Not me!

Yes, I meant old OKCoin/Mainland (BTC x CNY) closing in favor of OKCoin/International (BTC x USD).

They only need to increase the volume on the latter by a factor of 1000 or so. 

(But I hope that they both fail, so that their owners will learn to pick less confusing names next time  )

Indeed, after MtGox had suspended withdrawals and its price was falling fast, someone bragged on this forum that he had deposited 50'000 USD in there, to scoop up those cheap coins.

At least one serious crime appears to have been commited at MtGox: allowing clients to deposit even after it was known to be insolvent.  (If Sunlot or some other "rescuer"  succeeds in acquiring MtGox, and thus derailing the bankruptcy process, that and other eventual crimes will not be investigated and their authors will go unpunished.  No wonder the former management supports those takeover plans.)  Did Intersango do the same?

OKCoin (mainland) seems to have detached from Huobi (it is ~12 CNY lower now, used to be only 203 CNY apart) and has very sparse order book.  Its volume has recovered (~43 kBTC yestertday Jul/24), but that is still at the low end of its former range, and very low for a "dumping day".  Is it on its way to closure?

Just to let you know, if you don't know it already, that OKCoin has opened their International section (http://www.okcoin.com, separate from the Mainland site http://www.okcoin.cn),
trading BTCxUSD and LTCxUSD.

However their volume is still tiny (less than 30 BTC -- not kBTC -- in the last 24 hours).  The order book is not visible to unregistered readers it seems.

The drop happened on July 24 09:00 UTC (17:00 in China), 7 hours after OKCoin opened its International section (July 24 10:00 am in China, 02:00 UTC).  The BTC:USD price there opened at 606$ and fell almost immediately to 596$: https://www.okcoin.com/ (wait for the plot to show up). 

However the volume of the latter is still tiny (24 BTC in the last 24 hours).  Apart from the 7 hour delay, the drop could not have been due to people selling their coins there.

But perhaps the end-of-May rise was due to Mainland Chinese traders stocking up in bitcoin in antecipation of the launch; and the drop was due to some of them realizing that OKCoin/International was not what they expected it to be, for some reason, and dumping their coins back into the Mainland market?  Perhaps they had not realized that they needed to re-register, and maybe get over some legal obstacles?

A nomenclature question: bulls believe the price will go up, bears believe that it will go down.  What animal believes that the price will not change?

Sorry if it sounded that way.  I meant other LA countries except Ecuador are just "let's wait and see what the US does".

Ecuador may not be a technology hub, but the current government seems to be smarter than average about cyberthings.  Ecuador gave asylum to Assange, for example, while many other countries that should have helped him (including Brazil) were still uncertain about their view of Wikileaks. 

The policy of Brazil and other LA countries towards bitcoin seems to be "er, we don't understand it well, let's follow the US and hope it works out".   And the US is strangely sympathetic to bitcoin, I wonder why.  However Brazil, like most countries, has laws that prohibit the use of currencies other than the Real in retail commerce and other contexts.  It is likely those countries will some day apply those laws to crypto, too.

Ecuador is just ahead of them in having a plan for a national digital currency.  In my understanding, that prmompted them to explicily restate those laws for digital currencies too.

Did you mean this list, linked from the CoinDesk article? https://angel.co/bitcoin-opportunity-corp

[troll]Or Realcoin?  [/troll]

That is just what the public announcement says.  You cannot take such announcements at face value.  He may have been fired or he may have left, for any of many reasons.

Hm, the listed 24h volume at the recently-opened International OKCoin is a whopping 7.6 BTC (note, not "kBTC").  On second thoughts, maybe that opening did not cause the drop. 

(The BitVC site gives 23.7 kBTC as 24h volume, but that seems to include both BitVC and the Mainland Huobi.)

I actually liked the color change.  

The red/green coloring is traditionally based on the daily open/close prices, which are important for stock traders since there is a long time gap (16 h or more) between successive candles.  The close price gives the best estimate for the price during that gap, and the opening price reflects all the news that may have come out during the gap.

However, open/close are largely irrelevant for shorter or longer time intervals, of for markets (like bitcoin exchanges) that operate 24/7.   In these situations, open and close prices are not particularly special, they are the prices of two random trades that happened to occur at particular moments.  Individual trades are much less significant than the weighted mean of all trades in the interval.  With bitcoin, it often happens that the mean price is steadily falling, but many of the candles are green; or vice-versa.

A more significant use of red/green coloring could be based on the weighted mean slope during the interval, found by lienar regression of the trade prices in that range, of from the diference of the mean prices in the two adjacent intervals.   But I think that is superfluous: looking at the all-blue plot, it is obvious whether the price is rising, falling, or wandering about.

Note that "accepting payments in BTC" does not mean "keeping BTC" much less "doing the accounting in BTC".

I am pretty sure that Dell (and 99% of other companies who "accept BTC") do all their accounting in dollars (or the appropriate national currency).  For example, Dell will refund defective products only in dollars, even if you paid in BTC.  Even if some companies keep some of their spare cash reserves invested in BTC, they would account for that investment in thei budgets and audits as they would account any other variable-value investment -- namely, by listing its current market value in dollars.

And in fact most of those established companies that "accept BTC" actually use BitPay or Coinbase, whose main function is to convert the bitcoins into dollars so that the merchant can receive dollars.  Why would them use those services if they really wanted to get BTC?  They could just post the price in BTC and give a blockchain address for payment.  But instead they list the price in dollars, and let the payment processor deal with the conversion.

With few exceptions, the only companies that I know that actually accept payment or investment in bitcoins are startups by bitcoin enthusiasts -- like Trezor, BFL, AMT, Neo & Bee,  ...

Indeed, it was announced not long ago. (And Huobi has BitVC, too.)

It is possible that the rise at the end of May was Chinese traders buying BTC in antecipation of these "overseas Chinese" exchanges opening.

And today's drop may have been people finally being able to move those BTC to the overseas OKCoin and sell them for USD.  Too many of them at the same time?

(Presumably OKCoin is open to anyone, while BitVC is still by invitation, AFAIK.)

Sorry about the currency mistake.  (Inexcusable, since I still have some Czech banknotes somewhere here in my office, mementos of a conference in Plzeň some years ago...)

But the accounting part is very serious.

The ~1% yearly inflation of dollars and euros is already a complication for accounting; but if it is ignored it the errors are of that magnitude, and therefore are not likely to affect the company's financial planning -- e.g. how much to charge for the product in order to make a profit of about 10%.

The month-to-month variation in the value of BTC, on the other hand, is MUCH too large to ignore.  You cannot do a budget in BTC, to plan for a 10% profit, if the unit of accounting may be worth 100$ when your client prepays, 1200$ when you close a deal with a supplier,  800$ when you pay him, 400$ when you ship the unit, and 600$ when the client returns it for refund.  

Budgeting in BTC is MUCH worse than a building contractor using "strides", "spans", "arm lengths", and "car widths" in his engineering plans.  Much wose even than trying to build an airplane with a measuring tape made of latex. (Can latex can stretch to 12 times its rest length?)

In their website they tell how they first looked for a manufacturer of the plastic case that would accept payment in bitcoin.  But in the end the guy did not deliver, so they had to look for another one, presumably paying in euros.

Any company that does its accounting in bitcoin is obviously inpcompetent at managing its money.  We leave it as an exercise to compute the probability that it will deliver what it promises to its clients.  Extra credit for figuring out how many months it will take to go bankrupt.

Huobi has just reformulated their wepage and trading interface:
https://www.huobi.com/news/index.php?a=show_notice&id=445
I hope they tested it before putting it in use... 

Hm, isn't it rather the use of wildcard words like 'it', 'so', 'that', etc. in place of words and phrases that were explictly used earlier in the discourse?