing. 

Bitcoin has obviously become a religious sect.  Satoshi Nakamoto is no longer just a mere computer genius, but is already viewed as the greatest benefactor of mankind, a divine Messiah, if not an avatar of God himself.  And a con man has only to claim to be a true Bitcoin believer, and praise Bitcoin left and right, for other true believers to adore him and trust him 100%.  For they firmly believe that Bitcoin will protect them and triumph and save them from evil, and that there is no other evil but that which comes from the enemies of Bitcoin.

That is the only explanation I can find for Danny Brewster having managed to fool so many investors for so long.

And a fake blonde too. Quite appropriate for bitcoin. 

Amazing.

I can understand that some people can believe SOME of that stuff.  But are there really people who believe ALL of it?

But OK folks. Just promise that you won't drink that Kool-Aid in the end.

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Saturday May 03

Prediction valid for: Saturday 2014-05-03, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2744 CNY
Bitstamp's predicted price: 451 USD





[ Plot legend ]

Today's data point was again quite good (S = 0.0031, W = 0.826), but way off the trend of the last four points.  Obviously there was another break in the trend.  With a single data point, we can only use the banal predicition "tomorrow will be like today".

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which was assumed to be 6.09 CNY/USD. It was 6.08 today (May/02), and 6.11, 6.22, 6.25, 6.05, 6.09 on the previous good sample times.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Thursday 2014-05-01, 23:30 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Friday 2014-05-02, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~19 hours later)

Foiled again by the treacherous Chinese Bulgarians Russians Canadians aliens:

Huobi's predicted price: 2837 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2744 CNY
Error: 93 CNY (~15 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 461 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 451 USD
Error: 10 USD
 
NOTE: "According to recent statistics, 93.2% of all statistics are totally made up." (unknown)

I see.  Are you going to make the same offer to Mr. Karpelès, then?  Or is he the expert that you intend to hire to investigate the matter?

Now seriously: it is not a matter of "anger", but deterring further crimes from happening. 

It would be interesting to know, for starters, when did Mr. Gay-Bouchery became aware of MtGOX's insolvency, and what did he do about it then.

Perhaps today's drop was due to the FXBTC closure news.  The announcement on their site is dated May 02, 06:40:57 UTC (2:40 pm local time), and the drop started suddenly around 04:05 UTC (12:05 pm local).  Could be insider info?

Coindesk article

Google translation at Bitcoinregime.com

Announcement on FXBTC site (in Chinese)

Thread discussing the news

EDIT: that would explain why the price did not rebound, as would be expected after a mere freak dump.

An arbitrage trader follows the same "buy low, sell high" strategy of an ordinary speculator, except that he doesn't have to guess the future -- he can do both trades at the same time.

I imagine that arbitrage should be particularly lucrative for exchange owners, especially if they collude.  

Suppose that owners Alice and Bob of exchanges A and B agree to show each other the first few entries of their order books in real time, while delaying that information to the public by a few seconds.  Whenever Alice sees a sell order in her exchange A that has a lower price than the highest bid in B, she immediately buys into that order, counting that Bob will immediately sell the same amount into that bid. And vice-versa.

If this scenario is possible, the partnership Alice&Bob obviously would make a profit on every such occasion. Alice and Bob could equalize their expenses and profits, at any later time, just by exchanging bitcoins. Thus, even if A is in Bulgaria and trades only with dollars, while B is in China and trades only with CNY, they would never need to exchange dollars to/from CNY.  The dollars that Alice would take home would have come from the dollars that her clients deposited in A, while the CNY that Bob would withdraw from B would come from the CNY that others deposited into B.

(Trading fees, bank fees, and currency exchange rates complicate the details, but do not seem to invalidate the idea.)

Why do you think so?  Closure or shrinking of the Chinese markets can only increase the supply of coins in the Western ones, without a corresponding increase in dollars.  How could that mean higher prices in the West?

The current drop does not seem to be China's fault.  Apparently it started on BTC-e at 04:05 UTC, with a freak ~2000 BTC dump.  Huobi started to react around 04:10, and Bitstamp followed at about 04:25.  

What is strange is that the price did not recover after the dump, as it did on several previous freak dumps.  Perhaps the previous ones were smaller amounts of BTC that did not find any supporting walls, whereas this one is a significant increase in the supply of coins?  Or it was just the trigger that released pent-up market pessimism?


  

In my understanding, arbitrage in both directions is still possible in the current situation, as long as arbitragers have a RMB reserve inside the Chinese exchanges or some means of depositing money there.  Since the exchange owners could be arbitragers, this will probably be the case until the end. 

Arbitrage will be cut off (in one direction) if and when Chinese arbitragers, even insiders, are no longer able to withdraw any RMB.  In that case, the price will probably rise sharply in China, while dropping somewhat in the West.

I don't see how those news could affect the price.  The MtGOX drama has slowed down to court speed, so it will be a year or more before it moves any coins or changes the market's perception of bitcoin's future.

By the way, is there any estimate of the amount of bitcoins (and other altcoins) currently sitting in all the exchanges' wallets?  More importantly, of the coins "on the market" -- in the those wallets, or in the hands of traders who could quickly bring them in for speculative trade?  It would be interesting to compare that to the MtGOX heist...

Very interesting read indeed.

(But what a funny definition of "police" you have got there...  )

Interesting that Sunlot is based in Cyprus.  Could perhaps there be a connection to mysterious Mr. Brewster, whose past before going to Cyprus seems to be clouded in mystery denser than Mr. Karpelès's frappucinos?

Yes, thanks! Those are the pages I was referring to.

There is also a thread that discusses that proposal, with QA from their PR guy:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=587295.0

Frankly, to me it looks like the goal of the project is to prevent a police investigation of what happened at MtGOX.

The police can subpoena Mark and the banks to get the identities of suspect MtGOX customers and the bank accounts of suspect insiders.  A private investigator cannot do that.  That for starters.

I didn't watch the trades at the time, but from the 1m chart I would say that someone at BTC-e suddenly sold all his coins into walls at 435 and 430, and marched out, stomping and slamming the door.

Another 43 like him and the price will be down to single digits.

Another 44 like him...

I was looking at the plot of Plot of the Number of Unique Bitcoin Addresses Used per Day

Is there a thread that discusses the meaning of this plot?

Some curious features that beg for explanation:
* The first two obvious bumps correspond to the Apr/2013 and Oct-Nov/2013 rallies.  The third one seems to correspond to the period from about Mar/07 to about Mar/21 (hard to tell, that "smart plot" is not very helpful). But the volume was not particularly high in that period.
* In general there seems to be little correlation with price apart from the overall increase in both over the last 2 years. 
* There is a strong 7-day periodic component, strongest before the Oct/2013 rally and gradually being replaced by more irregular noise.

It is 11:00 am in China, and hourly trade volume is still like that of 05:00 am of normal days. 

Presumably the robots who are responsible for Huobi's  fake volume are still in bed, cooking their hangover from the party last night, and will resume their work in a couple of hours.  Otherwise today may be another record low in daily volume, comparable to the Chinese New Year.