I'd want clarification on this.  He may have meant that if someone happens to withdraw at the exact moment someone else is buying the order will only be partially filled (but in itself this is weird because this should be an atomic operation).  Or maybe he means that the order is publicly posted even though it can be filled right away, giving a trader a tiny time window to pull down a wall.

I doubt he means that a trader has the ability to be forewarned of impending trades and given the opportunity to confirm the trade or cancel his wall -- simply because that would have to be explicitly coded into the API.

Of course.  But this bot seems to be deliberately losing a trivial amount of money to keep the ticker as low as possible which is why I'm calling it manipulation.

I know the big walls catch big attention but check out what's going on now.  After every buy (look for non trivial quantity), somebody executes a sell for .01.  This has the effect of dropping the displayed market price back down to what the buyers are asking (about 8.36), not what the sellers are asking.  A 5 minute weighted average would show the price MUCH higher (about 8.49).  You can see it here:
http://www.bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD_trades.html

But if you have clarkmoody running its obvious because all these .01 sells show up red (the only red!)

Did the pump&dump really work? http://www.bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg2ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv  I'm seeing a dump of about 42k BTC for prices ranging between 9.3 to 8, but it does not look like there was enough volume to buy that back (to complete the cycle).  And now the price is approaching 8.4.  So the exact distribution within that slippage is critical. 

But my takeaway from last night's drama is that this bull market is so strong it may have caused the pump & dump to backfire!

 ;DIn circuitboard layout a "mil" is 1/1000!

When reading those old posts I came to the conclusion that half the people were arguing whether bitcoin itself is a bubble, and the other half arguing about whether bitcoin was currently in a bubble.  If you don't understand this distinction, a lot of smart people's posts end up sounding idiotic. 

I think its pretty obvious now to all who lived through the last 15 years (tech, housing bubbles) that there WAS a bubble in bitcoin.   But even if the price of a bitcoin eventually goes to zero its pretty clear at this point that you can't conclude that bitcoin-as-a-whole was a "bubble" -- it would merely be a failure.   But perhaps this terminology distinction won't matter to all of us holding onto coins...

1.1 MILLION dollars to push the price back to the prior stable zone (<5)!!!

a puny 20k ask wall is going to be overwhelmed by the tsunami that just hit the mountain!!!  Is it one buyer or a couple?  I'd guess a few, because what's the point really of having a penny difference?  If you wanted to spread out your wall to hide your interest, you'd do it with a larger spread, finer grain and maybe tweak the # amount a bit...

5pm -- quitting time!

When you say, "buys outnumber sells" this can literally be true since every buyer must have a seller.  Do you mean what's on the order book?  Or are you discriminating between who posted the "wall" (limit order) verses who met it?

nanotube the 100 BTC fee you are getting is pretty good but you know you can put that 10000 BTC to WORK for you!!! 

I hear someone's offering 7% a week on deposits; guy's name is pira-teat or something --  what DOES that mean anyway, "burning nipples" maybe? 

Over the course of the bet you'd make 1.3 million BTC.  Its a SURE thing!!!

>>> btc = 10000
>>> for i in range(0,18*4): btc=btc*1.07
>>> print btc
1305064.551270706

worked for me but took about 8 hours...

If you believed a player was artificially holding the price down with a big askwall, it would make sense to call his bluff and buy out the wall.  But only if you could buy the whole thing!  If so expect those coins to reappear.  At this point I wonder if sellers are holding back just to see how high it will go.

The same issue (in the other direction) occurs just on earth in a future where people are spending BTC from their phones like cash + a potential massive increase in individual transfers due to micropayments (or "milli"-payments).

If the bitcoin protocol evolved into a fractal blockchain, where the larger, slower, blockchains do not verify every transaction of the smaller, faster ones it will solve both interplanetary (extremely slow) and regional (high frequency) transactions.  Note that on a single planet, "regional" would not have to refer to a physical region -- it could be any social network; in fact "regional" blockchain membership could be created automatically by looking at transaction history of the parent blockchain.

Essentially we'd end up creating blockchains both slower and faster then the current one. 

It would be possible to do this with multiple independent "coin" chains but then you'd have the friction of independent markets that trade these different coins.  Just like we have today with gold -> USD.  This is what "litecoin" is attempting to do.  A "better" solution would be to allow the same bitcoin commodity to transfer into and out of the slower and faster blockchains and have the greater blockchain verify some invariants (such as total quantity) of the lesser blockchain -- but not verify every transaction on it.  An additional advantage is that periodically the leaf (final state) of every account in the lesser blockchain could be "committed" to the greater chain, and then that entire chain (the entire history of transactions within that chain) could be restarted.

If you are confused, imagine a "tree" of blockchains...

This architecture relies on the premise the the network has the "scale" property.  That is the premise of localization of payments (i.e. that the majority of payments happen locally); if the average user paid randomly across the entire network (a "scaleless" network), the largest blockchain would see more traffic then the local ones and there would be little point in a fractal design.  I think that bitCoin is "scaleless" as used today, but will become very scaled if mobile payments take off.

A big problem with shoehorning this into the existing system today is the BTC mining award.  There is no way today's blockchain could recognize coins "mined" on other blockchains... so the lesser and greater chains would have to rely entirely on transaction fees.

Why does everyone keep saying doubling/halving?  That assumes a linear x=y supply demand curve.  AFAIK we don't know the relationship.

The problem with bitcoin and Greece is that you need some Euros (or some other currency) to get BTC!  A few people could offer services that can occur from a distance (e.g. web design), but this will be a significant minority AND once these people have BTC how would they spend them locally?  A vibrant exchange with a working currency is what is letting BTC bootstrap itself in other countries.  But these LETS are appearing because the Euro system is NOT working.

And reading between the lines, it seems like TEM lets you spend a little without having any so long as you write down services that you offer when you sign up.  Now we know why all these debt-based currencies exist; they start up easily!

And it seems like its basically a tax dodge; somehow I just don't think the TEM txns taking place in impromptu marketplaces are paying sales, income tax etc :-).  I have no idea how bad the taxes are in Greece but given the fact that the country is about to go bankrupt, I'm guessing they are very high.  In this case the government seems to be tacitly encouraging (or at least ignoring) tax revenue collection, probably because its mostly going overseas through an externally-mandated program to pay back loans.

Hmm... your calculations illuminate an interesting interaction but are simply one dimension of a complex interacting system and so are unlikely to be predictive.  What is beyond the supply/demand curve, "driving" demand is a lot of human factors.

One issue with your reasoning is that the seller is not paying the miner the 50 btc.  The mined coins devalues everybody's BTC, so essentially all holders of BTC "pay" for each block, proportionally to his/her % of the total supply.  You could modify your equation to include this but since there is no "choice" involved (the network cannot choose to NOT mine a block in a given 10 minute period & so save the 50 BTC) I'm not sure if the relationship you propose is determinative.

cypherdoc its the mast on a sinking ship; everybody is trying to climb it

OP: As other posters have suggested, he would still need to acquire BTC on the market to pay it all back so offering 7% a week is a pretty high price for a little price stability.  So personally I think its a ponzi.  But to continue the OP's business model idea (which is interesting, regardless) what if his "exit" strategy is to pay everyone back (all at once) in fiat?  You could even put this in fine print in the loan contract "option to close out the loan at the Mt. Gox BTC/USD price + 2%" for example, and it would probably be mostly ignored as an unlikely CYA-type clause.  In this manner he could provide a large investor a significant amount of BTC (say at 8 USD) when a buy like that would drive the markets much higher.  So it would be sort of a ponzi in BTC backed by fiat.  Then just before going truly ponzi he could pay everybody back in fiat.  Of course, if all that fiat went straight back into BTC it would drive the price through the roof.  So the investor ends up accumulating a lot more BTC then would be possible on the open market.  So that's the purpose of the "loan" agreement (with a fiat clause in there it is actually a call option).

As long as the BTC price stays 7% below the baseline he can buy BTC back on the open market and keep going indefinitely.

The problem with this entire thing of course is the initial assumption: it presupposes the existence of some investor (or broker) who is too lazy to put buy orders in periodically.  You'd make a lot more $ that way... or more accurately if pirate IS that broker he's being paid too well for the effort involved.  And you'd expect to see dark buy orders on places like campBX.  And you could do it at a much lower interest rate.