Stay away from precious metals. They are in a long term bear market. Buying now could be equivalent to buying PMs the early 80s and having to bag hold for decades just to keep up with inflation.

There will be many bull traps along the way, but the overall trend is down for probably a decade.

The main reason why first world countries' currencies are stable is because people plan long term projects in them. Almost nobody plans things in terms of gold or bitcoin. Hence, the volatility and the twitchy nature of the market.

Even gold with its huge market cap is still relatively volatile. Bitcoin will always be relatively volatile as long as it isn't used as a widespread unit of account.

Going from a market cap in the millions to one over a billion is relatively easy, but having parabolic growth on a multibillion dollar market cap is not common.

Some people got calls from Mr.Margin  

Actually he is currently short term bull, thinking that it will go to 660 soonish:

https://i.imgur.com/8BfS5U9.png

540 is not probable. It should not go below 548 because a wave 4 should not fall in the territory of wave 1 (since 350). That is if this is still an uptrend.

Interesting FUD read on Bitstamp:

http://pastebin.com/ufNLW7xZ

OKCoin is a fraudulent exchange with fake volumes:

http://www.coindesk.com/chinese-bitcoin-exchange-okcoin-accused-faking-trading-data/

The volume thing may be a temporary situation. They are pretty much neck-on-neck at the moment regarding volume and Bitstamp could easily fall back to #1. Also, stamp has no margin trading, so without margin bitfinex would be many times smaller in volume.

I give you that on the fees and functionality. However, Bitstamp is designed with new users to cryptocurrencies in mind (i.e. very basic). Bitfinex has a higher proportion of pure speculators than Bitstamp and hence its price does not reflect the non-speculative demand for bitcoin as much as on Bitstamp.

Horrible idea.

Bitfinex has a shitty chart with extreme flash crashes and less price history.

Bitstamp's chart is far smoother and better to chart.

Wall street doesn't care whether the CPI is fake or not. They will short the hell out of gold as it gets near the CPI adjusted high, which happened in 2011 and the years after.

If the long term pattern repeats, gold could easily fall to about 700 to 500 USD and even stay there for a long time.

Gold is in a long term bear market. It has had its peak in 2011 and is not going to go above it for decades.

It will probably go down to as low as 500 in the coming years. It's a waste of time to own it for now. Maybe around 2030ish you should start thinking of going long gold.

GHash is now at 48%. 

https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs

The bitcoin industry is full of scams. You are more likely to get goxed than make money by handing your bitcoins over to third parties.

The insiders are getting out and leaving the peasants behind for a goxing.

Alts that are traded for USD on significant volume somewhat hurt bitcoin's market cap. Only litecoin has achieved this status so far. All the other crapcoins are rather irrelevant to bitcoin's market cap as you need BTC to purchase them and they have no liquid fiat markets.

I'd say Bitstamp and BTCChina.

Both have VC funding and have been around for more than 3 years, and their owners frequent major global bitcoin summits.

Most 'goxable' exchanges: the new 'high volume' Chinese exchanges like Huobi and OKcoin. Stay away from them.

A bunch of big orders cleaned up the bfx asks a few hours ago, but on stamp the price remained flat. The two exchanges should get back in sync soon.

Or perhaps this is the first sign of a goxing coming soon.