I agree with this, but the idea of "fake walls" is completely ridiculous, and I’m quite sick of reading it on these forums. I haven’t seen any that were cancelled when touched for a while. Also, I remember a wall of 10k BTC somewhere around ~8.5$ recently which was completely filled at ONCE.

Walls are not fake. Every single order can be filled without any chance for the owner to cancel it if it happens at once, even the very big ones by people who have the means to. It is a real risk to have such an order without intending to actually have it executed.

But generally it is true that the order book is way too easy to manipulate by bots, changing the entire shape in seconds. This can be prevented by small, for humans insignificant fees for cancellation or setting of orders.

Here is what happens:

Mt.Gox does not stream the full order book over the WebSocket; it streams only the changes as they come in. Therefore, the site polls the normal API at getDepth.php to get the 'whole' book. The problem is that the call to that API address seems to return only those orders within +/- $2 of the strike price. This is what you see when the order book loads initially.

As new orders come in, some lie outside of the initial 'full' book, so you get that light volume in the fringes of the book. There really is no way at this point to get an accurate representation of the entire order book.

The answer is no. However, since there are lots and lots of such traders someone will - but it's not due to skill but simply chance.

Didn't you say we were in rally mode after we broke 11?

4 months are you sure?

Clearly Pattaya is highly contentious. I see no reason to hold an event there, when so many other fantastic locations exist, both in Thailand (amazing country!) and elsewhere.

A conference is about networking, development, fun, and PR. All parts are important - and Pattaya seems terrible for that forth criteria, and if it is dangerous and super awkward, then it'll be terrible for the third as well.

Bruce - let's rethink the location.

Are the methods for analyzing the charts made for something with this kind of inflation?

Repeat: No analyst ever has outperformed chance. Ever.

defxor seems to think that being a good trader is about knowing whether to buy or sell. It isn't.

As S3052 says, it's about good money management, and what that means is regardless of if you buy or sell, being a good trader is about knowing how much to place on a certain trade, and at what % to take profits and cut losses.

Nothing to do with whether it's a buy or a sell.

Even if 100 people just took a random guess, let's say 50 chose to sell and 50 chose to buy... that doesn't mean there are 50 successful trades, because they still don't know how much % they should be putting on the line and what their exit points are.

I doesn't. It's a well researched topic and anyone who could provably show their TA works would be instantly world famous and talked about everywhere.


See above.

And if you know statistics, which I assume you do, you also understand that statements about the past can never support your claim. You need to have a provable track record of predictions, published before the fact and not after so that there's not bias of underreporting bad traders and overreporting the good.

If you are that successful, you should start now. There's a Nobel Prize in Economics waiting.

Summer?  Which hemisphere?
 

I was just watching Jeff Garzik's presentation at the Bitconf (really? Bitcon? was someone asleep?), and he mentioned the need for a PR effort to bring a higher level of bitcoin education to the general public.

As I happen to agree, and have a background in communication and journalism, it resonates with me.