Meet one such insane person.  Just bought a 2-digit amount of bitcoins and removed them from the order book.

I wonder, if everyone reading this thread bought something between 0.5 and 1 BTC and moved it out of the exchange, would that give the price a nudge in the upward direction?

Actually the positive China news does very little either.
People need to get some balls and get over this 920-950 thing (or similar ranges on other exchanges) instead of immediately selling if the price goes up 5 dollars. This mindset is the only thing that's holding it back. And because people are dump sheep everybody is afraid to be the first not to sell and let it go over 1000. And even if they do only 1 person has to dump 50 coins and the lemmings completely panic and all sell till we're back at 920.  
No sane person is gonna throw some money in now because they know this.

Is that a fact (say, deduced from analysis of the blockchain)?

When one wants to buy or sell something vauable, it is usually better to do it through a market or broker.  Otherwise one may waste a lot of time looking for the partner, and  the price may  end up being well above or below the market's price - leaving one of the sides quite frustrated.

So, who would want to trade bitcoins in private, and why?

On most of the exchanges that I monitor, the BTC trade volume for Friday Jan/31 was extremely low.

Huobi (15.26 kBTC) and BTC-China (1.17 kBTC) were the most affected; both had about 1/6 of the volume of last Tuesday's  (Jan/28).   For the non-Chinese exchanges, that ratio was around 1/3.

The decrease at Chinese exchanges is easy to understand, since Jan/31 is the Chinese new Year, and AFAIK people have several days of vacations before and/of after it.  But the fall at the non-Chinese sites is puzzling, since they are usually very active on Fridays.  

This "experiment" may show how much China infuences other exchanges.   Except for MtGOX, the prices in all exchanges are obviously tied by arbitrage.  So perhaps (less volume in China) --> (less price variation) --> (less volume at all exchanges).  Or perhaps arbitrage trading is a large part of the volume; then (less volume in China) --> (less price variation in China) --> (less arbitrage trade).

OKCoin fell "only" to 1/3 compared to Tuesday.  That is another hint that its clientele includes a significant non-Chinese component (the people who keeep trading while the Chinese are all asleep).

We all know about BTC-China's rogue robot that traded ~40,000 BTC in 2.5 hours, 40 BTC at a time, around Jan/30 18:00 UTC (Jan/31 02:00am in China) .  But there are other weird things going on at that site.  For example, its order book now has an offer to sell ~100 BTC @ 4872.38 CNY, and a bid for ~175 BTC @ 4872.37 CNY -- and those two guys just sit there, nose-to-nose, without moving a penny.  

Like some other exchanges, BTC-China also has a stream of small trades within that narrow spread, moslty below 40 BTC. I suspect that it is a robot trading with itself, to cover up the lack of real transactions and/or to inflate their volume.

Once in a while, there is a transaction that changes the price: arbitrage, perhaps?

The crypto-coin community urgently needs to define professional ethics standards for exchanges, and set up an international entity that will audit them and rate them for compliance.

OK, I think this all makes sense.  The MtGox fears reduced the total bid volume on the exchange, and when the final capitulation came (triggered by Gox concerns), there was insufficient USD liquidity to soak up the bitcoins and the exchange price fell dramatically.  The street price in Vancouver (local bitcoins) didn't fall during this period--in fact many exchangers were sold out!  So I think this was basically a market dislocation--there was ample demand from new small buyers, but the mechanism to acquire coins from the large holders at Gox had broken down.  

Will we see a final capitulation from this last November's growth spurt?