It is not clear whether mycoin.hk also included an exchange, there are conflicting reports on that.  If they did have an exchange, it was a small one.  The big scam was their cloud mining operation, which apparently was just a ponzi scheme and had no real bitcoins and no real mining.

Nevertheless, the latest small drop in price (from 1380 CNY to 1350 in a few minutes, with a recovery to 1360) happened just after 8pm in China local time.  It may have been a reaction to the news showing on TV, perhaps.

1 million HKD is 128'000 USD not 12'890 USD.

Their cloud mining contracts were 400'000 HKD each, and there are testimonials of people buying 8 contracts; so an average of 2.5 contracts per client seems reasonable.

The only questionable number is 3000 clients; it may be inflated, but it is not too high for an MLM scheme in a place like Hong Kong.

EDIT: Hong Kong has 7 million inhabitants and a median income of over 20'000 HKD/month.

Well, then he must have changed timezones between the two versions.  Most likely he was in the US, I would say.

EDIT: or he was logged into computers located in different timezones.

Uh-oh:

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1708308/mycoin-director-quit-one-month-bitcoin-platform-changed-trading-rules


An imperialist pig stealing from Chinese workers?  @NotLambChop, you must have the right poster for that...

Correct that far.  However, an academic (ahem!) in Hong Kong called for tighter regulations on bitcoin.  That by itself does not mean anything, but it is noteworthy that the news arrticle closed with his opinion.  There may be repercussions on exchanges.

And then we have the current dump.  Just a coincidence, or triggered by the mycoin.hk news?

It is 8pm in China now.  The mycoin.hk story playing on TV, perhaps?

It was a minor exchange too, but the big scam was not in the exchange, it was a cloud mining ponzi.

BTW, 1 million HKD is 128'900 USD not 12'890 USD.  That "万" thing does seem to confuse people there...

I understood that 30 victims contacted a local Councillor because they had no proof of investment and thought that the police would not take up their case.  The Councillor directed them to the police, let's see what comes of it.

Have they?  The mining contracts were ~52'000 USD minimum, so the uncertainty is only in the number of contracts that they managed to sell.  The "3000" figure may be inflated, but it is not too high for an MLM scheme

Sorry for the confusion...

MyCoin.hk is the new Hong Kong mining ponzi scam, that collapsed last December and broke the news yesterday; estimates (based on mycoin.hk statements) are still 3 billion HKD = 385 million USD.

GLB was a Hong Kong exchange that closed and stole all client funds in November 2013.  One newspaper yesterday said that the loss was 4.1 billion USD, but it was actually 4.1 million, it seems.

Well, that is what the news article claimed.

Correction: the "4.1 billion USD" for the GBL scam seems to be a newspaper error.  Other sources say "4.1 million",  with is of course much more plausible.

I don't know whether it is relevant, but daylight savings changes in the Southern Hemisphere (early April and early October in Australia, for example) are opposite to those in the Northern Hemisphere.

Well, before closing for good, mycoin.hk had set the price of bitcoin to ~1.5 USD for the purpose of calculating client payouts. 

The BitXChange.ro case highlights another kind of risk of the exchanges.  While their servers may be replicated and protected against external hackers, they may still have a single programmer who could do similar damage.  Indeed, like MtGOX and several other examples, their software team often consists of only one programmer.  Blockchain.info seems to be another example, given that they uploaded the buggy RNG without any internal review of the code.

Another random news post:  BitXChange.ro, a Bitcoin exchange in Romania, fired their chief programmer last October, and he has been holding their servers and user account hostage since then.  Exchange owners advised clients to withdraw everything, and claims to have been processing all withdrawals by hand since then.

https://www.btcxchange.ro/news

Another news report on the mycoin.hk mining ponzi below, only a few more details:
https://www.techinasia.com/bitcoin-pyramid-scheme-hong-kong-387m-investors-money/

I did not know the amount of the GBL scam:

I suppose that the figure is computed from BTC at the Mv/2013 price?  Anyway that would make GBL the largest bitcoin-related scam of all time.

I recall reading, some time later, that the GBL owners had been caught by the Chinese poliice, somewhere in the Mainland.  That also makes GBL one of the few (only two?) bitcoin scams whose authors were caught and tried.

Why is plankton so different from a ton of planks?

I generally agree, except that there are claims that mycoin.hk operated also an exchange that scammed their clients too.  So there may be some consequences for other exchanges.

PS. It is 10:00 am now in China.  The mycoin.hk news was on some Hong Kong newspapers, but may not have been picked up by Mainland newspapers yet; I don't know.  Some Mainland Chinese may get the news through the internet, but more may get them from TV this evening, or from newspapers tomorrow.  Let's see.

I don't think that there will be an immediate reaction to the mycoin.hk debacle (but I may be wrong, of course).

People have blamed bad press after the MtGOX collapse for the general price decline since Feb/2014.  I don't think MtGOX had that much influence, not even when it was fresh news (which is no longer the case). The only clear effects of MtGOX on price were a couple of sudden drops, notably on 2014-02-07 and 02-10, when Mark hinted/stated that there was a "bug in bitcoin".  But those drops were soon undone when the claims were dismissed.  As I said before, I believe that the general deciine since Feb/2014 is mostly due to the Chinese speculators getting disenchanted with bitcoin and taking their remaining money out of the market.

The mycoin.hk debacle may however convince the Chinese government to impose even stricter regulations about bitcoin trading; and those would surely have a large impact on the price (like the ones in March/April 2014).