It was supposed to be just an nternet payment method that was fast, cheap, safe, convenient etc., and did not depend on banks or governments.  Somehow "does not depend on" became "is beyond the reach of" or "will free us from" or even "will allow us to destroy". 

Adoption by the "libertarians" was the first of the two calamities that fell on bitcoin and will probably lead to its demise.  The second one was the price increases of 2013, that brought in all sorts of scoundrels, scammers and thieves who saw it as an easy way to take big money from fools.

Well, reading this forum one sometimes wonder... 
As you well know, it wasn't exactly like that; but, erm, not entirely unlike that either. 

I already said that. I won't buy it for speculation, investment (whose "sale" I consider a scam), or even to help "the cause" (which at this point seems to have been totally derailed by "libertarians" and greedy financiers).

I may buy some cryptocoin someday to pay for something, if I find that it will be easier/cheaper/safer/faster/etc than the usual means (cash, check, bank remittance, cerdit card , debit card, ...).  Which does not look very likely right now.   


Of course.

Well, there will not be any denial or confirmation of the rumor until Monday 00:00 UTC (08:00 CST) at least.  Huobi's traders have finally gone to bed it seems. 

If I had to guess what will happen until then, I would say that the price will probably drift down a bit more, as the less active clients become aware of the ban and show up in the marketplace, and skeptical traders get contaminated by the general doubt.  Say, the price may reach 2800-2900 CNY by Sunday night.

On Monday, if the report is proven false, the price should quickly return to 3500-3600 CNY.  If the report is confirmed, it will presumably start falling again; how deep and how fast, I can't guess.

Is this reasonable? Too obvious?

The "rumor" did apparently make it to CCTV, the main state TV media in China:
http://jingji.cntv.cn/2014/03/28/ARTI1395963853109425.shtml
However I can't quite tell through Google Translate how much weight they give to the report.
 

SecondMarket's  Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT) apparently owns now a little less than 100,000 BTC:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=337486.0
They had promised that liquidity would start "no later than march 2014", now changed to "in April 2014".  I take that to mean that some investors would be allowed to redeem their shares at the current nominal share price (the NAV in that table).

Apparently some 20,000-30,000 of the BTC they hold (not counting the "seed" 17,800 BTC) correspond to shares bought by investors between September and early November of 2013, when the BTC price was well below 530 USD, and hence the BIT share price was well below the current 53 USD.  Therefore, some of those investors may want to liquidate now to get their profits.  (There is no open market for their shares yet, although one has been promised for the end of the year.)

Almost all of the other BIT investors bought their shares for much more than 50 USD each, when BTC was in the 600--1000 USD range.  Some of them may be upset about the loss of value and may be impatiently waiting for a chace to get out.

In both cases the BIT would have to sell the corresponding coins to get the cash to pay the investor.   Will that mean several thousand BTC being dumped "soon" into the exchanges?

According to that table, new investments in BIT seem to have occurred at times when the BTC price was rising, even if momentarily.

The lack of news is not good news for investors.

The PBoC has issued no denial yet of the "rumor", even though reporters must be calling and and exchange owners must be pleading for them to issue one.

Exchange owners were angry at the "rumors" at first but seem to be quiet now.  Bobby Lee of BTC-China discusses the rumor as if it were possibly true.

Exchange owners must have contacted their banks, and either got no news, or got bad news.  

Here is a recent opinion piece on Caixin.com (by Google Translate, it seems to assume that the report is correct; obviously, since they are the source.)
http://opinion.caixin.com/2014-03-28/100658175.html

People may want to keep googling ' PBoC bitcoin "March 28" ' or  ' "3月28日" "比特币" '  to see if something sinificant comes up.

EDIT: "sinificant" obviously means "significant with respect to China". 

Until it is known whether the bank ban is true or false, "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" is what a sensible trader should feel. 

It is 20:00 pm now in China.  Huobi's clients normally trade heavily until midnight, go to sleep around 01:00 am and wake up before 07:00 am.  Except when the price is changing fast, then many keep trading all night long.

That article, like all the news I have seen, are based on that Caixin article.

A comment on the BTC-e chatroom claimed that the "ban" was mentioned  on state TV, but I could find no confirmation of that.

Why is everybody still saying that Huobi's volume is fake?

The Chinese exchanges -- Huobi. OKCoin, and another dozen that are not in the popular charts -- typically have about 90% of all BTC trade volume in the world.  Even if half of it were fake (and there is no evidence that any of it is) they would still have 80% of all the volume in the world.

Bitstamp and the others are following China down the crash because of arbitrage: traders who buy cheap bitcoins in China and sell them in the West.  Arbitrage effectively makes all markets behave like a single market; and this merged market is perhaps 80% chinese.

Still no new news about the "ban" -- and no denial from PBoC...

3200 was crossed upwards at least five times yesterday, starting at 13:18 UTC.  Why didn't it count?

Googling ' PBoC bitcoin "March 28" ' still does not bring up any news that is not based on the Caixin article.   Anyone found newer news?

Yes, sniff sniff.   And no more Chinese Slumber predictions.   

Perhaps I can still use the method to predict the number of pages in this thread. 

I forgot to put the disclaimer that my predictions are entirely free of charge and worth every cent of it. 

Since I am bound to be hated anyway, why not post this:

  CoinDesk, March 27, 2014 at 19:06 GMT
  Reddit CEO Thinks the World of [ censored ], Slams ‘Crazy’ Bitcoiners
  http://www.coindesk.com/reddit-ceo-thinks-world-dogecoin-slams-crazy-bitcoiners/

And, for those who did not like either my bullish or my bearish predictions, here is the Chinese Slumber Method prediction.  Since the Chinese did not sleep last night, the last data point (3126 CNY) is invalid (W practically zero). So the Method says to stick to the previous trend, which predicts 3667 CNY on Huobi and 600 USD on Bitstamp by Friday March 28 19:00--19:59. 

AFAIK, since the Dec/2013 edicts you basically needed a Chinese bank account to move money (Yuan) in and out of the exchanges.  (IAnd maybe you needed that in order to get an account on the exchange at all?)

From their trade volume pattern, Huobi's clientele seems to be almost entirely Chinese.  OKCoin may have a significant part of the clientele in other time zones.

Huobi's CEO said (a month ago?) that they had about 10,000 active clients.  Not clear what "active" meant.

User @rpietila posted recently an analysis of MtGOX's database leak; IIRC, they had less than 70,000 clients with 0.001 BTC or more in their account.

If you didn't like my bullish 70 USD prediction, here are two bearish ones:

These predictions assume that the ban will only undo the effect of the last rally of Mar/03 and get the price back to the previous trend that has held since Jan/19, apart from a detour in late january.   A possible justification for that trend would be gradual cash-out and exit of traders from the market, due to losses or other reasons, not compensated by the recruitment of new investors.

The black lines assume that the trend is either linear (by now at 2350 CNY) or decaying exponential (2600 CNY).

Of course, in either case, if the trend persists Bitcoin will be dead before the end of the year.  So you probably prefer the 70 USD prediction.