But if the court says that the intervention should continue, the receiver will continue his search for BFL assets, correct?

That @bcp19 guy has a point.  This thread is getting very tiresome to read, with all that content-free bickering, irrelevant pics, long quotes and re-quotes and re-re-re-re-re-quotes,  multiple reposts of mile-long email and skype transcripts, adolescent obscenities... I wonder if the FTC still has the stomach to read it...

Please note that

* The readers of this thread who matter are the authorities, the BFL victims, and prospective BFL clients.  The latter will probably read only page 1, so that page should have a short and objective summary of the situation, updated as needed. The other two classes of readers will appreciate if the dicussion is as succint, focused, and dispassionate as possible,

* if you post insults, the BFL guys can respond with insults.  If you post facts, they will be unable to respond.

* "Crowd detectives" may uncover important clues, but only law enforcement can confirm them. The important thing is to bring the clues to their attention.

* If criminal fraud charges are brought to court, "SLoK" may be involved for his help in suppressing criticism on the BFL forums, etc.. For the civil case, the important question is whether and how he was paid for his services. In particular, whether he got machines that should have gone to clients, and (like others at BFL) whether he pocketed bitcoins that rightfully belong to said clients.  Hunting him down through the internet may be fun, but Josh has this information, and maybe @bcp19 has it too; the FTC and the Court should ask them, under oath.

Something to do with the standard model of subatomic dairy particles perhaps?

Comparing prices among some exchanges

The goal of this exercise was to compare the prices on major exchanges over time, trying to filter out daily variations.

For this goal, I collected from the ste bitcoincharts.com the daily prices at six major exchanges available there:

  MGOX 2010-07-17 -- 2014-02-25 MtGOX     
  BTCE 2011-08-14 -- 2014-11-27 BTC-e     
  BSTP 2011-09-13 -- 2014-11-27 Bitstamp  
  BFNX 2013-03-31 -- 2014-11-27 Bitfinex  
  BTCC 2011-06-13 -- 2014-11-27 BTC-China 
  OKCO 2013-06-12 -- 2014-11-27 OKCoin.cn

Specifically, for each exchange, I used the average of the trade prices within each UTC day, weighted by the trade volumes. These prices were smoothed with a 29-day Hahn window, and interpolated over small gaps by weighted linear regression in that window. See the plot below.


[ click on the image for a full-size version. ]



In this plot, for easier comparison, the prices at BTC-China and OKCoin were divided by 6.18, the mean CNY:USD currency rate since April 2014.

Initial inflation

Note that, when each of those exchanges opened, its price was significantly above the others for some time.  A possible explanation is that their initial clients include many enthusiastic but novice traders, who had not yet learned to compare prices among exchanges.  The only exception is BTC-e, which has been somewaht lower than the others, most of the time.

Reference price

To compare the prices of those six exchanges, I had to pick a reference price.  None of those exchanges existed over the complete time interval spanend by the data, from 2010-07-17 to 2014-11-27.  Moreover, every one of them was clearly "deviant" at some time or another.

For example, it is well-known that MtGOX's price was well above market  A visual comparison of the plots show that the discrepancy started around 2013-04-01:  


[ click on the image for a full-size version ]

It turns out that, between May/2012 and Jan/2013, the prices of MtGOX and Bitstamp are fairly close.   Therefore, I decided to set the (smoothed) reference price as being the (smoothed) MtGOX price before 2012-05-01 and the (smoothed) Bitstamp price after 2013-01-31, with a gradual transition between the two (a weighted mean of the two, with shifted-sine weight).

Relative prices

The following plot shows the ratios of the (smoothed) price at each exchange to the (smoothed) reference price defined as above:


[ click on the image for a full-size version ]

Comments

Note that BTC-e was below the MtGOX/Bitstamp reference most of the time. Also, except at the opening in April 2013, Bitfinex has always been
always almost identical to Bitstamp.

The BTC:CNY prices in BTC-China and OKCoin were quite close, except for a couple of weeks after OKCoin opened on 2013-06-12.  However, both varied significantly relative to the MtGOX/Bitstamp reference.

Specifically, the price in China was significantly higher than normal during the ascending phases of the bubbles that peaked on 2012-06-01,
2012-10-01, 2013-04-09, 2013-11-29.  The Chinese prices sharply dropped in the descending phases of those bubbles, particularly around 2013-06-01 and 2013-12-20. This behavior is consistent with the theory that those bubbles were created by the opening of markets in China, and markets outside China struggled to follow.

On the other hand, the prices at BTC-China were higher than normal also from 2011-07-01 to 2012-01, and around 2013-06-15, when the price was falling. That may indicate that those drops of the price were due to loss of demand (or increased offer) outside China, and BTC-China lagged behind.

Data files

Raw volumes and smoothed prices. The data fields (ignoring the "|" separators) are the UTC date and the start UTC hour of the sampling interval (always "00:00:00" hour), and then, for each of the six exchanges: the day's traded volume in the national currency, the day's traded volume in BTC, and the smoothed mean trade price. Zero values are missing data.

Relative smoothed prices. The data fields are the date and time as above, the smoothed reference price (smooth splice of MtGOX and Bitstamp prices), and then, for each exchange, the ratio of its smoothed mean price to the smoothed reference price.  Zero relative prices indicate missing data.

Well, not to say anything about Josh, but some friends who worked at Intel tell me that its president had a cubicle too, like any other employee.

Don't know whether my friends were exaggerating a little, but, based on my limited experience in the US, I believe that American CEOs who are really big don't feel that they need to assert their status by having a fancy office.

Why do you say so? That Shane guy seems to have a real solid career, why would he write the sort of posts that TekHed posted?

The USMS explicitly says in the announcement that they will not publish any information about the outcome, other than notifying winners and losers privately. 

At least one person (@BurtW, IIRC) filed a FOIA request to get the closing price of the previous auction; but I haven't seen any result from that.

(Seized stuff becomes property of the US government, that is, of the US citizens. One would think that they should have the right to know the price, at least, when some of their property gets sold by the USMS.  But they do not seem to care about their rights when they vote...)

That is stated in the auction announcement somewhere.  IIRC, after being notified, the winner has a day or two to wire in the payment, then the USMS has a few days more to transfer the coins.  If the winner fails to pay by the established deadline, then the next one is called and given the same time to do so, and so on.

The price dropped ~50 dollars on June 13, when the previous auction was announced; and immediately recovered when it became known that a single bidder had bought all the coins.  Most people concluded from that fact that the closing price was above market.  Tim Draper's statements further reassured them that the coins would not be dumped on the open market.

I did not see any significant drop this time.  Perhaps the market now assumes that such auctions will have no net effect, and ignores them.

On the other hand, there is no guarantee that all the coins will again be scooped by a single bidder.  So far, Tim Draper got a huge paper loss on that purchase, and it seems that he will only enter a syndicate this time (meaning that he intends to bid for less than one lot).  Some of these 50'000 coins may be bought, well below-market, by short-term traders who will promptly dump them for quick profit.  If the coins go to several bidders, the mere suspicion that some may be dumpers may be enough to trigger a drop.

I have never claimed that the price will not reach new highs.

I still believe that bitcoin will never become a significant currency, and its price will eventually drop to zero, as its intended role will be filled by some other instruments.  I think that it will survive for another few years, at least.  However, I would not risk guessing what the price will do until then, neither in the next few hours or the next couple of years.

There may still be another 10x bubble, even this year, who knows.  We just saw the price jump 90 dollars in 2 days because of an ambiguous sentence by that OKCoin tech guy; and then crash again as people turned skeptic about its meaning.

The price is obviously driven by demand and supply, but the demand is entirely driven by people's expectation that it will be widely adopted or e-payments in the future, and (recursively) by expectations of future bubbles. I don't know how to predict those expectations.

May be... but those dime and quarter bots won't do it.  The buys of that Bitfinex quarter bot are still less than the miners's output (~4500 BTC/day, lately).

I do not believe that the 2013-11 bubble was created by Willy.  China was visibly leading it, and we know that there was a surge of demand there, by a specific segment of the population.  I believe that Willy was just doing arbitrage between MtGOX and China (possibly with virtual dollars on its side), i.e. just importing the Chinese demand.

Looking at the prices of the MtGOX "dime bot" transactions, I thought that its purpose may have been to keep the price drifting up during the intervals when there would be no activity otherwise, especially in the 1 minute chart.  In that case it may have been buying from itself. If it was run by the house, it would not even pay fees.  Its OKCoin cousin may have had the same purpose.

MtGOX had such a robot too (not to be confused with the more famous Willy); it bought 0.1 BTC every 20-30 seconds, IIRC.  It was turned on during certain periods last December and January.  And I recall spotting another such robot at OKCoin.  They may have accounted for 10% of the volume on some days.

That is a matter of public record:
http://www.trademarkify.com.au/trademark/1280069?i=TekHed-Mathias_Jason#.VHr15yhiEtU

Kael_Arawn = Jason Mathias = TekHed owner
http://www.randlan.net/index.php?topic=283.5;wap2

I had a look at this "wallet" (set of apparently connected addresses) that is claimed to be
the input wallet of BitPay:
http://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/BitPay.com

I looked the pages for 2014-11-28, Black Friday, spanning from 07:52 to 20:42 UTC (01:52 to 14:42 in central US).  I should have checked another 8-10 hours after that, but the latter hour is the limit of the database, it seems.

In that time interval, the wallet started with 3495 BTC and ended with 1340 BTC.  Along the way there were maybe 2300 small inputs (assumed to be customer payments), some 150-200 outputs adding to 997 BTC, and one lump output of 2000 BTC.  Thus the inputs in that interval should add to 1340 - 3495 + 997 + 2000 = ~842 BTC.  That is about 315'000 USD.

Note that there may be other addresses belonging to BitPay that the site does not recognize as such. 

Tomorrow I may have a look at last year's Black Friday, and at other random days, for comparison.

Ah, I missed that detail -- I asked 2 days or more.  But its still does not work.  Maybe it is the Safari browser I am using at home.  Will try again tomorrow on firefox.

Someone is posting a false ".onion" address for blockchain.info to theads of this forum:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40264.msg9694988#msg9694988

Is it working? No matter what I enter, it says "your search could not find anything"  Maybe I am filling some field wrong?

One should look in the blockchain for one or more transactions, about a day ago, totalling at least 120 kBTC.  Is there a tool that would list the largest transactions within a range of dates?

Indeed.  This may be easier to read:
http://www.walletexplorer.com/address/1i7cZdoE9NcHSdAL5eGjmTJbBVqeQDwgw

Then what could the spike be?

The spike shows practially unchanged (~43 million bitcoin-days)  in the chart filtered by "minimum age 1 month" but is totally invisible in the chart with "minimum age 1 year".  It means that the coins responsible for the spike were last moved between 30 and 365 days ago.  I would guess that it was a single owner, or maybe a few.  (If it was a collective event, such as Black Friday shopping, it should have moved many young coins too.)

The number of coins involved is therefore between 43 M / 365 = ~118 kBTC and 43 M / 30 = ~1.43 M BTC.

If the owner bought those coins within the past year, he must have paid 45 million to 1.7 billion dollars for them. But the coins may have been bought well before they were last moved, so their cost may have been much less.

That spike may be the ~144'000 coins seized from Ross Ulbricht's laptop.  They were probably moved to a single address by the FBI after his arrest, and are now being moved to an address under control of the USMS, and/or are being split into lots, in preparation for the auction.  If that is the explanation, the last time they were moved must have been 43 M / 144 K = ~300 days ago, by the end of jan/2014.  It should be easy to confirm or exclude this explanation by looking at the blockchain.

It could also be blockchain.info (or some other big holder) moving all their coins to new addresses, if they became concerned about the safety of the old keys.