Your comment is advanced. I was merely pointing out a small logical gap between "number of wallets" and "actual usage".

Your wallet app automatically creates 100'000 new wallets every time you use it, to inflate the app's usage statistics. 

Does that mean that in 2033 every bitcoin user will own 2.56 billion wallets? Why would he need that? 


 

Note that those "Chinese Slumber" predictions are tests of a conjecture about the Huobi prices at late night local time being more predictable than prices at other exchanges or other times, or daily mean prices.  They are not meant to be taken as trading advice; readers beware.

That said, the prediction is at the top of the post: it says that the price at Huobi at the stated hour (~19:30 UTC) will be 2837 CNY, sightly higher than the last price at the same hour (2818 CNY).  The method does not try to predict the price between those two moments.

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Friday May 02

Prediction valid for: Friday 2014-05-02, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2837 CNY
Bitstamp's predicted price: 461 USD





[ Plot legend ]

Today's data point was again quite good (S = 0.0032, W = 0.812), but still a little above the previous trend line (by 16 CNY).  The last four points Apr/28--May/01 still fit fairly well a shifted decaying exponential A + B*Q**(d-D0), where (d-D0) is the number of days since Apr/28, A = 2913.63, B = -197.68, and Q = 0.789.  (This trend is closer to a straight line than the previous one.)

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which was assumed to be 6.15 CNY/USD. It was 6.11 on May 1st, 6.22 on Apr/30, and 6.25 on Apr/29.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Thursday 2014-05-01, 02:52 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Thursday 2014-05-01, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~16 hours later)

The prediction for Huobi was fairly good, only a bit too pessimistic:

Huobi's predicted price: 2802 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2818 CNY
Error: 16 CNY (~2.60 USD)

The prediction for Bitstamp was further off, due to a change in the R factor:

Bitstamp's predicted price: 450 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 461 USD
Error: 11 USD
 
NOTE:
  "I hate spinach. That's good, because, if I loved spinach, I would eat it, and I hate it."
      -- Prudhomme

Thanks for searching the archive.  The pages I mentioned were at that URL on 2014-03-12, but unfortunately were either taken down that same day, or were purged later from the Web Archive.

Here is a post to another thread that mentions that analysis: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg5665606#msg5665606

I suppose that the price quoted at the exchange is always that of the LAST trade that was executed.

Thanks.  I admit that I have a vey foggy (to be generous) idea of what people here mean by the term "Wall Street".   I though that "Wall Street investing in bitcoin " meant companies like Fortress buying bitcoins as an asset that they expected to increase in value, just as they could invest in gold.

By the way, about mining: China's foreign trade balance could profit from it in two ways, by mining bitcoins that they could sell in the West for dollars, and by selling hardware to miners.  Are there estimates of how much (dollars) those activities amount to?

I don't see Wall Street investing in bitcoins yet.

Bitcoin funds like SecondMarket's BIT and Pantera PBP are ventures that allow Wall Street types to skim off fees and possibly other gains from people who want to invest in bitcoins.  In these ventures, the random Joes who put money in the fund take all the risk of bitcoin's price falling, while the fund managers have guaranteed profit whatever happens to it.

The Fortress group just swapped their direct investment in bitcoins, that was a red stain in their quarterly reports, by a stake in Pantera's fund management company.

Bitpay and exchanges also have attracted the attention of investors, for the same reason: they are not investment in bitcoin, but in businesses that make money out of people who use, speculate with, or invest in bitcoin.

But of course those companies will make more profit if more random Joes are convinced to use or invest in bitcoin.  And those people who already have big hoards of bitcoin want the price to go up, which will only happen if more people buy it. Hence all the marketing hype...

As for China, their Central Bank does not care about bitcoin since it now cannot be used for commerce or finance.  But apparently the government is still worried about the exchanges being used for illegal payments, hence the decision to cut their easy money input/output channels (banks and payment processors).

Governments will not go out of their way to notify people of such auctions.  They list them in some obscure site or government publication. There are people who make good money by scanning those places every day, showing up at those auctions, and re-selling the goods they buy on the market with large profit margins.  Since the government officials do not get to keep any of that money, they have little incentive to get better prices.  As long as there are a few bids for each item, they have done their job, and that is all they care.

EDIT: the auctions may also be run by private companies under contract by the government, in which case foul play and kickbacks are much "safer" and therefore likely.


AFAIK none of the Silk Road coins have been auctioned yet; the court authorized the sale only recently, and appeals may still be possible.  It is not clear that those 3 M$ of "seized revenue" from the Slomp/J case were bitcoins.  In the accounts I read the police did not said so.  The reporter may have guessed that they seized bitcoins and exchanged for cash;  but would be very strange for the police to sell the coins (or any merchandise) before even arresting the man and filing the charges against him.  The seized "proceeds" may have been dollars or foreign currency (which they are allowed to exchange for dollars immediately, I believe).

Thanks!  But the Google Translate output is confusing; I cannot tell whether it is about OKCoin's bank account, or a customer worried that his personal bank account could be closed for having used it to deposit into OKCoin.  If you read Chinese, can you confirm that the question and answer refer to OKCoin's account? 

Where was this posted? (Is it indeed from OKCoin?)

Bitcoin trading does not per se inject money into the market, nor does it change the market cap (= number of existing coins times the market price of one coin).  The coins and the yuan simply exchange hands. 

By the way, that same headline could have been phrased as "unnown investor decides to dump 40k bitcoins" 

The database has been saved by many people I suppose (but not me, sorry) and may be still available; google for "Mt.GOX leak".

The site was http://mark-karpeles.com/ but that URL now points to a form ostensibly created by Mark Karpeles for clients to confirm their claims against MtGOX.  Careful, it smells of a phishing attempt and it may be illegal since creditors should probably contact the bankruptcy court/executors rather than the unknown author of a dubious webpage.

Yes, definitely, that is what I meant.  If MtGOX is revived, by Sunlot or any other party, it is very unlikely that the new management will solve the crime. Even less likely than the intenet detectives.

The police can get subpoena all the internal accounting records, emails, and bank records of MtGOX and any persons they have evidence to suspect.  They can get connection logs and access non-public databases of various relevant data.  These things alone gives them immensurably more chances of finding the culprit than all the internet detectives put together.

A hired expert will have access to all that data.  Plus he will have the obligation to work hard to get to the bottom of things and avoid half-baked conclusions, PLUS he will not have to fear being sued by the people he finds evidence against, PLUS he will not be easily bribed by guilty parties.  (Soon after the MtGOX database leak, a website came up that posted some tantalising results, such as the identities of the most successful traders.  The website was suddenly taken down by the author without explanation.)

I repeat my question: what useful results have the crowd detectives obtained so far, in this or in any other bitcoin scam?

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Thursday May 01

Prediction valid for: Thursday 2014-05-01, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2802 CNY
Bitstamp's predicted price: 450 USD





[ Plot legend ]

Today's data point was quite good (S = 0.0028, W = 0.851), but again below the previous trend line (by 67 CNY).  It is now clear that tere was a break in the trend between Apr/27 and Apr/28 (or, rather, there was no clear trend from Apr/25 to Apr/27).  The last three points Apr/28--30 are good and define a shifted decaying exponential A + B * Q**(d-D0), where (d-D0) is the number of days since Apr/28, A = 2820.80, B = -105.80, and Q = 0.56522.

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which was assumed to be 6.23 CNY/USD. It was 6.22 on Apr/30 and 6.25 on Apr/29.
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Wednesday 2014-04-30, 02:26 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Wednesday 2014-04-30, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~16 hours later)

The prediction was again too pessimistic because it did not detect the break in the trend:

Huobi's predicted price: 2720 CNY
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2787 CNY
Error: 67 CNY (~11 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 439 USD
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 448 USD
Error: 9 USD
 
NOTE:
  "Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a
  mistake when you make it again."  -- F. P. Jones

Shun advice
at any price -
that's what I call
good advice.
-- Piet Hein, /Grooks/

Opening and closing prices are a hangover from stock exchanges, where trading only happens during business hours of business days.  They are important when displaying daily prices, because between one day and the next there is a big gap, so the last price before the gap is important for the duration of the gap, and the price may change considerably during the gap because of news etc..   The very names "opening" and "closing" originally referred to the exchange hours.

Bitcoin however is traded continuously 24/7, so opening and closing prices are no more special than the prices of any two consecutive trades anytime.  Charts should have options to omit them and display only high&low and/or mean price in the interval.   [troll]But bitcoiners in general lack the mental agility that would be needed to adapt to this departure from old established tradition.[/troll]

In bitcoinwisdom one can get HL-only candles by choosing the OHLC option and rolling the thumbwheel to get 1-pixel candles. The only single-trade price that matters, most of the time, is that of the most recent trade (the current price"); in bitcoinwisdom it is shown by the black triangle at right with 30m or smaller intervals.

Volume bars in bitcoinwisdom (and bitcoincharts, and presumably most charts) are red iff the corresponding candle is red, that is, the price of the last trade in that interval is less than the first trade