Hey, SecondMarket's Bitcoin Investment Trust updated the "liquidity" paragraph on their page:
It used to say "liquidity to start no later than March 2014", which of course meant March 31st.   Now "as of April 2014" surely means April 30, and "limited basis" presumably means only some investors may be allowed to take out only some of their money.

What a surprise, yawn.  

And they seem to be hoping to avoid liquidity altogether by implying that it is equivalent to allowing investors to sell to other investors, on that specific market.  Of course it is not.

If an investor truly liquidates, BIT has to pay him; if that investor entered in September with 100,000 USD, they have to pay him ~500,000 USD now, and then try to recover that sum by selling the corresponding bitcoins.  They will not be free from this obligation until the BTC price itself goes to zero.

On the other hand, if the investor is told to "liquidate" by trading his shares on the open market, he will have to find another sucker who is willing to but a BIT share for its face value; in which case it is that sucker who pays, and BIT keeps all their money, down to the cent.  If BIT then suspends liquidity indefinitely (as other Bitcoin funds have done before, IIUC), the market price of a BIT share may go to zero, and investors may lose all their money -- even if the BTC price (and therefore the nominal BIT share value) goes to the moon.

Hey, the trust updated the "liquidity" paragraph on their page:
It used to say "no later than March 2014", which of course meant March 31st.  Now "as of April 2014" surely means April 30, and "limited basis" presumably means only some investors may be allowed to take out only some of their money.

And they seem to be hoping to avoid liquidity altogether by implying that it is equivalent to allowing investors to sell to other investors on that specific market.

What a surprise, yawn. 

PS. My tentative explanation for the descending trend is that short-term speculators (especially in China) are becoming tired of bitcoin.

That is understandable, because its price is too unpredictable (they cannot guess where the crashes or rallies will end up, and whether they will have a permanent effect) and generally descending (meaning that losing money is much easier than winning some).

So those speculators are gradually cashing out, usually at a loss, and leaving the market; and not enough new investors are coming in.  Same number of coins in the market, less money = lower price.

If the investment funds were buying, that could be propping the price up.  But with falling BTC price those funds are unattractive, and may start soon (or may already be) selling some of their coins, if investors chose to jump out.  SecondMarket's Bitcoin Investment Trust (BIT) for example was supposed to "start liquidity no later than March 2014".
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=337486.msg3620842#msg3620842

Actually Huobi recovered nicely from the fake news dip; but it was in a descenting trend before that and it continued straight through the dip.  Look at the blue dots in the left plot here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg5829697#msg5829697
If that straight line keeps true, by tonight we should have around 3477 CNY = 566 USD.

They may make money from lending. From Huobi's site (Google Translate, slightly edited):
Huobi at least has fees for withdrawal:
I understand that they issue their own card, good for deposits ("Huobi TOPUP" above).

Their withdrawals seems to be a little bit faster than MtGOX.

Thanks, but the "Pest Control 2000" seem to be ammunition rater than just firecrackers.  That is what I infer from these posts in that blog:




Am I guessing wrong?

That Blammo Ammo company (now apparently called Fun Ammo), makes some rather, uh, "fun" things: http://everything2.com/title/exotic+shotgun+ammo

I have been listing only those that bitcoinwisdom carries.  I could add some from bicoincharts too.  Unfortunately bitcoincharts does not carry any of the big Chinese exchanges, not even Huobi; and 80% of the entries in their menu seem to be dead or insignificant exchanges.

Is there another convenient source for daily volumes?  I don't mind copying by hand from the screen, but would rather not wait a minute for a site to load and then try to find the daily volume in a Thai or Mandarin page.  And I would rather have volumes for UTC days, not local days,

lakeBTC typical volume seems to be 0.6 kBTC, by the way

I didn't state any value, those are the numbers and I believe they are mostly real trades between competing traders.

However, I wrote earlier why I think that those numbers do matter: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg5801780#msg5801780

Zero fees explain the larger volume, but do not make it irrelevant.  If McDonalds had 10 times the sales than Burger King by offering free drinks, this reason  would not make their sales less significant.
 

Today I learned that Roger Ver (aka Bitcoin Jesus, aka The Man Who Assured Us That MtGOX Was Solvent)  served 10 months in jail in 2002 for storing, selling, and mailing explosives without licence.

Yes, I read his version of the story, and several articles defending him, making him a martyr of free spech and such.  Please don't bother to repeat that.

I am posting only to ask if anyone knows exaclty what were the "Pest Control 2000" things that he was selling.  I understand that they were sort of firecrackers that farmers would use to scare birds, but how exactly were they launched?  (I found only a couple posts in one blog that mentioned them, and from the context it seems that they could be launched with a shotgun.) 

Also, how much explosive did those things contain? (According to the ATF charges, Roger described them as "M80"s in the eBay ads, which according to Wikipedia are hefty "firecrackers" containing ~3g of gunpowder.  But that same document seems to say that they are not M80s.  Elsewhere I read that consumer-level fireworks cannot contain more than 0.05g of explosive, except for those with a launching stick.)

Finally, Roger Ver wrote in his version of the story that the company that made those things was only asked to stop making them.  However, those blogposts above seem to say that the comany was closed because of them.  Can anyone confirm that?  Thanks...

The total trade volume today (Fri Mar/21 00:00-23:59 UTC), on the exchanges that I monitor, was ~408 kBTC.  That is almost three times yesterday's volume (139 kBTC) and a little more than twice last Friday's (198).

Volume outside China grew 85% relative to yesterday (from 29 to 54 kBTC) and 186% relative to last Friday's (19 kBTC).  Bitstamp (22 kBTC) and Bitfinex (19) remained at the top, and BTC-e (10) fell further behind them.  CampBX returned to its usual range with 0.07 kBTC, from the freak 0.72 kBTC of yesterday.

Volume in the Chinese exchanges that I monitor increased 223% since yesterday (from 110 to 354 kBTC) and 198% relative to last Friday (179).  OKCoin retained its lead over Huobi (with 54% and 43% of my Chinese total, respectively). 

China's slice of my total volume increased again from 80% to 87%.  Note however that my numbers may be only 2/3 or less than the actual total, with most of the omitted traffic in China.

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

             !    Fri !    Sat !   Sun !    Mon !    Tue !    Wed !    Thu !    Fri !
  EXCHANGE   !  03/14 !  03/15 ! 03/16 !  03/17 !  03/18 !  03/19 !  03/20 !  03/21 ! Currencies considered

  Bitstamp   |   8.68 |   2.20 |  3.30 |   9.17 |  14.90 |   7.08 |  10.90 |  22.40 | USD
  BitFinEx   |   5.53 |   1.74 |  1.90 |   3.76 |   7.74 |   3.44 |   8.10 |  19.20 | USD
  BTC-e      |   3.76 |   2.55 |  2.62 |   3.90 |   7.91 |   5.48 |   7.85 |  10.43 | USD,EUR,RUR
  Kraken     |   0.48 |   0.34 |  0.15 |   0.48 |   0.85 |   0.57 |   0.74 |   1.10 | EUR
  Bitcoin.DE |   0.20 |   0.12 |  0.12 |   0.40 |   0.42 |   0.35 |   0.38 |   0.43 | EUR
  CaVirtEx   |   0.11 |   0.06 |  0.06 |   0.10 |   0.10 |   0.13 |   0.40 |   0.14 | CAD
  CampBX     |   0.06 |   0.03 |  0.02 |   0.07 |   0.32 |   0.06 |   0.72 |   0.07 | USD

  SUBTOTAL   |  18.82 |   7.04 |  8.17 |  17.88 |  32.24 |  17.11 |  29.09 |  53.77 |

  OKCoin     |  97.80 |  55.40 | 40.00 |  59.00 |  82.70 |  95.00 |  58.30 | 190.00 | CNY
  Huobi      |  78.40 |  36.50 | 27.00 |  63.80 |  84.10 |  62.40 |  48.10 | 154.00 | CNY
  BTC-China  |   2.97 |   1.13 |  1.51 |   2.74 |   3.70 |   3.79 |   2.85 |   9.79 | CNY
  Bter       |   0.19 |   0.35 |  0.28 |   0.34 |   0.27 |   0.35 |   0.36 |   0.66 | CNY

  SUBTOTAL   | 179.36 |  93.38 | 68.79 | 125.88 | 170.77 | 161.54 | 109.61 | 354.45 |

  TOTAL      | 198.18 | 100.42 | 76.96 | 143.76 | 203.01 | 178.65 | 138.70 | 408.22 |

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.

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.)

NOTE: 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.

You are counting on there being another rally like Jan-Mar/2013 and Oct-Nov/2013.  But in each case there were at least 5 months of stagnation between the previous rally-and-crash and the start of the new rally.  So if the future is to be like the past, the next rally should not begin until Jun/2014.

(But the past price history is irrelevant, unfortunately.  The price is determined by supply and demand, which are in turn determined by intangibles like public view of bitcoin.  There is no reason to expect that they will change in the future like they have in the past.

My "Slumber Method"  tries to measure some of those inrangibles, but I count it a great success when a trend persists over 4-5 days.

An exponential rally in the price of some commodity  is usually due to "infectious" growth of demand, typically when a new market is opened.  There may be another big market opening, or there may be not...)

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Saturday March 22

Prediction valid for: Saturday 2014-03-22, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 3447 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 566 USD.



The red and green strokes are actual hourly prices (Huobi on the left, Bitstamp on the right).  The magenta square at right is the above prediction.  The blue square next to it is the last prediction (see below). The light blue-gray squares are the older predictions.   The blue dots are the Slumber Points, the mean prices ((L+H)/2) in the interval 19:00--19:59 UTC every day. On the Huobi plot, the size of the Albertosaurus under each dot indicates the night-time activity at Huobi. Specifically, the area of the reptile is proportional S = V_h/V_d, where V_h is Huobi's mean hourly volume in the three hour period 18:00--20:59 UTC (02:00am--04:59am China time), and V_d is Huobi's daily volume 00:00--23:59 UTC on the same date.  The largest Albertosauri correspond to the S = 0.010 or greater.   The size of each blue dot (on both plots) is proportional to its reliability weight, computed from Huobi's ratio S.  The brown lines on Huobi's plot are trends fitted a posteriori to the Slumber Points. The orange line is the trend assumed for the Huobi prediction above.

The trend assuemd now is the straight line A + B*(d-d0) where d is the day of the month, d0 = 19, A = 3745.85, B = -99.49, fitted by weighted least squares to the points Mar/19--21.  (It seems that there was indeed a break in the trend between Mar/18 and Mar/19, as suspected yesterday.)

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which today was 6.09 CNY/USD.

Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Friday 2014-03-21, 00:02 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Friday 2014-03-21, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~19.5 hours later)

Huobi's predicted price: 3630 CNY.
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 3547 CNY
Error: 83 CNY (~14 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 591 USD.
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 582 USD
Error: 9 USD

NOTE: By my count I still have 1 Note credit, so there is no Note today.

Oh, indeed. Thanks!

Where are you seeing that "drop to 1 CNY"? Looking at bitcoinwisdom now, I do not see it.  The lows I can see are

Huobi:     3213.1 CNY
OKCoin:    2653.9
Bter:      3011.0
BTC-China: 3301.0

Did someone doctor the logs?

I have been doing a lot of numerical analysis so I find that an interesting problem.  But I was originally drawn to bitcoin because of my occasional role as public advocate in computer-related issues, such as electronic voting, privacy, copyright...

Sorry, I am a computer scientist, not an economist...

I wonder how this general situation is handled in general.

Suppose that an investor X puts 1000$ into a fund; after a year the management tells X that his shares of the fund are now worth 3000$; then the fund goes bankrupt.  How much can X claim to be owed, 1000$ or 3000$?

In my limited experience with civil claims, I would think that the courts do not count as the plaintiff´s losses any profits that he could have earned if either party had acted differently; they only count definite losses.  Thus, my understanding is that X above could claim only the 1000$ that he invested, not the 2000$ that he thought he had. 

If that is indeed the logic that the MtGOX bankruptcy court follows, then it would disregard all trades that happened inside MtGOX, and consider only how much each client deposited and withdrew, using the USD and BTC price at the time of deposit or withdrawal to convert everything to yen.

But I do not know if that is the case, really.  Does anyone know?

If I understood correctly, that Fox video and today's net news say that Second Market plans to create or enable a market for shares of their Bitcoin Investment Trust, and/or open the trust to ordinary investors, by the fourth quarter of this year.

Neither of those things seems to be related to the statement on their site that "liquidity should begin no later than March 2014".  Have they said anything about this?