Yes, but the point is: exponential growth for the past N years is no guarantee that it will continue for one more year.

As @solex whote a couple of days ago, "the trend is your friend, until the bend in the end" 

For those who like to extrapolate on log-scale charts:

Worldcom share price:


Wikipedia editing activity:
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~reltech/2009/09-45.pdf

"Change is inevitable, except from vending machines."  (unknown)

That is NOT an argument against bitcoin or a reason to expect its failure.  Just something that turns my stomach, but that is my problem.  I mentioned only to get to that joke.  Har har.

You should read that short story. 

In Arthur Clarke's short story the Nine Billion Names of God, a Tibetan monastery buys a computer to speed up their mission; which is to write down all the nine billion names of God (which can be generated by a simple algorithm), so that the only true purpose of mankind is fulfilled and the Universe can be shut down.

I have seen people describe mining as a "brilliant" idea.  I think it is one of the most absolutely imbecillic ideas that mankind has produced. Bitcoin is still barely being used now, and its miners already waste hundreds of exaflops and megawats to do a simple task -- maintain a bank ledger -- that could be done with a couple of PCs.  All that because, you know, you can't trust governments or bankers -- only young frappucino-slurping nerds.

However, mining does produce some tangible results: a large library of strings whose cryptographic hash begings with so many zeros. Perhaps the NSA  has got a use for those strings, in which case those megatons of coal may have been burned for a noble reason.

But, who knows, perhaps they already got all the special strings that they need, so mining has fulfilled its only true purpose; and that is why the Bitcoin Universe is being shut down?

++

Sure; but will you want to? 

[fud]
BTW, there are rumors that the CEO of bitcoin left Earth yesterday for an unknown planet, and his bulltrolls have not been paid their March salary.
[/fud]

387 USD is 1/3 of Bitstamp's all-time high.

Well, when BTC succeeds, would you want to buy Germany, or would you be satisfied with Estonia and a slice of Angola? 

Well, I appreciate your frankness, at least.

However, when bitcoin is sold as a hedge against inflation, as a get-rich-quick scheme, or whatever, it ends up being bought by many people who are not rich, criminals, or corrupt politicians: just ordinary people who hope to get a little better life, and do not know enough economics to see through the bitcoiners' hype.  Many of them are induced to put all their savings, sell their houses and make debts by the promises of bitcoiners whose goal is, essentially, to take their money.

Sorry, but that moral excuse does not work. 

Why here?  You mean that the rest of the world already got wise about the value of bitcoin? 

I suppose that the Chinese 3rd party payment processors were clearly overstepping the December bans when they allowed temselves to be used for recharging the "to-up cards" issued by the exchanges.  Also, the revenue they got from this service cannot have been a significant part of their revenue.  Hence their prompt response to the Caixin article and/or the PBoC circular.

On the other hand, the exchanges and banks apparently believed that the bank route did not violate the December decrees.  The amount of money in the exchanges' bank accounts (basically, the sum of all the exchanges' CNY client accounts) must have been quite substantial.  Also, most of the traders' deposits and withdrawals probably used the bank route, rather than 3rd party processors; especially the largest ones.  Both the static balance and the transfer fees must have meant a lot for the local branches.  So it is not surprising that the banks waited so long before telling the exchanges about the latest PBoC circular.

I think they mean: "ICBC will not let us transfer money from our account to other ICBC accounts, only to accounts on other banks.  For users whose personal account is on ICBC and want to withdraw, we will use our accounts on other banks to transfer funds to your account."

On Huobi, the drop at 02:51 UTC (10.51 China time) may have been dumping by insiders, or reaction to news of other exchanges, Australia, etc.. The larger drop at 04:37 (12:37) must have been by the clients who were logged in at the time and saw Hobi's note as it was posted. Then those clients may have called some friends, which may explain the  next series of smaller dumps.

Now there may be a gradual decline as other users log in and see the note, one by one.  There may be many clients who check once or twice a day (say, before and after work) or even less.

This may help:
Fire coin = Huobi (Google Translate may insert other words between those two)
Fire currency = ditto
"user ICBC account withdrawals" = perhaps "withdrawals by users with an ICBC account"

I understand that their ICBC branch received at 10:00 an order from upper management to close Huobi's corporate account by April 18.  There is no room for negotiation. ICBC does not know about other banks, they may be delaying because of different interpretations etc.  Until the deadline Huobi can move money to other banks but not to other ICBC accounts. 

A BULLISH prediction I made when the bank rumor first came out:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg5939081#msg5939081

And a BEARISH one:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg5941052#msg5941052

But of course both are based on TA, which is to say on nothing much, almost nothing much.

Well, one possible hope for bulls is that the really big investors are forcing the price drop so that they can claim massive capital losses to the IRS. In that case, the price should shot up again after april 15.

(Wait, are they allowed claim, at this time, the capital losses that happened since January? If not, sorry, forget it...)

A bearish article about the mood of bitcoin traders in China:
(Possibly already obsolete after the deelopments of the last five minutes):

  比特币一月狂跌三成 甬城多数玩家清仓避险
  http://money.zjol.com.cn/system/2014/04/09/019956348.shtml

The title makes no sense under Google Translate but the body is slightly better.
Note again that "Wright" is "Lite"(coin).

Fundamental bug found in the protocol, permanent fork of the blockchain is inevitable:
http://www.coindesk.com/industry-website-advocate-bitcoins-unicode-symbol/
BTC or Ƀ?

Is this site legit?

Money & Tech - 4/9/14 Daily Update
http://www.moneyandtech.com/apr9-news-update/