Bitcoin Forum

About the spectacular increase in the USDBTC exchange rate - can we tell if this has been driven by new money coming in to buy bitcoins, or is it just normal trading and speculation?
We can't know for sure of course, but the price increase may be driven by people seeking safe havens due to the threatened savings tax in Cyprus. The delay in the increase would fit with this as most people are not in a position to just buy coins at short notice, there was a delay due to banks being closed at the weekend, and the time taken to complete wire transfers. On the other hand I know there are many professional traders speculating on bitcoin who can push the price one way or another. If there are new users coming in it should be visible as an increase in number of connected bitcoin clients, increase in people monitoring mtgoxlive, and I'm sure plenty of other indicators, but I don't know where to see historical information on any of these.
Anyone noticed any significant changes in activity or indicators one way or another?

Hard to say… there is currently no reliable indicator or measure of speculation. One idea was to graph trade volume vs transaction volume. This showed that there was a huge spike during the 2011 bubble, but there is no spike for the recent increase in price. You can see the graph here:
http://blockchain.info/charts/tx-trade-ratio

Thanks.

Do you know is there anywhere to see the number of active hosts? I found http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/ but it does not seem to be updated recently.

I think a lot of it is because the only ASIC manufacturer with a product only accepts payment in Bitcoin and they raise the price every time they have a production run.  ::) 600 untis x $5000 = $3,000,000

Also the Bitcoin gods half the payment for mining making it more costly to produce coins.

I'd say there is some new money. Lot's of press lately from the likes of Max Keiser, Peter Schiff (some negative), Tom Woods, etc.

Awesome. This is super useful. But does the spike happen before or after the bubble burst?

TX Trade Ratio (http://blockchain.info/charts/tx-trade-ratio?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=)

Looks to me like it is new money too. I only found two possible indicators - first the number of posts per day in this section - I reckon about 4 pages of posts on 20th March, earlier in the month it looked more like 1-3 pages per day. Second is the number of unique addresses on blockchain.info which seems to be increasing steadily week on week.
http://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

If I'm right I would expect blockchain.info to show a sharper increase in unique addresses over the next week or so. New buyers are probably supportive of the price as it means more money chasing the limited supply of coins, and they will not yet have a profit they will want to cash in.

One more indicator - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-20/spain-bitcoin-run-has-started