The catch is that you must give the bitcoins to Grayscale, they will give you fresh BIT shares, and you must keep them for 1 year before you can sell them on the OTCQX market.  Good luck...

That is what I meant in my previous post.  At first sight, the volume in USD is  not much lower than it was a year ago:

Exchange  ! 2014-05 ! 2015-05
----------+---------+--------
Huobi     |     5.3 |     5.3
OKCoin.cn |     9.6 |    10.7
BTC-China |     1.2 |    12.6
Bitstamp  |     1.9 |     0.9
Bitfinex  |     1.7 |     2.5
BTC-e     |     0.9 |     0.9

All values are very rough eyeball readings from charts, converted to millions of USD per day.  Although Bitstamp lost half of its volume, Bitfinex doubled and the other exchanges varied surprisingly little.  (BTC-China was practically dead last May, probably because of bank access problems and/or unattractive fee structure. But its volume today is comparable to that of October, when it had been revived.)

However, the price moves seem "different" than a year ago; more "bimodal": scattered large changes separated by periods of nearly constant price.  Moreover, there seems to be much less rebound after those big changes: the price just stays where the big change dropped it off.

Could it be that most of the volume is now robots intensively trading fractions of BTC, with no intiative in moving the price; and the big changes are a few humans making their moves?

EDIT:  lower --> not not much lower

Weird.  I copied the trades from FRT and added the volumes -- twice, because it did not match the OTCQX page.
I suppose 19,894 is correct then, there must be a bug in the list or in my summation...

The volume was 20894.00 according to FreeRealTime.com (1000 shares more than the OTCQX number).

Summary:

Date       ! price range (OTQ)  ! price range (alt)   ! volume
-----------+--------------------+---------------------+-------------
2015-05-04 | 37.98 --   42.00   | ??.00 -- 200.00 [1] |     765
2015-05-05 | 55.00 --   94.86   | 50.00 -- 175.00 [1] |     435
2015-05-06 |  N/A  --    N/A    | 65.00 --  68.00 [1] |     125
2015-05-07 | 40.00 --   66.00   | 40.00 --  86.00 [2] |    2844
2015-05-08 | 49.00 --   59.00   | 49.00 --  59.00 [2] |   14807

2015-05-11 | 50.00 --   57.95   | 49.50 --  57.95 [2] |    2756
2015-05-12 | 49.00 --   50.01   | 49.00 --  52.25 [2] |    2286
2015-05-13 | 49.00 --   49.00   | 49.00 --  50.00 [2] |     327
2015-05-14 | 44.00 --   49.00   | 44.00 --  49.95 [2] |   20894

"OTQ" data from the GBTC quote page at OTCQX.
[1] from this post.
[2] from the Freerealtime site.

But the listing shows a 174 share trade at 49.00.  Why do you say that it should not have counted?

Could they be waiting in the hope that the GBTC price will go higher?

Too small a drop for that.

In the last 2 months I count at least 6 drops like this one or larger.

But the market feels quite differet from a year ago, don't you think?  While the volume is still quite high, perhaps it is almost entirely a few robots trading fractions of BTC over and over again.  So, when a real trader moves, the price jumps by 5-10 dollars and gets stuck there, instead of bouncing back...

According to other posters, the daily ranges shown in the OTCQX quote page ignore any trades smaller than 100 shares.  Today there was only one trade above the threshold: 175 shares at 49.00 $/share.  There were however other smaller trades at 49.95 and 50.00 $/share.

Don t forget that the average BIT share was bought for ~40--50 USD.  I would think that 24 $/share is way too low for those who have those shares, while 49 $/share is way too high for those who are thinking of investing in bitcoin through BIT.

My guess is that they and Circle will be shifting the bulk of their business to the USD-to-USD payment market (i. e. PayPal's turf), which is orders of magniture bigger than BTC-to-USD (BitPay's model) and USD-to-BTC.  For that market, their staff does not seem exaggerated at all.

Circle also seeems to be eyeing the USD-to-CNY and/or CNY-to-USD remittance markets.  I imagine that bitcoin will be an internal instrument that will be used if and when it advantageous to them.

Since the beginning, AFAIK, the full investment contract was confidential and shown only to investors, apparently with certain non-disclosure restrictions.  The information on the BIT website was fairly terse.  Grayscale was not mentioned (and presumably did not exist).  There was no mention of brokers, Authorized Participants, or other intermediaries: accredited investors could buy BIT shares directly from BIT/Secondmarket, in dollars (minimum 25'000 USD, IIRC), and redeem them for dollars after the 6 month holding period.

Not disputing this, except a detail: if I read correctly, the official filed documents (available through the OTCQX site) say that Grayscale takes only bitcoins, not dollars, when issuing new shares; and returns only bitcoins, not dollars, when the shares are dedeemed.  It is some top-level brokers (of which SecondMarket is one, possibly the only one) who may take dollars from clients and buy bitcoins to give to Grayscale, or get bitcoins from Grayscale and may sell them to give dollars to clients.  Did I read correctly?

Well, what can I say? That is not my recollection.  What I read said that after 6 months shareholders could redeem, but not resell (except in special cases with express authorization from SecondMarket).  The promised market was definitely distinct from redemption and from such exceptional sales.

The worst thing that happened to bitcoin was the fast price increase.  It turned it from an experimental currency into a pyramid schema, created an absurdly overinflated and overconcentrated mining industry, got the system to depend on a steady supply of new coin buyers instead of actual users, attracted many scammers and heckers, and snake oil salesmen...

Interesting indeed, but I don't see anything that suggests appliances.  It may have something to do with mobile access (Android and iOS), though. 

Cound it be something related to payments instead of mining -- like NFC receivers for points-of-sale and/or smartphones? Or a hardware wallet that interact with your smartphone?

Hey, the method I proposed does not use dishonesty or false claims either!  

There may be nuances that escape me, but I remember reading such from the documents on their website.  The clients could not redeem or sell their shares to other people before 6 months, and after that they would be allowed to trade them in a specific market, that had been promised for Q1 or Q2 2014.  I recall rumbling in the SecondMarket Observer thread when Q2 2014 was up and no such market was provided.

If that "secondary market" was not OTCQX or something like it, what could it be? I had no news of any trading of BIT shares going on before GBTC started trading on OTCQX.

And I don't know when the 6 months became 12.  

Well, it seems that their plan is indeed to insert ASIC mining chips into appliances and steal use free electricity from the consumers:

http://www.coinspeaker.com/2015/05/10/startup-21-inc-wants-to-put-bitcoin-miner-in-toaster-9190/

(Unless the author of that article tooks that "fact" from this forum...)

In another forum, someone mentioned the CueCat story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

I still don't understand why they would use such a complicated method to take money from gullible bitcoiners, instead of the simplest method that I devised about a year ago:



[ The image may appear truncated due to a forum bug. Click on the image for the full-size version ]

Even so... a standalone mining rig would use dozens or hundreds of those ASICS and consume hundreds of watts, 24/7.  If you divide those "extra costs" of the rig (cabinet, PSU, maintenace, etc.) by its hashpower, the rig would probably still be more cost-effective than "parasitic" ASICs in other consumer equipment.

I still cannot see how this hypothetical plan can make economic sense.  They may be into mining, but I suspect that appliance-embedded chips is not their plan.

Because the issue is not you wasting 10 W; it is someone else using 10 W of your power to his benefit.

Would you not mind if your neighbor pulled a cable from your home to feed his front porch light, even if it was just 10W -- for no other reason that he does not want to pay for those 10W?  If he did that without you being aware of it?

"You need a router? Well, we have this router A that costs $43 and consumes 15 W, and this other one B that does exactly the same thing but costs $51 and consumes 25 W; the difference being that B also does a certain computation for some company that does not want to pay for those 10W itself, and thinks that you will not mind paying for it.  If you buy B, you can fill a form at their site and every month they will mail you a check for 23 cents. You may opt to get that in bitcoin instead."