This one is interesting:

Bitcoin devs do NOT have consensus on blocksize

About the chances of COIN being approved:

Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg 2014-12-22
Bond Kings, Bitcoin and China: Exchange-Traded Funds to Watch For in 2015

Most people who bought BIT shares are probably long-term investors who are not scared by the current price dip. (They were willing to be locked infor 6 or 12 months when they bougt.)

Also, after the BIT shares weer "transferred" to the shareholders, each shareholder still needed to do some paperwork before he could put his shares for sale.  Perhaps most holders did not succeded in doing it, of did not have the time to do it, or did not give it a high enough priority.

Also, the average investor paid ~50 $/share, and the lucky ones who paid less include the founders.  They may not want to sell for much less than that.


Anyone can buy, but they have to use a registered stock broker.  Brokers may use other brokers.  


CoinDesk must be waiting for Greyscale to tell them what to write.  And Greyscale probbly wants to wait until there are some good news to tell.

GBTC data from OTCQX page at end of each day:

Date             day's price range      day's volume
---------------+----------------------+-------------
2015-05-04        37.98 --   42.00               765
2015-05-05        55.00 --   94.86               435
2015-05-06         N/A  --    N/A                125

According to a post on the SecondMarket Observer thread, when OTCQX updates the GBTC quote page, it ignores any trades smaller than 100 shares (10 BTC).  That is why the daily price range for today is shown as "N/A--N/A" ("not available") even though 125 shares were traded today.  Also, OTCQX has the same working hours as NYSE.

I don't think one can get better data from other sources; they can only get it from OTCQX.  Paying clients of OTCQX apparently have access to the trade log; perhaps someone can find some such client who would leak some hints...

EDIT: by the way, OTCQX is not like an ordinary stock or bitcoin exchange.  They seem to be more like a central database that collects and merges information from registered brokers; it is the brokers who keep the client's shares and execute the trades.  Right?

Have you seen the BitGo integer overflow error? (BitGo gave to a lucky user a javascript tool to recover BTC from an old-format wallet.  The tool had an integer overflow bug that would send at most 2³² - 1 satoshi (~40 BTC) to the destination output, leaving everything else as transaction fee.  Fortunately the miner was nice and returned the ~80 BTC fee to the user.)

According to the data colelcted by @jl2012, most shares were sold before May/2014, so almost all of them must be mature now. (In one of the filed douments they say that there were some redemptions, and therefore some additional buys not recorded in that table; but, IIRC, they were less than 10% of the total, maybe less than 1%.)

Thanks, but I believe that simplest is best.

(On the other hand, I really should spend more time updating its contents.)

Besides, know that Real Programmers create their webpages only by editing raw HTML with emacs, after turning html-mode off.

(A couple decades ago, when I was the department's webmaster by default, I did write perl scripts that generated its HTML pages, to ensure consistent looks and such.  Now they have hired some "professional" web programmer, and you can see the result.  But it wasn't wasted work: I learned to hate perl.)

I think that the Wall Street Journal also has a similar page on GBTC, but it is quite likely just a reformatting of the data that OTCQX gives them.

Nice to know that I am not posting in vain.  Maybe now you can see the truth for yourself. 

Most of the trade volume at the big Chinese exchanges is probably robot trading.   However, are the robot owners "wall street", or just individual day-traders who code their own robots?  Is the liquidity there sufficient for "wall street" to be interested?

I would think that the Western exchanges like Bitstamp have so little liquidity and so much spread that not even "cottage robots" would find them worth the trouble.  Is that so?

Bertrand Russel "If we assume that a single false statement is true, for example that one plus one is one, then we can prove anything -- for example,  that I am the Pope"
Skeptic: "I doubt that you can do that. Show it."
Bertrand Russel: "I am one, the Pope is one. If one and one is one, then the Pope and I are one."

You don't need that complication.  The Fortress Investment Group (a huge investment fund) and Overstock are traded in the open market, and at one time both owned some raw bitcoins.  (Overstock still does, Fortress may have unloaded them in early 2014.)  

So, when you bought shares of those companies, you became owner of some bitcoins.  (And maybe in a much stricter sense than when you buy BIT shares, because the latter may not really give you ownership of a slice of Grayscale.)

The catch is that (AFAIK) the SEC will require the company to post quarterly and annual reports on their finances, and the company needs the SEC's permission to list its shares on NYSE or NASDAQ.   If the assets of the company are entirely bitcoins, the company would have no revenue, just expenses, and would look no better than COIN; therefore, it would probably be in the same limbo as COIN, waiting for the SEC's decision...

BIT shares (GBTC) daily trading summary:

           !   OTX !   OTX !   FRT !    FRT !    FRT !        FRT !       FRT !     
Date       !  PRLO !  PRHI !  PRLO !   PRHI !   VSHR !       VUSD !      PRAV ! OBS 
-----------+-------+-------+-------+--------+--------+------------+-----------+----------
2015-05-04 | 37.98 | 42.00 |   .   | 200.00 |    765 |        .   |    .      | (*0)(*1)
2015-05-05 | 55.00 | 94.86 | 50.00 | 175.00 |    435 |   32198.00 |  74.01839 | (*0)
2015-05-06 |   .   |   .   | 65.00 |  68.00 |    125 |    8268.50 |  66.14800 | (*0)
2015-05-07 | 40.00 | 66.00 | 40.00 |  86.00 |   2844 |  163651.00 |  57.54255 |     
2015-05-08 | 49.00 | 59.00 | 49.00 |  59.00 |  14807 |  750019.70 |  50.65305 |     

2015-05-11 | 50.00 | 57.95 | 49.50 |  57.95 |   2756 |  143247.34 |  51.97654 |     
2015-05-12 | 49.00 | 50.01 | 49.00 |  52.25 |   2286 |  113299.25 |  49.56223 |     
2015-05-13 | 49.00 | 49.00 | 49.00 |  50.00 |    327 |   16113.10 |  49.27554 |     
2015-05-14 | 44.00 | 49.00 | 44.00 |  49.95 |  20894 | 1004923.74 |  48.09628 | (*2)
2015-05-15 | 38.00 | 45.00 | 38.00 |  45.00 |   2320 |   97444.35 |  42.00188 |     

2015-05-18 | 27.15 | 38.00 | 27.15 |  38.00 |   4950 |  158115.83 |  31.94259 |     
2015-05-19 | 27.90 | 29.50 | 27.89 |  29.90 |   4308 |  122327.92 |  28.39552 |  

"OTX" data from the GBTC quote page at OTCQX.
"FRT" data from the Freerealtime site, except those flagged (*0) and (*1) (see below).

PRLO = Lowest price in specified day.

PRHI = Highest price in the specified day.

VSHR = Number of shares traded in day.

VUSD = Trade volume in USD (sum over all trades of num of shares times price per share).

PRAV = Average price in day = VUSD/VSHR.

OBSERVATIONS:

(*0) The "FRT" price range for this entry was obtained from this post.

(*1) For 2015-05-04, the values of PRLO, VSHR, VUSD, and PRAV could not
be determined; the value of VSHR was taken from the OTCQX page.

(*2) The summary pages at OTCQX and FreeRealTime.com say 19894, but
adding the FreeRealTime list of trades we get 20894 (1000 more). The
VSHR value given is the latter. There were 2 trades near the end of the
day; perhaps one was undoing the other?

The "Accredited Investor" thing was relevant until last October or so, while BIT was under different rules.  Accredited Investors (i.e. individuals with "money that they could afford to lose") could buy shares directly from SecondMarket by paying in USD, at about the current price o 0.1 BTC per share.

Now, only "Authorized Pariticpants" can get shares from Grayscale, by giving BTC to it.  SecondMarket is an Authorized Participant and so they may still be able to act as middlemen and sell new shares to individuals for USD, as they did before (does the 1 year holding apply to them too?).  If so, perhaps they still require the buyer to be an Accredited Investor.  Those shares would still have to be held for one year before resale.  Perhaps SecondMarket now can charge a premium for those shares?

From @jl2012's tabulation, I would think that almost all existing BIT shares are mature and could be sold by their owners.

That is one reason why one cannot take the past halvings as precedent for what will happen in the next halving.  Since it takes months to set up a large mining farm, mining is very profitable while the price is rising fast.  If, at the previous halvings, miners were making more than 100% net revenue over their recurring costs, the halving of the reward still left them profitable.  No wonder that there was no significant drop in the hashrate in 2011

Now, we have many miners who ordered their equipment in late 2013, counting on four-digit prices, only to see the price drop by 80% over the last 15 months.  So, today the miners must not be making that kind of profits anymore.  We don't know for sure, but most comments that I have seen say that, or worse. If the price does not double before the next halving, many miners will surely shut down.


The last halving was on 2012-11-28.  The price did not register any change, and remained flat for nearly a month at ~12 $/BTC, until the next bubble started  (on 2013-01-06) that took the price to a peak of 226 USD/BTC.  In fact, the price was rising until 2012-11-28, and stopped rising then.)  There is no evidence that the early 2013 bubble was due to the halving; on the contrary, there are several hints that t was actually due to adoption in China through BTC-China. 

Since conditions are so different, the next halving may cause an price increase; but it may also have been "priced in", as they say, and have no effect at all.


Thanks, I will check.

No, I am the SEC's CEO.

I don't think that the SEC cares much about that.  The delay on COIN is not just bureaucracy, and the approval is not automatic.  The SEC is still trying to decide whether allowing people buy COIN on NASDAQ is a good idea.

Why would that happen?  The halving means that there will be only 1800 BTC per day to be mined rather than 3600.  Many miners will have to stop mining, starting with those with smaller efficiency (hashes per dollar of electricty and other recurrent costs).  It is not clear whether these miners will be small or large.  My guess is that mining will become more centralized, and more China-based.

I have seen a proposal by an Israeli mathematician to change the way miners get their blocks from pools, that he claims willo reduce the risk of centralization by letting individual miners choose which transactions to include in a block.  Perhaps.

There is that "21" company that apparently intends to put mining chips inside domestic equipment. Let's see...