My guess is that it is a robot selling to himself at a slowly increasing price within the spread, to give the impression that the price is rising when in fact is may be falling.

It also helps build volume, and prevents gaps in the charts when there are too few trades.

And this one had me slightly worried, somewhat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qzwOAsGCdw  

The first 60 seconds may comfort some here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lvoAxSbtlo 

(Read by the author: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHabJ0lLx5A )

It is midnight 23:00 already in China but the Chinese are still glued to their screens, working hard to fulfill your wish.

Unfortunately, half of them are bulls, half are bears...

To me, the great puzzle is who could be buying those coins at 130 US$ over market price.  (It is easy to guess who is selling them.)
The only answer I can think of should scare everyone who has accounts there, in cash or bitcoins.

Er, how many coins will be mined to the end of March? 

Are the low prices really due to the influx of mined coins?

As many must have noticed, volume was generally quite low over the last two days. 

Volume in China actually recovered a bit compared to Jan/31 (Chinese New Year), to about 50 kBTC.   Huobi's hour-by-hour volume followed an unusual pattern: low in the morning and lunchtime, growing to very high at night, and falling to near zero only after 02:00 am.   Not implausible for an extended holiday, I would say.

BTC-China seems to be still in zombie mode; the little real volume they have may be just arbitrage.

The total volume outside China, on the other hand, was a record low this Sunday Feb/02.  It was ~25% less than Friday's Jan/31 (itself 50% less than previous Friday's Jan/24) and only ~1/3 of previous Sunday's Jan/26.

The biggest drop outside China was at Mt.GOX: only 2.28 kBTC on Sunday Feb/02, which is ~1/2 of Fri Jan/31 and Sat Feb/01, and ~1/5 of previous Sunday's Jan/26.

 

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


               !    Fri !    Sat !    Sun !    Mon !    Tue !   Wed !   Thu !   Fri !   Sat !   Sun !                     
  EXCHANGE     !  01/24 !  01/25 !  01/26 !  01/27 !  01/28 ! 01/29 ! 01/30 ! 01/31 ! 02/01 ! 02/02 ! Currencies considered

  BTC-e        |  15.27 |   9.34 |  10.38 |  21.02 |  16.82 |  6.53 | 12.54 |  4.65 |  6.30 |  4.74 | USD,EUR,RUR         
  Bitstamp     |  15.78 |   8.70 |   9.70 |  25.19 |  20.04 |  7.04 | 13.13 |  7.73 |  8.30 |  4.07 | USD                 
  BitFinEx     |  10.99 |   4.62 |   7.88 |  15.63 |  13.62 |  3.87 |  8.18 |  3.91 |  4.54 |  3.15 | USD                 
  MtGOX        |   7.38 |   9.52 |  16.11 |  10.02 |  11.82 |  7.21 |  6.60 |  4.45 |  5.13 |  2.28 | USD,EUR,GBP,AUD,JPY 
  Bitcoin.DE   |   0.52 |   0.30 |   0.34 |   0.60 |   0.49 |  0.33 |  0.47 |  0.35 |  0.33 |  0.35 | EUR                 
  Kraken       |   0.46 |   0.19 |   0.24 |   0.63 |   0.54 |  0.24 |  0.37 |  0.20 |  0.23 |  0.15 | EUR                 
  CaVirtEx     |   0.41 |   0.33 |   0.10 |   0.40 |   0.22 |  0.21 |  0.25 |  0.24 |  0.24 |  0.20 | CAD                 
  CampBX       |   0.13 |   0.04 |   0.05 |   0.13 |   0.20 |  0.07 |  0.06 |  0.05 |  0.23 |  0.16 | USD                 
  Crypto-Trade |   0.01 |    .   |    .   |    .   |   0.01 |   .   |  0.01 |   .   |  0.01 |  0.01 | USD                 

  SUBTOTAL     |  50.95 |  33.04 |  44.80 |  73.62 |  63.76 | 25.50 | 41.61 | 21.58 | 25.31 | 15.11 |                     

  Huobi        |  89.25 |  58.16 |  91.31 |  63.13 |  92.88 | 32.14 | 29.27 | 15.26 | 28.86 | 26.27 | CNY                 
  OKCoin       |  34.01 |  26.33 |  31.40 |  35.41 |  52.37 | 29.11 | 18.56 | 17.11 | 20.38 | 20.00 | CNY                 
  BTC-China    |   6.82 |   3.04 |   5.55 |   4.43 |   6.45 |  1.94 |  1.99 |  1.17 |  2.31 |  2.21 | CNY (NOTE 1)         

  SUBTOTAL     | 130.08 |  87.53 | 128.26 | 102.97 | 151.70 | 63.19 | 49.82 | 33.54 | 51.55 | 48.48 |                     

  TOTAL        | 181.03 | 120.57 | 173.06 | 176.59 | 215.46 | 88.69 | 91.43 | 55.12 | 76.86 | 63.59 |                     



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. The BTC-e volumes now include retroactively also exchanges to EUR and RUR (together about 1 kBTC/day or less).  Trade between BTC and other cryptocoins, such as LiteCoin, is NOT included.

Coinbase volume is not available, neither at Bitcoinwisdom nor at Bitcoincharts, but they are 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.

In the context of stocks, it does not seem to be useful to think of "the Apple stock market" or " the Google stock market", except when "market" is short for "supply and demand".

It seems more useful to think that there is just one stock market, where the stocks of all companies are traded together.  That's because traders can quickly sell one stock and buy another as they see fit.  New investment money that comes into one stock promptly "diffuses" to other stocks.  Thanks to arbitrage traders, one can even think of all stock exchanges of the world as a single market.

Methinks that the same is happening in the world of crypto-currency, with regard to both the exchanges proper and the support network.

The most reputable (or least disreputable?) crypto exchanges seem to be well connected by arbitrage, so that prices tend to rise and fall together.  Several already trade two or more crypto-coins, against each other and against national currencies.  Many traders already own and play with several types of crypto-coins at the same time.  So perhaps we should start thinking of "the crypto-coin market" instead of "the Bitcoin market", "the Litecoin market", etc.

As for the support network, it seems that many miners will direct their efforts to whatever crypto gives the best return at the moment.   So, even though the blockchains are independent, we should perhaps think of just one Crypto-Coin Network, that supports all cryptos according to usual cost/profit principles.

Does this make sense? 

Er, um, but doesn't that imply that in the future everybody will use Dogecoin, no one will use Bitcoin?

I was looking at Cryptsy DOGE/BTC in the http://Bitcoinwisdom.com charts

You play heads-or-tails for money, and two seers in funny clothes knock at your door, claiming to be able to predict the outcome of the next coin throw.

One elucubrates over the outcomes of past throws with astrolabe and compasses, and then proclaims "heads" or "tails" before each throw.

The other meditates in the lotus pose, eyes closed, and then says "50% chance that the next throw will be tails".

Which of the two seers would you hire? 

Thanks, I suppose you mean this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/dogecoin-crashed-this-weekend-2013-12

So its price crashed because its popularity soared. That may be good news for Bitcoin indeed.

All cryptocoins are brothers in fate, if one fails the others will suffer too.

Pure bitcoiners may rejoice in the demise of a competitor, but people out there will wonder: if Dogecoin crashed without warning or reason, why wouldn't Bitcoin too?

Is that a full day? Yesterday's was around 6000 BTC I think.

Presumably many naive investors still choose to sell their BTCs at Mt.GOX because of the 130+ USD price difference. But every transaction has two sides, and neither novice nor expert would want to buy at that inflated price.  So who is buying those new coins?

The theory here seems to be that the buyers are old customers trying to get their money out via BTC, since they can't get it through USD.

But, is that plausible?  Methinks that an investor would rather wait for six months to get all his money out, rather than take a 13% loss.  Even if he needs some of the money right now, wouldn't it be be cheaper to get a loan?

I was there last october actually.  But "few hours" is more like six, on low traffic days...

Yes, the Serra do Mar plateau scarp covered with semitropical forest may be the best scenery in the whole State.  I know of at least one "Amazon jungle" movie that was actually shot there.

Now, on topic:

One would expect that a big "wall" - an offer to buy or sell 100 BTC or more, sitting in the order book - would be a barrier for the price, halting its fall or rise for a while.

But could it be that a big wall also attracts large transactions that "eat" it instantly?  

Suppose that the highest bid is at 900$ and there are only small bids all the way down to 700$, adding to 20 BTC.  

Someone who wants to sell 100 BTC at 800$ minimum will probably wait.  If he sells 10 BTC to the small bidders in the 800-900 range, the price will fall to 800$.  Some bidders will get scared and lower their bids even more, further away from his sell goal.

Now suppose someone puts up a bid for 150 BTC at 800$; then that seller would immediately sell his batch.

In this example, the existence of the big wall triggered a price drop that would have been delayed indefinitely without it.  Does this sort of thing happen in reality?  If so, is it common enough to negate the "protective" effect of big walls?

Just because I wrote that... A foot-long lizard came into our living room, scared the hell out little doge doggy.  We shooed him out. (Doesn't seem to be a native species, may be some neighbor's escaped pet.)

But proves nothing, it surely could have happened in Finland too, with a reindeer or something.

The rest is from Poe, too (almost).  

I am obssessively interested, admitted, but it is only one of many obsessions I had through life.  Two years ago it was Fukushima, for instance.  There were also the Voynich manuscript, Wikipedia, Wikimapia, and other more technical ones...

An obsessive personality is almost basic requirement in academia, actually.  In any field of research, if you are not obsessed with your subject you have little chance of discovering new things; and if you don't, you don't publish, and you don't get promoted...

Campinas is sort of like like Finland in winter, without the winter. "Entertainment" is four shopping malls with some 40 movie theaters that may show almost five different movies at the same time...