Hm, makes sense... Huobi means something like "fiery currency" (火币, Huǒ bì), googling around I guess that GABI could be "toy currency" or "irrelevant currency" (尜币, Gá bì)  http://baike.baidu.com/view/1121368.htm
 

Hm, maybe it is an effect of the Russian proposed ban?

But anything is news now, it seems 

It does not seem likely that "starving miners" are responsible for the large single-transaction dumps.  Even the most desperate ones would be selling 25 BTC at a time, no?

Those dumps could be (1) traders who panic and sell everything at once because they think a crash is underway, (2) rich but dumb novices who have not learned about slippage yet, (3) traders who get burned and leave "stomping and slamming the door", (4) "Wang Li, you get our money out of that bitcoin thing NOW or I will take the kids away and file for divorce."

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Alchemist.JPG

Indeed.  In the 80's, when monthly inflation here in Brazil was in the double digits, banks offered "overnight" investment funds (called just that, in English) that approximately compensated for inflation but were totally liquid.  So everybody quickly transferred any money they received into those funds, and took it out (automatically even) just before each payment.

Such instruments are still available. (This year, the inflation is expected to be around 5-6%/year.) The Central Bank and private banks offer several kinds of bonds that yield inflation plus something, by various formulas -- prime rate, consumer price index, fixed interest, etc. Such bonds are regularly used by companies and large investors as a liquid and safe money storage.  Ordinary citizens use savings accounts and liquid investment funds provided by their retail banks.  No one would be stupid to keep their savings in cash or in plain checking accounts.

Inflation is a big nuisance, for sure: it makes medium-range planning more complicated and risky, requires constant renegotiation of salaries and price markups in stores, is another substantial tax that drains wealth from the economy, etc.. ... but it is survivable.  If the US dollar's inflation ever "explodes" from 1%/year to, say, 10%/year, things will get real "interesting" -- but doomsday prophets will be disappointed.

Indeed there are signs that interest in China has been waning and, on the balance, money has been leaving the market.  The most obvious sign is the gradual price drop from February to May, and the general drop in volume (Huobi typically had ~60 kBTC/day in Feb-Mar, noy only ~15 kBTC/day).  Also, the CEOs of Huobi, OKCoin and BTC-China sounded very gloomy in their recent interviews.  They described the opening of the "international" sections as attempts to preserve their businesses in face of increasingly bad prospects in China.

Until March, clients of the Chinese exchanges could use bank transfers to deposit money.  By orders of the central bank (PBoC), they lost that channel.  For a while it looked like they would soon lose the withdrawal by bank option too, and some banks (as well as AliPay) stated that they would not allow their accounts to be used for any bitcoin-related business.  However the withdrawal by bank is still working: according to OKCoin's CEO, the banks are reluctant to follow the PBoC directive to the end because they don't want to lose their fees on that service.

In addition to bank deposits, Huobi had some sort of debit card that apparently is still working.  After losing the bank deposit option, OKCoin arranged for some "brokers" who would sell "recharge codes" privately to clients, but they may have had to stop that too.  BTC-China had "vouchers" that could be bought in stores, but they cannot sell them via internet.

Since January there was also a crackdown on use of bitcoin in e-commerce.  Merchants were prohibited from quoting prices in bitcoin, and major e-commerce sites like Taobao banned the sale of bitcoins, maybe even of bitcoin mining equipment.

The new "international" sites by Huobi (BitVC) and OKCoin (OkCoin.com), that opened in the last two months, are located in Hong Kong or Shanghai, "special economic zones" which have more relaxed controls on financial businesses.  BTC-China has always been in in Shanghai IIRC. AFAIK these new sites can take deposits by bank, but not easily from ordinary Chinese citizens in the mainland; and their volume is still very small.

Indeed, my best guess about the cause of the recent rally (since ~May/20) is that some traders at Huobi and OKCoin got inside info about the imminent opening of those "international Chinese" sites, and stocked in bitcoins in order to move their trading over there.

For those who are unfamiliar with technical analysis, the pattern that has developed over the last 5 hours (on OkCoin, 1minute chart) is called "Funnel With Right Inverted Notch, Half Of A Pasta Roller, Teaspoon Without Handle And Hand With Fingers Chopped Off By The Food Processor." It means that the wonton soup did not go down well and the price may surprise everybody, e.g. by failing to surprise. 

Actually the largest markets are OKCoin (varies around 30'000 BTC/day) and Huobi (about 15'000 BTC/day).

BTCChina was big during the October and November rallies, with 50'000 BTC/day or more,  but then lost almost all its volume when it lost its bank accounts (around Dec/19) and has been struggling to recover since then.  It is still at  abut 1/10 of that.

There are a few other exchanges in China, but there is almost no data about them.  Earlier this year the five largest together may have had as much volume as Huobi or OKCoin; but two of them, at least, closed in April-May.

Bitstamp, Bitfinex, and BTC-e have even smaller volume than BTC-China.

It is often said that the volume at Huobi and OKCoin shoudl be ignored because it is "misleading" or even "fake".  Yet there is little evdence of "fake" trades there, but some evidence that the trade is quite real.

Yes, sure, one of the reasons why OKCoin and Huobi have so much volume is that they do not charge trading fees.  That does not make their volume less legitimate.  Yes, sure, zero fees induce traders to do more trading, but also attarct and keep more traders; and a trader that trades 10 times per day is not much different than10 traders who trade once a day. 

(There is a question of how deep the order books are, but no one knows the "real" order book of any exchange -- namely, the amount of coins and money sitting on traders' accounts or their "cold wallets" outside the exchange, not on the order book but ready to jump in if the price changes enough.)

One could turn the "zero fee" argument around and say that trading fees depress trading, create an artificially wide spread, prevents the price from tracking small movements in other exchanges, obscures trends, etc.; so one should disregard from analysis any exchange that charges trading fees.

Anyway, whatever one thinks of zero fee volume, it is beyond obvious that all the major changes in the price since November, if not since last April, were generated by the Chinese traders reacting to events that were relevant to them , with little influence of events and markets outside China. The price is usually stable when it is late night in China, and starts moving when it is 07:00 or 08:00 am there.  The price was still during the week in early February when Chinese banks were closed, and started dropping as soon as they opened.   It is often hard to tell which exchange led a particular crash or rally (since arbitrage robots usually propagate the change in less than a minute); but, when there is a clear leader, it is almost always Huobi or OKCoin.  And so on.

The myth of "fake volume" is commonly repeated because it helps hide the unpleasant fact that the price is sustained at the current levels only by the Chinese traders, and its future is entirely at their mercy.  Obviously, that fact would make bitcoin-backed funds very hard to sell. 

You get the idea. That is why OKCoin and Huobi must be declared irrelevant and omitted from any statistics.

From that perspective, it seems relevant to ask which coin offers the largest "jackpot"  (single-block reward), in USD, regardless of the odds.

For retailers it is quite easy, cheap, and risk-free to "accept bitcoins".  Last time I looked, Bitpay had an entry program that charged zero from the merchant and something like 1% from the customer, up to 100 US$/month.  At the next level, the merchant paid 30 US$/month flat (unless there were 0$ "bitcoin" payment in that month), with a much larger upper limit per month.  In any case the merchant did not have to handle or understand bitcoin, as he received just plain old dollars via bank transfer.  So he did not have all the risks and accounting headaches that he would have if he REALLY accepted bitcoins.

Coinbase gives merchants the option to REALLY receive some of the bitcoin, or keep it in their Coinbase accounts.  However I presume that, as regulations for bitcoin trading become more cumbersome, merchants will find that option less and less appealing.

By the way, I hope that everybody is now aware that buying bitcoins to pay a merchant that "accepts bitcoin" implies TWO bank transfer fees plus the Coinbase/Bitpay fee, whereas paying the merchant directly in dollars means just ONE bank transfer fee.  Ditto for paying with old bitcoins and then buying back the same amount to "restore the level".

Paying with bitcoins still only makes sense if you have bitcoins that were acquired for less than the current market value, and have decided to sell (without replacing them later).  The advantage, in that case, is that part of your purchase will be paid by the traders who buy the coins that Coinbase sells on the exchanges.

You don't ask such questions on this forum 

You will not read about them in Coindesk, for sure...

Both may be right... Friday 7:30 am in China is Thursday 22:30 in London (BST), Thursday 19:30 in NY (EDT) , Thursday 16:30 in San Francisco (PDT)...

You mean, the miner generates a list of N addresses and sends it to the pool, right? 

Thanks!

You mean, the phone number with a question mark at the end?

How could he possibly answer that with a question?

Do you think that Monty Python was a user of this forum?

Did Monty Python answer that question, or did they just ask it?

He definitely wasn't.  Fascism in Italy (and later Nazism in germany) were supported by landowners and industrialists; they saw it as the antidote to communism and the ills that came with it (land reform,  workers' rights, syndicates, ...), that were spreading over Europe after the Russian revolution.