Thanks! Yeah, that is what "trading" means today, it seems...

Saint Google to the rescue:
100 Most Attractive Male Characters in Chinese Internet Novels – Part 2
http://hui3r.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/100-most-attractive-male-characters-in-chinese-internet-novels-part-2/

EDIT: the relevant item is

Folks have probably noticed this, but at this moment the price seems to be back to the exponential trend that it was following from Jan/19 to Jan/31 and from Feb/07 to Mar/03:


(Huobi, 1d, log scale)

The bump from Jan/31 to Feb/07 corresponds exactyly to the Chinese New Year bank holidays.

I don't recall if a good explanation was found for the jump on Mar/03.  There was an "important announcement on Bloomberg" that may have triggered a big buy on Bitstamp. The "sheep" followed, and forgot to come down again when the announcement turned out to be a flop --  is that it?

Thanks for the correction!

Sorry, I was thinking of those who wish to continue trading cryptos after April 15 (assuming the rumor is correct) and eventually cash some profits.

More generally, they also have the options of withdrawing their money before April 15, or  trading on the Chinese exchange forever without ever cashing out.

I understand that to mean: any Chinese citizens who can send their CNY offshore (which turns them into CNH) can now deposit them directly to BTC-e, without converting them to EUR or USD first.

That could be one option for Chinese citizens to put new money into the cryptocoin market.  However it seems to be limited to 50,000 CNY/year for most people, is that correct?

Chinese citizens who already have money in their Chinese exchange accounts would probably want to buy bitcoins there and export them to an account on BTC-e or any other exchange.

I suppose that the PBoC would not mind, quite the opposite, if Chinese citizens withdraw CNH from BTC-e and bring them back into the mainland?

Thanks.  That was posted ~9am Monday UTC which should be ~5pm Monday in China, correct?

About the Bter notice:
AFAIK the PBoC notice was not sent to the exchanges, but to banks and payment processors only.  These may inform the exchanges, at their leisure, or may simply block deposits to their accounts.  It is not clear whether the block is already in effect for all banks and exchanges, or if some banks are still accepting deposits on the exchange accounts.

The clarification above by Bter, if I understand correctly, says that they did NOT have bank accounts for clients to deposit in, so they do not know anything about that kind of channel.  Their channel for CNY account recharge was a payment processor, and they have been notified by it that payments are suspended.

What other exchanges have posted relevant notices?

Where is that quote from? 

If I understood correctly the Google Transalte output, this article says that students at a university entrance examination in China were asked to evaluate Bitcoin risk, among other random questions:

http://www.dzwww.com/shandong/sdnews/201403/t20140331_9926899.htm

Is this bullish or bearish? 

The main Western exchanges that took part in this partial crash were Bitstamp,  Bitfinex and BTC-e.  Kraken had very small volume, 2.23 kBTC max, on Thursday; and LakeBTC did not budge from the usual 3--4 kBTC.

Typically, those three exchanges were churning ~20 kBTC per day.  On Thursday, Friday and Sunday, they traded ~220 kBTC above that baseline in total.

In China, Huobi, OKCoin and BTC-China together had ~50 kBTC of trade last Sunday, and ~170 kBTC daily from Monday to Wednesday.  On Thursday, Friday and Sunday they had about 360 + 270 + 130 = 760 kBTC traded above those baselines.

It is hard to interpret these numbers, since many of those coins were probably traded many times, both in China and outside it.   However, we may perhaps say that at most 220 kBTC were exported from China to those three exchanges  by the arbitrage traders during the crash.

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

                    !   Sun !    Mon !    Tue !    Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !    Sun !                      
EXCHANGE            ! 03/23 !  03/24 !  03/25 !  03/26 !  03/27 !  03/28 !  03/29 !  03/30 ! Currencies considered

BSTP Bitstamp       |  6.10 |  13.67 |   8.11 |  10.31 |  49.21 |  34.96 |   7.45 |  31.44 | USD(w,c)             
BFNX Bitfinex       |  4.83 |   9.28 |   4.90 |   7.65 |  41.02 |  35.99 |   4.64 |  26.15 | USD(w,c)             
BTCE BTC-e          |  2.43 |   6.35 |   4.99 |   3.49 |  20.81 |  17.79 |   4.03 |  23.58 | EUR,RUB,USD(w)(1)    
LAKE LakeBTC        |  4.01 |   3.48 |   3.79 |   3.61 |   3.62 |   3.84 |   4.16 |   3.82 | USD(c)               

SUBSUBTOTAL         | 17.37 |  32.78 |  21.79 |  25.06 | 114.66 |  92.58 |  20.28 |  84.99 |                      

KRAK Kraken         |  0.29 |   0.88 |   0.70 |   0.80 |   2.23 |   1.27 |   0.45 |   1.41 | EUR,USD(c)(2)        
BTDE Bitcoin.DE     |  0.18 |   0.48 |   0.28 |   0.32 |   0.98 |   0.48 |   0.23 |   0.84 | EUR(w,c)             
HITB HitBTC         |  0.03 |   0.04 |   0.04 |   0.05 |   0.38 |   0.39 |   0.11 |   0.72 | USD(c)               
CVIX CaVirtEx       |  0.08 |   0.34 |   0.13 |   0.13 |   0.63 |   0.35 |   0.07 |   0.59 | CAD(w,c)             
BCUX Bitcurex       |  0.08 |   0.23 |   0.12 |   0.20 |   0.64 |   0.50 |   0.14 |   0.58 | EUR,PLN(c)           
LBTC LocalBitcoins  |  0.37 |   1.04 |   1.14 |   0.99 |   1.10 |   1.13 |   0.68 |   0.51 | (c)(3)               
ANEX AsiaNexgen     |  0.52 |   0.78 |   0.44 |   0.82 |   1.01 |   0.92 |   0.50 |   0.28 | HKD(c)               
BCTR BitcoinCentral |  0.02 |   0.09 |   0.04 |   0.07 |   0.31 |   0.15 |   0.07 |   0.22 | EUR(c)               
CPBX CampBX         |  0.05 |   0.07 |   0.03 |   0.04 |   0.23 |   0.15 |   0.03 |   0.16 | USD(w,c)             
JUST Justcoin       |  0.01 |   0.04 |   0.06 |   0.06 |   0.11 |   0.08 |   0.03 |   0.10 | EUR,NOK,USD(c)       
BMKS BTCMarkets     |   .   |   0.01 |   0.01 |   0.02 |   0.13 |   0.02 |   0.03 |   0.06 | AUD(c)               
BMPL BitMarket.PL   |   .   |   0.02 |   0.03 |   0.03 |   0.06 |   0.05 |   0.02 |   0.06 | PLN(c)               
MCBT MercadoBitcoin |  0.02 |   0.06 |   0.05 |   0.03 |   0.18 |   0.11 |   0.03 |   0.04 | BRL(c)               
BT2C Bit2C          |  0.03 |   0.03 |   0.04 |   0.02 |   0.06 |   0.05 |   0.01 |   0.03 | ILS(c)               
BTNZ BitNZ          |   .   |   0.02 |   0.01 |   0.02 |   0.04 |   0.01 |   0.03 |   0.03 | NZD(c)               
BITX BitX           |   .   |   0.03 |   0.01 |   0.02 |   0.02 |   0.02 |    .   |   0.02 | ZAR(c)               
FYSE FYB-SE         |  0.01 |   0.02 |   0.02 |   0.03 |   0.07 |   0.02 |   0.01 |   0.02 | SEK(c)               
FYSG FYB-SG         |  0.01 |   0.01 |   0.01 |    .   |   0.07 |   0.03 |   0.01 |   0.02 | SGD(c)               
ROCK RockTrading    |  0.01 |   0.05 |   0.02 |   0.03 |   0.06 |   0.02 |   0.02 |   0.02 | EUR(c)               
BCID Bitcoin.CO.ID  |  0.01 |   0.01 |   0.01 |   0.01 |   0.01 |   0.01 |   0.01 |   0.01 | IDR(c)               

SUBSUBTOTAL         |  1.72 |   4.25 |   3.19 |   3.69 |   8.32 |   5.76 |   2.48 |   5.72 |                      

SUBTOTAL            | 19.09 |  37.03 |  24.98 |  28.75 | 122.98 |  98.34 |  22.76 |  90.71 |                      

HUBI Huobi          | 18.00 |  73.60 |  56.50 |  91.50 | 213.00 | 185.00 |  33.10 |  92.10 | CNY(w)               
OKCO OKCoin         | 35.90 |  82.30 |  92.60 | 104.00 | 283.00 | 251.00 |  69.60 |  86.80 | CNY(w)               
BTCC BTC-China      |  1.57 |   4.84 |   2.28 |   2.90 |  13.64 |   8.88 |   1.51 |   4.91 | CNY(w,c)             
BTER Bter           |  0.28 |   0.47 |   0.32 |   0.39 |   0.77 |   0.47 |   0.33 |   0.39 | CNY(w)               

SUBTOTAL            | 55.75 | 161.21 | 151.70 | 198.79 | 510.41 | 445.35 | 104.54 | 184.20 |                      

TOTAL               | 74.84 | 198.24 | 176.68 | 227.54 | 633.39 | 543.69 | 127.30 | 274.91 |                      

NOTES:

(1) The USD volumes for BTC-e obtained from Bitcoincharts are consistently smaller than those obtained through Bitcoinwisdom. Using the latter.
(2) Bitcoinwisdom lists only BTC/EUR for Kraken, not BTC/USD.
(3) Bitcoincharts lists Localbitcoins with many currencies, most of which appear to have negligible volume.  This line counts only AUD,BRL,CAD,CHF,CZK,DKK,EUR,GBP,RUB,SEK,THB,USD.

All numbers were collected by hand or copy-paste from the sites http://bitcoinwisdom.com (w) and http://bitcoincharts.com (c). 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.

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 the same period may span part of day 01/14 or part of day 01/16 in your local time zone.)

WARNING: There are at least five additional large exchanges in China that are not on this table because they are not covered by Bitcoinwisdom: FxBTC, ChBTC, BTCTrade, BTC100, and BTC38.  Together they may have as much volume as Huobi or OKCoin.

Yeah, sure.  Amazing what some fake volume can do to the price, neh? 

Mr. Lee of course needs to disqualify the other exchanges because BTC-China shrunk to near nothing when it switched to vouchers, and did not recover even after they reinstated bank deposit/withdrawals.

I would like to see the evidence for that "10 to 20 times" multiplication of volume.  Of course, without trading fees there will be many strange behaviors by robots that one will not see in the "greedy" exchanges.  By coincidence, "10 to 20 times" is about the ratio of volumes between Huobi or OKCoin and BTC-China.  Even if only  50% of the volume at the other Chinese exchanges were real, BTC-China would still be insignificant in the Chinese market.

On the other hand, on Jan/30 BTC-China reported  41,000 BTC of trade in less than 3 hours, due to a runaway robot, at a time when their daily volume was around 5,000 BTC.  They did not remove that fake volume from the chart API; as a result, they were listed as the largest exchange in the world by sites like bitcoincharts  (which to this day does not carry any other Chinese exchanges).

After interviewing the CEOs of Huobi and OKCoin, Coindesk reluctantly admitted that China may account for 60% of all trade volume in the world.  That may have been right when MtGOX was active, and if one counted only those two exchanges in China.  If the PBoC rumor is false, perhaps Coindesk will one day update that number to the factual 90-95%... (If the PBoC rumor is true, it may become 0%, of course.)

As for the "phantom walls", I have seen many complaints here about such things occurring on the Western exchanges.  They can be set up and taken down by trading robots; they may be sleazy tricks to manipulate the price, but why blame them on the exchanges?

For all I know, the mainland Chinese exchanges were responsible for the October-November price rally, which brought in all the venture capital etc.  The least that bitcoiners could do in retribution is to admit that they exist...

Chinese Slumber Method (non-)prediction for Monday March 31

We interrupt the advanced TA gallery to inform that today's Slumber Point was very unreliable (S = 0.014, W = 0.017) and way off the previous trend, so the Chinese Slumber Method refuses to give a prediction, even under advanced interrogation techniques.


Plot legend

Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Sunday 2014-03-30, 00:41 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Sunday 2014-03-30, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~18 hours later)

Huobi's predicted price: 2987 CNY.
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2819 CNY
Error: 168 CNY (~28 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 493 USD.
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 456 USD
Error: 37 USD

EDIT: removed bogus "Bitstamp prediction is" line

NOTE: The last two squares show that the method can predict tomorrow's price fairly accurately, it just can't predict tomorrow's date.

If the rumor is false, I don't see why they would not deny it on Monday (last time they denied it on the same day, IIRC).

If it is true, the "confirmation" would consiste in them sending the order to the banks and the banks blocking deposits on the exchaneg accounts.  That may take a bit longer, but since the deadline is April 15, and the report has been leaked, they may want the deposits to be blocked starting tomorrow already.

If the report is true, perhaps it was leaked beforehand so that some big arbitrage traders or investors could have time on Friday to move enough CNY into the exchanges to buy all the coins that will be dumped by common clients.

Indeed, Google easily found a random precedent:

Can they send CNY that way, or do they have to convert to other currencies?

Obviously all the coins sold at Huobi are being bought by Huobi clients.

Some of them are ordinary speculators or investors who believe that the price will be higher eventually.  Some are arbitrage traders who send the coins to the Western exchanges and sell them there for a slightly higher price.

Presumably a large part of the volume now at Bitstamp is one-time sale of coins exported from China by the arbitrage traders. I do not know how those sales could be separated from western panic sellers, from people who bought before october and are cashing out the profit just in case, from etc.   If one could do that, then one could estimate how many of those cheap Chinese coins are being bought by the Chinese, and how many by Westerners.

It is 1:15 am in China.  Within a couple of hours, price MAY stabilize for a while.  Perhaps even go up a little, pushed by the Western exchanges.

The chart looks normal now: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate

I wonder why there was no volume and no price chang on Saturday, and so much of it today.  Perhaps:

* All active traders get the rumor on Thursday or Friday.  By Friday night all the pessimists among them have sold.

* Nothing changes on Staurday, so no trading.

* The Sunday morning newspapers carry the rumor.  The occasional and week-end traders finally get it, and the pessimists among them start to sell.