Dear Bitstamp, my prediction of 690 USD plus or minus 10 by 19:00 UTC was only a prediction, not a command.  Considering what you have been through today, is OK if you don't quite make it.

Huobi was stabilizing just above 4000 CNY, but suddenly started dropping and shaking again, down to 3950 in a few minutes

It was 22:17 21:17 there when it started. Perhaps the TV news?

If bitcoin was a global finance leader, would its traders still pretend that 3/4 of the global market simply does not exist? 

Volumes (kBTC) in the two hours 10:00 to 11:59 UTC

Huobi     46.93
Bitstamp  34.23
BTC-e     24.52
BitFinEx  19.14
MtGOX     18.22
OKCoin    14.70
BTC-China  8.31

Indeed, it seems that someone sold ~4000 BTC in a single order.

I don't think it is MtGOX itself. It is (a) "if that exchange over there suddenly collapsed taking away their client's money, could my exchange do the same?" and (b) "SOMEONE SAID THAT THE BITCOIN PROTOCOL IS BROKEN, RUN!!!"

Markets did not like that at all it seems.  They expected MtGOX to sink perhaps... but a flaw with the protocol that affects all exchanges? 

My guess: if one expects that he will have to sue MtGOX to get their account balance out, it may be better to have it in dollars than in bitcoins.  "He owes me 70,000 dollars" may sound more substantial to prosecutors and judges than "he owes me 100 bitcoins".

EDIT: missing words "he will have to"

Thanks! (But it gives only the minute-by minute summary, which merges several transactions into each entry.  A transaction by transaction log would be easier to read...)

I hope someone is saving the transaction logs of all exchanges.  It should be a gold mine for bitcoin historians and statistical market research or all kinds...

Thanks... I dont' know, maybe someone is trying to dump some 20-30 kBTC at any price?

PS. Is that stream of 60 BTC sells that is pushing MtGOX's price down?  (I cannot check it because the bitcoinwisdom chart for MtGOX is updatings very slowly and shows only a few transactions in the log.)

The steady "exceptional" background traffic at MtGOX, that started around 12:00 Feb/7 UTC, seems to be a stream of transactions for 60-70 BTC, about one every 5 minutes or so That is about 700 BTC/hour, 16 kBTC/day.  They seem to occur at the low end of the spread.

I suspect that the news from MtGOX will be bad for those trapped there, but in any case there should be no immediate impact on price at other exchanges.  Most traders must have been aware of their problems for weeks, and are not affected by them.

Even a complete collapse of MtGOX should affect the price only in the longer term, after it is featured on mainstream media and scares some potential investors away from Bitcoin.

It is merely trying to recover the (all time?) high of Jan/21:

https://coinplorer.com/Charts?fromCurrency=DOGE&toCurrency=USD

Huobi's volume is much lower than yesterday's; nearly as low as it was during some days of the New Year holiday week, when banks were closed.  Yet I found no mention in the web of Feb 10 being a bank holiday in China.  

I am now afraid that my prediction (4450 CNY at 19:00 UTC) will fail, as it depended on the general downward trend we have seen since the end of the Chinese bank holidays (a trend which is manifest only when the Chinese are fast asleep).

Right now it would take at least 1500 BTC of trade to get Huobi down to 4450.  But I still have some hope:  we are still 12 hours away from the target time, and even at the current slow pace the total volume until then will be much more than that.

I do not know what could be driving that downward trend, but the cause is probably in China since it started sharply at the end of the holidays, after the price had been nearly constant for a week.  Perhaps there is a steady stream of disappointed Chinese investors leaving the game, so that the Chinese market has fewer and fewer Yuan competing for the same number of Bitcoins?

Oops, thanks. I should have written "30 US$" (over Bitstamp) rather than "30%".

If the price at Coinbase is higher than that of other exchanges, people should flock there to sell, but no one would want to buy from them at those prices. 

So Coinbase must be collecting lots of bitcoins and depleting their dollar reserves. And they cannot sell those bitcoins now without a substantial loss. This is what MtGOX was doing until a couple of days ago. (Perhaps Coinbese is trying to fill the market niche that MtGOX abandoned?  )

Perhaps they believe that the prices will rebound to more than 730 soon? 

Is there a general shortage of money in the other exchanges, that might be cured when the banks open today?

What is preventing arbitrage from working (buy cheap coins at other exchanges, sell them to Coinbase for 30%+ profit)?  We knew why in the case of MtGOX, but that explanation does not apply to Coinbase, does it?

Sorry to have started an off-topic discussion... But Three Mile Island was indeed a meltdown, although it fortunately failed to breach the pressure vessel.

The industry initially denied any meltdown, but the truth became evident many years later, when the pressure vessel was finally opened and its contents were removed.  A large portion of the fuel had melted, leaving a wide cavity in the middle of the core.  The molten stuff trickled down through the remaining water, bore twice through internal steel baffles and collected  at the bottom of the pressure vessel.  If the operators had taken a little longer to do the right thing, it would surely had breached the pressure vessel, like Fukushima #1--#3 did.  See the Wikipedia article  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident. (The /Science/ magazine had a long article about that in the 1980s).  

EDIT: PS. By the way, the Fukushima reactors all scrammed properly and were completely shut down when the tsunami hit.  The meltdown occurred because of the heat given off by the radioactive elements resulting from fission, which is not stopped by the control rods and requires active cooling for months after shutdown.  Also, none of the reactors that melted down used sodium as a coolant.

Daily volumes of BTC trade to/from USD and other national currencies (in kBTC):


               !   Thu !   Fri !   Sat !   Sun !   Mon !   Tue !   Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !    Sun !
  EXCHANGE     ! 01/30 ! 01/31 ! 02/01 ! 02/02 ! 02/03 ! 02/04 ! 02/05 !  02/06 !  02/07 !  02/08 !  02/09 ! Currencies considered

  MtGOX        |  6.60 |  4.45 |  5.13 |  2.28 |  3.37 |  5.40 |  8.20 |  21.54 |  58.89 |  26.82 |  23.48 | USD,EUR,GBP,AUD,JPY
  Bitstamp     | 13.13 |  7.73 |  8.30 |  4.07 |  4.93 |  7.59 |  8.48 |  20.65 |  42.79 |  13.50 |  15.06 | USD
  BTC-e        | 12.54 |  4.65 |  6.30 |  4.74 |  5.75 |  4.51 |  6.55 |   9.72 |  31.84 |  11.67 |  12.51 | USD,EUR,RUR
  BitFinEx     |  8.18 |  3.91 |  4.54 |  3.15 |  3.45 |  3.36 |  5.22 |  21.11 |  66.36 |  11.12 |  12.07 | USD
  Bitcoin.DE   |  0.47 |  0.35 |  0.33 |  0.35 |  0.51 |  0.27 |  0.31 |   0.61 |   1.30 |   0.37 |   0.47 | EUR
  Kraken       |  0.37 |  0.20 |  0.23 |  0.15 |  0.21 |  0.29 |  0.23 |   0.59 |   1.45 |   0.37 |   0.45 | EUR
  CampBX       |  0.06 |  0.05 |  0.23 |  0.16 |  0.10 |  0.12 |  0.16 |   0.21 |   0.82 |   0.27 |   0.24 | USD
  CaVirtEx     |  0.25 |  0.24 |  0.24 |  0.20 |  0.08 |  0.17 |  0.18 |   0.39 |   1.07 |   0.57 |   0.23 | CAD
  Crypto-Trade |  0.01 |   .   |  0.01 |  0.01 |   .   |  0.01 |  0.01 |   0.04 |   0.05 |   0.01 |   0.03 | USD

  SUBTOTAL     | 41.61 | 21.58 | 25.31 | 15.11 | 18.40 | 21.72 | 29.34 |  74.86 | 204.57 |  64.70 |  64.54 |

  Huobi        | 29.27 | 15.26 | 28.86 | 26.27 | 24.77 | 18.65 | 19.55 |  39.97 | 131.91 |  77.00 |  64.08 | CNY
  OKCoin       | 18.56 | 17.11 | 20.38 | 20.00 | 18.09 | 12.77 | 12.33 |  26.07 |  74.37 |  37.63 |  34.63 | CNY
  BTC-China    |  1.99 |  1.17 |  2.31 |  2.21 |  1.70 |  1.33 |  1.54 |   4.09 |  17.66 |   6.86 |   5.75 | CNY (NOTE 1)

  SUBTOTAL     | 49.82 | 33.54 | 51.55 | 48.48 | 44.56 | 32.75 | 33.42 |  70.13 | 223.94 | 121.49 | 104.46 |

  TOTAL        | 91.43 | 55.12 | 76.86 | 63.59 | 62.96 | 54.47 | 62.76 | 144.99 | 428.51 | 186.19 | 169.00 |



All numbers were collected by hand from the site http://bitcoinwisdom.com. Beware of possible errors.

For each exchange, the numbers include only the trade volume to/from the currencies listed in the rightmost column. Trade between BTC and other cryptocoins, such as LiteCoin, is NOT included.

Coinbase is said to use Bitstamp for currency conversion.

Dates on the header line are UTC. Specifically, "01/15" means "from 01/15 00:00:00 UTC to 01/15 23:59:59 UTC". (Beware that Bitcoinwisdom uses your local time, so the date may appear to be off by 1 day.  For example, if you are 2 hours west of Greenwich, it may show "01/14 22:00" when the UTC time is "01/15 00:00".)

(NOTE 1) On 2014-01-30, BTC-China had a burst of extremely fast, regular and atypical transactions, all with similar amounts (a few tens of BTC) and prices (~4836 CNY), adding up to about 41,050 BTC.  The burst started suddenly around 17:00 UTC and and stopped suddenly around 19:30 UTC. Presumably those transactions were made by a faulty robot trading against itself or some other robot, and did not represent actual exchange of money and bitcoins between distinct individuals. Therefore those anomalous transactions were subtracted from the BTC-China volume for Jan/30.

Marijuana has been criminalized in most countries only because of pressure by the US.   Ditto for music/video/software sharing,  unscrambling HDMI signals, and several others. So if the US bans cryptocoins, most Western nations will probably follow suit.

It is true that the ban on marijuana did not stop its use, and actually increased its price by several orders or magnitude.  However, marijuana can be grown and sold in secret, while cryptocoins cannot be used without accessing the very public blockchain and support network.  I cannot imagine how the network could continue to function if the US decided to stop it.


Why is that surprising?  Rejection of the traditional political process is almost a definition of anarchism/libertarianism, isn't it?