Well, the situation may not be so simple. LTC trading on Huobi may have made a difference if the fees and other facilities are different from those of other exchanges, or if they have lazy/loyal customers who would trade LTC but not on a different exchange.

I understood (through Google translate) that Huobi had some special one-time offer to encourage LTC trading. Does anyone know for sure?

(The bitcoin press, like Coindesk, should have thoroughly analyzed those details beforehand for their readers.  But they barely acknowledge that China exists...)

Another freak transaction on Huobi: a small trade at 3799 CNY at 13:08:11 UTC, at a time when the spread was around 3729.  A bug? An internal manual fix?

What you mean by "second fiat"?

In countries with very high inflation (and I mean VERY high - much more than 10%/year) the USD may be commonly used in commerce instead of the national currency.  I gather that such is the case of Venezuela now, maybe of Argentina at times.

Brazil had very high inflation in the 1980s but even then the USD was not commonly used. Since the early 1990s the currency is fairly stable, and people do not use USD, or think prices in USD, except when importing items.

Russia and China, and perhaps also India, have banned crypto-currencies from commerce. I do not see them reversing their position anytime soon.

Huobi is undergoing a micro-crash. Trading suddenly and almost completely stopped for 4-5 minutes just before that, and it still seems to be hiccupping. DDOS? Overload?

It is 14:00 in China, so Huobi must have started trading LTC.  Their BTC price dropped a little,  volume seems to have doubled, but all within the usual volatility...

Thanks!

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

             !    Tue !    Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !   Sun !    Mon !    Tue !                     
  EXCHANGE   !  03/11 !  03/12 !  03/13 !  03/14 !  03/15 ! 03/16 !  03/17 !  03/18 ! Currencies considered

  Bitstamp   |   9.17 |  12.70 |   6.73 |   8.68 |   2.20 |  3.30 |   9.17 |  14.90 | USD                 
  BTC-e      |   5.09 |   7.96 |   7.43 |   3.76 |   2.55 |  2.62 |   3.90 |   7.91 | USD,EUR,RUR         
  BitFinEx   |   3.63 |   7.29 |   3.31 |   5.53 |   1.74 |  1.90 |   3.76 |   7.74 | USD                 
  Kraken     |   0.45 |   0.56 |   0.40 |   0.48 |   0.34 |  0.15 |   0.48 |   0.85 | EUR                 
  Bitcoin.DE |   0.41 |   0.37 |   0.35 |   0.20 |   0.12 |  0.12 |   0.40 |   0.42 | EUR                 
  CampBX     |   0.06 |   0.04 |   0.03 |   0.06 |   0.03 |  0.02 |   0.07 |   0.32 | USD                 
  CaVirtEx   |   0.18 |   0.13 |   0.13 |   0.11 |   0.06 |  0.06 |   0.10 |   0.10 | CAD                 

  SUBTOTAL   |  18.99 |  29.05 |  18.38 |  18.82 |   7.04 |  8.17 |  17.88 |  32.24 |                     

  Huobi      |  55.00 |  77.90 |  65.40 |  78.40 |  36.50 | 27.00 |  63.80 |  84.10 | CNY                 
  OKCoin     |  68.50 |  90.60 |  60.70 |  97.80 |  55.40 | 40.00 |  59.00 |  82.70 | CNY                 
  BTC-China  |   3.11 |   3.16 |   2.89 |   2.97 |   1.13 |  1.51 |   2.74 |   3.70 | CNY                 
  Bter       |   0.34 |   0.49 |   0.26 |   0.19 |   0.35 |  0.28 |   0.34 |   0.27 | CNY                 

  SUBTOTAL   | 126.95 | 172.15 | 129.25 | 179.36 |  93.38 | 68.79 | 125.88 | 170.77 |                     

  TOTAL      | 145.94 | 201.20 | 147.63 | 198.18 | 100.42 | 76.96 | 143.76 | 203.01 |                     

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.

Bitfinex is based in Hong Kong, but it apparently deals with USD rather than CNY.  Is this correct?  Is it reasonable to consider it a "non-Chinese" exchange?

Chinese Dinosaur Slumber Method prediction for Wednesday Mar/19

(It already looks like this prediction will be wrong by a mile, but anyway...)

Prediction valid for: Wednesday 2014-03-19, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 3699 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 610 USD.


The red and green strokes are actual Huobi hourly prices.  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 Huobi prices ((L+H)/2) in the interval 19:00--19:59 UTC every day. 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 the mean hourly volume in the three hour period 18:00--20:59 UTC (02:00am--04:59am China time), and V_d is the 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 is proportional to its reliability weight, computed from the ratio S.  The grey lines are trends fitted a posteriori to the Slumber Points. The orange line is the trend assumed for the above prediction.

The trend used is a shifted exponential A + B*Q**(d-d0) where d is the day of the month, d0 = 16, A = 3681.68, B = 160.32, Q = 0.476.

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which these days seems to be around 6.06 CNY/USD.

Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Tuesday 2014-03-17, 06:05 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Tuesday 2014-03-17, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~13 hours later)

Huobi's predicted price: 3674 CNY.
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 3718 CNY
Error: 44 CNY (~7 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 606 USD.
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 614 USD
Error: 8 USD

NOTE 1: Read Note 2.

NOTE 2: Ignore Note 1.

NOTE 3: Aren't you glad that Note 2 did not tell you to re-read Note 1?

Ok, since the UTC idea is already taken, my plan now is to convince Dogecoin, Bitcoin and Litecoin to merge their blockhains to create the DogBiteCoin.   

According to the table posted by @manfred earlier today, Huobi is the only Chinese exchange that does NOT offer LTC.

Thus the impact of Huobi starting to trade LTC is uncertain.  It seems to have caused the recent drop, but why? (Is there any other explanation for the drop?)

Perhaps it has affected and will affect only the traders that would like to trade LTC, but are too lazy, or too fond of Huobi, to use some other exchange.  There may be enough of them to make a difference.

Perhaps trading LTC on Huobi has special advantages.  How are the fees on other exchanges?

According to Google Translate, item 2 on Huobi's LTC info page seemed to say that there will be some bonus for Huobi customers who will start trading LTC (IIRC; I am unable to get the page now, server overloaded?).

EDIT: got the page.  That, and item 1 says there will be an LTC lottery too.

DARN! 

I just thought of creating my own coin called UlimateCoin or UltraCoin or UtmostCoin or etc..

Then sit back and enjoy watching the general confusion whenever people use the acronym "UTC". 

I thought that you may be interested in this table:

Sounds good, but why put the closing price in the formula? You could use  the  geometric mean of L and H
instead, namely m = sqrt(H*L).  Then your indicator would be
   d = log10(H/m) = log10(m/L) = (log10(H)-log10(L))/2 = log10(sqrt(H/L))
That is simply the half-width of the [L,H] interval in log scale. 

To make the number easier to understand you could convert it back from log scale to linear,
namely use D = 100(10^d - 1) = 100(exp(ln(10)*d) - 1).
That is simply he percentual increase of H relative to m (or of m relative to L).

In any case, it would be very interesting to plot your indicator as a function of the time span considered to compute H and L (hour, day, month, year).  The shape of that plot should be related to the fractal dimension of the price plot.

It is already March 19 in China, but maybe LTC trading will start only at 14:00 CST (March 19 06:00 UTC).  That is what I could barely decipher from Google Translate's  output:

https://www.huobi.com/topic/index.php?a=ltcshangxian

"lái tè" 莱特 I suppose is a phonetic imitation of "Lite" (and also of the name "Wright"); Litecoin would be "lái tè bì" 莱特币 then, as in "Huǒ bì" 火币 = "Hot coin" or "Fiery coin"

Perhaps.  The fund seems to be rather opaque at this point.


My point was that they could lower the BTC market price temporarily so as to reduce the money they must pay to the liquidating investors.  Then they lift the market price again and only THEN sell the coins corresponding to the liquidated shares (slowly, or off-market), thus making a nice profit.  This could work only because their BTC holdings are large compared to the market's  liquidity (I think).

I believe that BIT has the means and stated intention of being flexible in their trading of bitcoins.  If they have some extra BTC reserve, they can accept a new investment immediately, backing it with their reserve, and later replenish the reserve at the best price they can.  Similarly for liquidation.

No, on their site they explicitly warn prospective investors that such a market for BIT shares is not in their plans, and none may develop. 

I understand that "liquidity" for an investment fund means just what I described, the investor can take money out from the fund (at the current share price) and give up his shares.  Am I wrong?

That has nothing to do with the issue.

What that "100% backed in BTC" promise means is that, for each share held by investors, BIT will keep 0.1 BTC in its posession.  It does not mean that BIT must sell those BTC when the investor liquidates; if BIT has cash reserves, it can just pay the investor from those and keep the corresponding BTCs as reserve instead. That would not violate the "100% backed by BTC" promise to other investors, on the contrary.

(The whole point of the trust is to insulate the investors from the BTC trading that BIT must do to honor BIT's part of the contract.)

I don't undertsand your remark. I stated a fact (AFAIK, read it here) and asked a factual question. No opinions there.

By the way, zebras are notorious for being impossible to tame. You can't take them for a ride.