My option is missing... I guess you all think it's ludicrous, so nobody considered adding it?

I'm speculating. I thought there's a fair chance the price would drop, so I sold.

My sell average was well above 17 USD though... most of my coins changed owner in those two extreme upward spikes to 20+. Was a good decision. But right now I'm not so sure, so I just watch what happens. If things remain undecided, maybe I wander off and buy some options on metals while you guys sort out things here. I like Bitcoin though, if the speculation mania dies down and they become usable and secure on Android, I might buy a few again to be able to trade with my friends the geeky way.

Oh, of course I kept enough to pay pledges and such things no matter where prices go. Not that my puny 20 or 30 BTC bounty will motivate the android developers much, but I gotta keep my promises.

Again and again I see this happening: the volume practically starves out until random fluctuations push price some way -- and then, something strange happens. More often than not, wild fluctuations occur after some disturbance. One might expect people having quite a few open orders and some placing new ones in similar patterns as before, but instead they suddenly change their minds, trading with much higher volume at a price less favorable for them.

It looks like a herd movement; if one goes one direction, others follow.

Anyways, volume is rather low once again. A single buy and some ghostly adding and removing of bids was all that really happened. We all know there are people with hundreds of thousands of BTC on mtgox, yet few sell orders are placed in advance, even at significantly higher rates. Probably it's again volume that appears late once there was a movement.

So far, stagnation with low volume was followed either by an accelerating decline or a sudden upwards spike and fluctuations. Someone holding on to BTC without having an order placed will profit from neither case, at least in the short term. Now, I know quite a few people intend to hoard BTC for a while, but we have a large amount of speculators here; illiquid market is an understatement for the current situation.

Wow, this makes me realize where all that processing power comes from.

I never thought about this... if there ever is a large price crash in Bitcoin, the hardware markets will be flooded with used high-throughput graphics cards.

And the Southern Islands GPUs are around the corner... ebay might be a feast for gamers soon.

After using it for a bit, there is one thing I would like changed.

Since there is a lag between changes on the tiny-scale bars and the full, linear scale depth graph, large changes on orders are displayed as some kind of overshooting bar with unknown height at first. I don't really care about micro-movements, so I'd like an option to make the bars log scale or larger linear scale.

I'm aware that many people have issues with log scale, and I also like being able to just add areas -- but maxing out at 400 BTC orders is too low if there is any serious movement. If you want a quick fix, how about doubling to 800 for Mt. Gox?

Settings are always cool though. That way, everybody gets the kind of view he likes.

There are no dark orders anymore. But, you may still be right: sellers always reacted slowly so far, it might be profitable to do a "scare" order to sell at higher prices and pull it when prices close in.

However, we have very little volume, so I somewhat doubt it. It would make more sense for a daytrader, who estimated price above his bid anyways and wants to make profit in an upwards spike with his remaining coins. Yet, more likely, it's someone who sold at a higher price and would buy back in if it drops. (Price estimator kind of person)

The really important question IMO is whether the funds were newly added or come from Bitcoin sales. If they come from old sales, they will run out at some time and cease to play an important role; if they were newly added, more might come the same way.

I assume USD on exchanges or withdrawn USD count as positive balance, and voted accordingly. That would phrase the question as "What is your current profit balance, with everything converted into USD?"

What I believe is that the main sources of funds are people buying in for five-figure sums or more, while the main drains are speculators who sell when it gets too risky and miners/early adopters who cash out at arbitrary times or whenever they don't expect a further rise in value.

It's not so certain the important players (speculators, early adopters who bought insane amounts back in the day) will disclose a lot of info; and even if they do, the vote won't say much, since it caps at 10k$. I think the only people who have fairly reliable distributions are those working at mtgox.

This is my new favorite. Really cool site!

I did one, and it worked.

It took approximately one hour, maybe a little longer.

MagicalTux knows about this. There was a time frame shortly after re-activation in which absurd fees, sometimes millions of dollars, were calculated. It is beyond me how such a simple calculation can be done with such massive mistakes, but you can assume that they'll fix it within the next 24h. Otherwise, highlight MagicalTux in #mtgox on freenode during daytime in Japan.

Those "mistakes" are really absurd. I think it is safe to say that reasonable code cannot produce such errors with a single mistake; the consistency checks should stop things immediately. At least it never happened to me; I make mistakes, but the majority is caught by checks, and the rest by tests. Now I don't think what I do is special at all -- I just admit I do mistakes and take precautions to notice them in time.

A consistency check of the type "WTF I have a negative balance" is very easy! As is one that notices drastic changes in absolute value of all accounts, though that one might be executed asynchronously and thus take a few seconds. (Seconds! Not "lol an error happened half an hour ago and I just noticed via complaint on IRC")

It's really wild-west hacker programming. I cope with it because I got zero-fee for a month and know how to annoy the admin if errors persist. If this doesn't improve soon, I will call it "too risky" and leave the exchange though. We've had another error tonight, orders not being executed. That might be even more dangerous than the fees, because it produces errors that cannot be fixed in retrospect (can't execute order afterwards!).

I'd like to add something that's orthogonal to this kind of analysis, but really important.

Remember that external factors or changes in parameters are gigantic for Bitcoin. Take for example the recent stagnation in Google trends for "Bitcoin" -- was it because of Mt. Gox being down? Or are we facing a change in the "climate" of the market, possibly to slower growth? On what time frame might more early adopters start adding liquidity to the market due to personal or psychological reasons? Will we have trading adoption this year, will Bitcoin face legal troubles?

Every one of these questions answered in an extreme way can blow any behavioral analysis completely off the board, in either direction. So I think people should start doing more estimates on the not so likely scenarios; sum up all those, and they might actually dominate the forecast for speculation. This may be one of the rare cases where the median of expectations is significantly less useful than the average.

Not that I want to stop you from guessing about the most likely scenario. Just a reminder, because many people use such topics to apply directly in speculation.

Remember the trade fees are collected *per trade*, not at the end. That's annoying for arbitrage, the exchanges get a large portion.

I just checked tradehill for arbitrage and... well, there is some money when people go nuts, but the whole thing is quite a hassle and the large volumes aren't trivial to get.

Stupid thing is: I have to change back into BTC in tradehill since they can't pay me fiat decently, so if buying/selling doesn't even out statistically, I have to pay the fee twice when doing arbitrage.

Also, it's a hassle to deal with the tradehill fee system. Basically, you need a friend to get the referral link from, so you don't lose the money paid to the referrer. Bleh. This stuff is all not very nice for arbitrage if you're in for bigger sums, I guess that's why arbitrage isn't functioning well.

Okay... that can be done.

IMO, a mod should come about a ban-worthy post every few minutes of reading, but next time I go through the forums, you'll get some reports.

The title says it. I have never been a friend of aggressive moderation, but this forum is taking the permissive attitude too far. There simply exists behavior that justifies an immediate ban.

Spamming referral links is such an offense. Begging for money is, too. Similarly: impersonation, overly rude language, flame.

I know this must be handled with caution, as to not overdo it... but if people can't even follow simple etiquette, you will scare off valuable users. I know of people who are no longer active on the Bitcoin forum because of the horrible post quality; this will not get better if no moderation takes place.

You can make a subforum similar to /b/ on the chans and allow all the crap there. But remember that even 4chan /b/ bans referral links without further question, even if they don't involve money.

Yep, it's that bad, you're being more permissive than the biggest of the infamous /b/ boards.

Taking time != eating my sleeping time three times in a very busy week for nothing.

When one announces an exact re-launch time, everything should be ready to run -- delays should normally be announced > 12 hours in advance. Anything else is cheap hacker mentality. IT stuff can't be handled the "put it online when the content is finished" way unless you're a top-class modern programmer -- and those are self-critical enough to use buffer time anyways.

I really want to take this professionally, and if I see my funds again I will stay calm and nice... but it is undeniably annoying. At least the next planned re-opening time has the sun up over here. Not that I didn't have other plans for that moment. But at least it's not "be online with trading machine at 5am" again.

How would difficulty have an influence on BTC price? You got it the wrong way 'round, man. Price determines difficulty.

Also, the amount of BTC available to exchanges is based on production rate, and difficulty adapts to keep that constant. Miners might as well be Satoshi secretly writing magical BTC bucks with his quantum computer, the market would not change as long as the effective minting rate does not change.

Edit: oh, @topic: please use the word "stable" when more than two months have passed. Normal people will shake their head when one says "stable" because the market didn't explode in antimatter fireworks for a day.

You think their "master account" was hacked? Also, wouldn't it be strange to have that as a normal user account? They state they don't trade with that; why even have a balance for it?

It's possible, but it wouldn't make a lot of sense in terms of design. Also, the way MagicalTux talked about passwords to me earlier today... I'd be surprised if their PW got hacked. Or if their account *had* a usable PW to begin with.

I think there's someone else with a lot of BTC on mtgox. Can't be sure, but that's my guess.

It would make sense that someone who puts BTC onto MtGox has the intention of selling them at some point.

A big question is what the 500k BTC deposit is going to do. If these start flowing, they'll probably cycle through a few speculators and drive price down until they're distributed.

An interesting fact is that if the holder is good in psychology, he might be able to trigger a crash or prevent a bubble or do other things that would be too expensive on normal markets. With the prices pushing quite high compared to the amount of BTC some people have, those few are a non-negligible force on the market. And unlike on other markets, one can't just assume their actions will be sane. It could be anyone who just happened to have a miner running more than half a year ago, those people need not have a clue about finance.

Though it appears at least one has thought of a non-disruptive method: someone appeared to be selling a constant, small stream of BTC while mtgox was still running. That's conservative, but very predictable and unlikely to cause sudden trouble. But how can we be sure that's the one with the biggest wallet? Time will tell, I guess.

Did not receive verification.

In fact, the site did not provide any further info when I had input the proof page, and never confirmed anything since. I cannot tell whether the proof was even submitted or not.

6.9 USD

@piuk: Please don't post the average, post the median. The average is completely pointless. A single person claiming "LOL THIRTY QUADRILLION" has more weight than the entire forum posting reasonable numbers if you use average.

I'd like all of you to know one little thought of mine.

People should seriously calm down and let this unfold naturally. It's not sensible to split people into the extremes; one part throwing in more money than they should (Kelly criterion!) and the other screaming -- mostly nonsensical -- opinions why everything must fail with absolute certainty. Both sides are overdoing it. We shout tread with caution and let it unfold in a calm, stable way. If the price jumps to 100 USD in a few weeks, all we will get is more chaos and instability, and the few who benefit might pay out their profits outside of Bitcoin, because the market is just not ready for people to spend or hold 6- or 7-figure USD equivalents within it. Many small speculators who slipped into this might bleed in such cases, and that will not help sustain a good image of Bitcoin.

We need variety, so Bitcoin is good. We don't need more bubbles, so the price hype is bad. It's really that simple! Neither panic and naysayers nor people screaming for exponential growth doubling in less than a month are helping. We're in a state of a half-caught crash, barely avoided further chaos -- don't push it now. Take a step back and remember what is reasonable and what is not.

That's all I wanted to say. Thanks for reading.