Look closely, that's a fake beartrap. Made in China? 

Touché.  However, the stakes are very different...

Draper invested 18 M$ to buy the 30'000 BTC at 600$/BTC or so.  On paper, he lost at least 4 M$ so far.  SMBIT may have sold almost 100 M$ in shares (at the then-current price) and therefore earned at least 2 M$ in fees, but has sold very little for the last 6 months.  For them (and other bitcoin investors and entrepreneurs), convincing people that bitcoin will go to the moon means millions of dollars.  They  will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in BloombergTV and advertorials in Forbes to push that view.

On the other hand, skeptics like me, Krugman, "Prof Bitcorn", and millions others out there will not earn or lose a dime, whetever happens to bitcoin.  (Actually, IIRC, Prof Bitcorn said that he does own some BTC.)  We will only have to deal with bruised egos (but economists like Krugman and Bitcorn are quite used to being wrong).  Apart from that, skeptics have no reason to try to influence the price; and they will not spend even 10$ to have their opinion published.

By the way, while I belive that bitcoin will not survive in the long term, I would not risk any prediction for the price in middle term.  It may even go back to the 1000$ range or more, who knows.  All I will risk saying is that, unless and until a large new market opens, the price will probably keep falling towards the pre-bubble level of ~120$ (or even ~20$, if the Feb/2013 bubble too was made in China).

Once again, YOU are saying "BTC is a ponzi scheme", not me. 

Those entrepreneurs obviously have substantial interest in making people believe that bitcoin has a bright future and is going "to the moon" any time now.   They are selling their funds, services, and bitcoins; and no one expects salesmen to provide unbiased evaluations or sponsor impartial data gathering and publication.  That is all.

YOU are saying "bitcoin is kind of dying away", not me.

But, indeed, there is NO real world evidence about bitcoin usage.  Those plots do not show such growth, and we have no idea of what that blockchain traffic really is.  That is all of my point.

But, if you care to know, I also believe that the bitcoin entrepreneurs like Andreessen, Sielbert, Draper, Matonis etc. (and the bitcoin "news" sites that they support, like Coindesk) have no interest in such data becoming available, because they know that it would be depressing and bad for their sales.  Just like they want people to believe that China is irrelevant.

Yet the total daily transaction output volume in BTC (minus changebacks) is still ~120 kBTC/day, less than it was in mid-March, late May, and two weeks ago:
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&timespan=&scale=0

And, since the price has been falling, the total volume in USD (minus changebacks) has been stagnating near 50 M$/day since late March, after falling from 80+ M$/day in January
https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0

By the way, those charts do not seem to have been maintained in a long time, and no one is monitoring their "contact us" thread.  I wonder how they identify the "popular addresses".  The growth in the chart posted by @touhonoob could be due to that list becoming outdated, so that new "popular addresses" are increasingly being included in the plot.

Indeed. I don't know about the law, but morally those machines belonged to customers since the moment that they were paid for.

It does not matter that the company still had not decided which machine shoudl go to which customer.   Like cash or corn, mining machines are a commodity.  If a machine turned out to be defective, the company would have been obliged to replace it: because the customer was owed a working machine, not that broken machine.

After successfully running the same scam for several years, buying expensive houses and such, it is not surprising that they got arrogant and careless about it.  

"The engines stopped working ten minutes ago, but the plane is still up in the air.   Time to stop worrying about the ground, obviously we will never hit it."

China took the price from ~120$ (or, quite likely, from ~14$) to ~1200$.  (And all with fake volume; awesome, no?) But now they are realizing they are not welcome by people in this thread, so they are pulling out.  Please be patient: there are only 230$ (or 335$) still to drop, and after that no one will have to mention them again.

Sorry, the person deserving the refund of 4000$ (say) is the customer who bought for 4000$. If you bought from him for 200$, you deserve to have the 200$ back.  If you paid 200$ and get the 4000$, while he paid 4000$ and gets nothing, something is wrong, dont  you agree?

That site is (ostensibly) for gatering information to be provided to law enforcement.  There is no need of that in this case, is there?  The identity of the scammer i known.  Is anyone pressing charges?

(Ver's idea sucks.  Private anonymous rewarding law enforcement agents will surely lead to more corruption and fabrication of evidence. Besides, Ver is hardly the right person to head a law enforcement initiative...)

In case people are thinking of bounties for something more direct than gathering information for law enforcement: that would be a crime, and hunting down those who contract or provide such "services" should have more priority than a mere theft.

Let's see if I understood, you are asking whether it is possible to make some thousand bucks with no sweat, by duping the FTC and taking some of the refund money that was supposed to be used to refund real customers? 

Indeed.  It explains the, let's say, rather original tone of their defense of BFL.  I don't think it will help their clients at all, but it may attract more clients among a certain segment of the bitcoin community, who will think it was genial.

That defense may even have been what prompted the judge's reprimand.  Its language may seem bland by the standards of this forum, but by legal standards it is quite offensive to the receiver and to the FTC.

Speaking of which, the language and "vivid imagery"of many posts here may prevent their use by the FTC, and may turn the investigators away from this thread.  I hope people are not using that style when writing to the receiver or to the FTC.

In their "sentences" they say that they are not, but it does not matter.

Now that the fun seems to be over, it may be worth reminding the spectators: "don't drink and post".  (I don't know why that came to my mind reading this thread.)

The plot, in the manner of soup to which a spoonful of cornstarch is slowly added, thickens.

I would be surprised if FINCEN, SEC, or the like will take the time to develop regulations specific to bitcoin exchanges.  It would be a lot of work for a very small segment of the economy.  (Note that the FINCEN letters quoted above only clarify how the FINCEN thinks that bitcoin exchanges fit into existing regulations.) 

That NY regulator does not seem to be putting much effort into the bitlicense regulations, either.

Anyway, exchanges should post Terms of Service where they promise not to do all the nasty things that exchanges could do to their clients, such as giving non-existing bitcoins or dollars to some clients, trading against their clients, playing with client coins elsewhere, delaying or blocking withdrawals, etc.  Then the law would automatically prohibit those things, just as it enforces any contract.  Moreover, theft and fraud are crimes, irrespective of the method used by the criminal or the nature of the property taken from the victims.

As for auditing: I don't know what is the state of the art now, but the auditing protocols that were proposed earlier this year could be easily circumvented by a malicious exchange.  (The amateur "audits" that some exchanges did after MtGOX were sorry jokes that proved nothing.)   The blockchain and the account database record only part of the real situation of the exchange, so I doubt that fancy protocols could ever replace a true independent audit done in the traditional way.   But even a true audit would have trouble dealing with the bitcoin side of the accounting.

Anyway, the main problem is not what the exchange is doing, but what it can do at any moment without prior warning.  At any moment it could become another SheepMarketplace; and then what?

Actually, to a good approximation, news and rumors have effect in price if, and only if, they are relevant to Chinese traders.  Most of the large swings from December to May were clearly due to Chinese news; and none of the news that are relevant only to the "West" (Overstock, Dell, Paypal, BitLicense, etc.) had any significant efect.

Only a couple of large price swings in that interval remain without explanation, and may or may not be due to events outside China.  Ditto for the "pump" episodes from May/20 to Jun/10, and the various "dumps" since then.

If someone gets a malicious version of the firmware, signed with the authentication keys held by Satoshilabs managers, it may then convince users to download and install that "firmware update" in their Trezor.  That malicious firmware then could steal the coins, in many ways. As long as Satoshilabs takes good care of those keys, that risk does not exist.

A thief may substitute a malicious fake Trezor for the real one, when the user buys it.  A fake Trezor too could steal the keys in many ways.  As long as Satoshilabs keeps close watch on their shipping dept, and users only buy Trezors directly from them, that risk should be small.

The thief could also convince a user to download and install a non-authenticated version of the firmware.  That would cause the Trezor to wipe its memory clean and display a warning on its window.  The thief then would have to convince the user to ignore that warning, and re-enter the 24 magic words, from which the private blockchain keys are derived.   Users should be wary of re-entering the magic words after such a warning.

(Many years ago some pranksters would dial a random fixed phone number, pretended to be the phone company, and asked the person to drop the set into a bucket of water, "for a test".  Many users did.)

I understand that, whatever the price, the difficulty will adjust so that mining always remains worthwhile for SOME miners.  "Worthwhile" may not not mean "profitable", though; and some miners would have to  switch off. Isn't that so?

The saying was "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime".  Note the subtle diference -- no "don't" there...