DISCLAIMER: my speculation pocket is half cash/half coins at the moment. So I have not much interest in talking the price up or down. In both cases I win some and I lose some.

Crazy hoarding takes a break. Get-rich-quick dreams die of euthanasia.
You still buy coins to make your purchases but you do not hold them because they are slowly depreciating over fiat.
Dollars/euros or any other weapon-backed currency stay price reference for everything that matters to the public.
But Bitcoin achieves its goal of being an alternative to moneygram/paypal/western union, especially in countries where such instruments are unavailable while getting dollars/euros is expensive or illegal.
New exchanges start popping up like mushrooms - by then maybe the Ripple protocol plays a role into balancing the price and providing the liquidity needed for their users to operate without much slippage. Or maybe not.
The money flow makes it so that an economy of sellers/buyers of goods and services develops using bitcoins. Over time it grows to the day that the average joe is educated to think of bitcoin as an exchange medium for goods (as opposed to gambling/speculation money).
That day the fiat price trend starts reversing again. But a much bigger economy is behind it. Allowing for a long, gradual demise of dollars/euros.

OK, last part is probably visionary. But the rest... what do you think?

Or simply that the get-rich-quick types are quietly heading for the door. Leaving the market in the hands of either stronger hands or actual users, depending what side your short-term bets are on.

+1
But also "shadow money" how they call it. Which they (think they) can crush anytime if they want to do so.

The exchange is btcchina.COM not .ORG. they are UP.
And they had announced they were upgrading servers to cope with the extra load anyway.
As to some accounts being hacked, I don't know but I think it's totally possible. Chinese and Russians love to hack the shit out of themselves and anyone else. And never admit their own mistakes.

Thanks!

Guess it won't be long before a number of companies start producing ASICs in Shenzen.

How many sellers accepting bitcoins there? Any major sellers? Do you see a trend?
I suppose btchina.com is their CNY price reference (which so far follows Gox with some delay).
How do they protect themselves from the fluctuations in value of bitcoins?
Do they have a price in bitcoins and one in CNY?
Do they use some automatic conversion system, e.g. BitPay-style?

I'm trying to evaluate the real relevance of that fact, once the rumors of last weekend are fading.
(for westerners: taobao is one of the biggest Chinese marketplaces)
Thanks

Time to test it again, it seems...

With today's fees, Mr. Karpeles might want to buy his employees an extra bottle of champagne each.

He also said “I have no confidence whatsoever in Bitcoin being a universal currency.”
And “I’ll put it this way, of our $49 billion, we haven’t moved any of it to Bitcoin”.
http://businesstech.co.za/news/general/37226/buffett-talks-social-media-and-bitcoin/

But in the last years he's not been always right - I read that some of his investments failed grossly.

clash of the titans. Market orders all the way  

the one is dumping the other one is pumping. Epic. I had to hung up on a phone call with a friend. 

uhm... never say never... downtrend is still going...

I'm here with popcorns.

Since the volume is ridiculous and everyone's sitting on the fence, it might be the only chance you can have to manipulate the market with so little money - if compared to Mr. 2M wall.

But I think that the result is uncertain. Correct me here as I'm not good at charts - but I think that few hours ago 30k+ dumps in one hour only moved the price 10$ down.

Depends.

If most days they have been "reaching the maximum amount of buys within an hour or two", and if "some fixes for that are in the works", why did they have the need to blog about how good they are doing - who they are trying to appeal to? Wouldn't that generate even more load that their systems aren't able to handle right now?

It is a bot. That number is its creators' signature. I think it's trying to buy at the minimum possible slippage.

Yawn, so low volume. Two bots flirting and some random guy buying half a bitcoin.

Uhmm.

7000 accounts on ripple.com right now. Yesterday when I checked they were 6700. (Source: ripplecharts.com)
Doesn't look to me like they are dying. Not yet at the very least. If that's a bubble it's still expanding not collapsing.

Here's my points

1. Gox is still the price setter. Not bitstamp nor btcchina. Gox still rules (unfortunately).
2. No fresh money has arrived on Gox yet. It is late night over there after 5 days with banks closed.

So if bulls have run out of ammo and bears too - which is likely so after 5 days with no fresh money coming in - mostly pigs are still trading, chaotically battling over a few coins. In these conditions price has to fall slightly*.
Because dollars are silently being peeled by Gox fees at every change of hands of every single satoshi.

Comments anyone?  

* EDIT: for the next few hours I mean. After that I have no idea what will happen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boj75h3urLU

(I know I already posted this. I just find it funny every time, like I'm stupid I know, sorry  )

I wouldn't lose hope so early.
Bitcoin is the first easily accessible, relatively widespread technology that can circumvent restrictions on currency exchange set by governments.

I'm thinking about China where you are not allowed to freely exchange CNY for USD, unless you're very important. And their government is printing CNY faster than the feds are printing USD because they are trying to deflate their own internal housing bubble and at the same time make sure Chinese products' price (in USD) stays low enough.
Or Iran, for what matters.

This could have an important side effect: if you keep constantly changing back and forth from your national currency to bitcoins, after a while you start thinking of prices of goods in bitcoins. So I envision a distant future where bitcoins (or a successor of them) are the worldwide currency of reference.

Albeit for most people in the short term bitcoins mainly are a crazy speculation toy.

So here's how I read the current sentiment around this forum: most people who watched 2011 happen here are now expecting a dump. Most newbies aren't.

2011 bitcoiners are mostly middle-class geeks not pro investors. Their fun-money has suddenly become something you can buy real estate with. At that level there is little point for them in buying more coins with their monthly spare cash - it's like adding a few dimes to a million.
Most of them were true believers at the beginning, yet now I'm not sure most of them still are - to the point they'd actually spend their coins.
Their stash's potential worth keeps oscillating between "decent car" and "financial empire", depending on the news of the day.
So much at stake doesn't make you sleep at night. Turns you into a zombie checking tickers and watching walls.

Newbies - they are coming late to the party and are likely in for the get-rich-quick hype. They don't have the 2011 bias. It's like fathers vs kids. Fathers have cognitive bias so they are uneasy to adapt to new conditions. Kids have inexperience bias so they are likely going to make the same mistakes again.

And then there are speculators. Pro speculators. Likely silent lurkers here. Maybe we are all being played by a few pro's of them who just need to get all the coins for their own play, and are ok with burning some serious amount of fiat in the process. I don't know.

I think BTC price is like Schroedinger's cat. The simple act of us observing walls and talking about them makes it so that they move in the opposite direction of where the most of us expect them to. And yes I think the dump will happen. But only when almost nobody is expecting it anymore. Which makes it hard for us to get profit on the way up.