Notice that each breakout (diagonal arrows) was preceded by a sudden collapse in the price (vertical arrows) with the exception of the breakdown in October 2010 which occurred after the uptrend started.

Brown line is the 50-day moving average.

Not shown is one other horizontal consolidation and leg-up in May-July 2010. You can see that on the Bitcoin Market USD/PayPal chart.

Can anyone tell me in precise and simple terms what constitutes a node? I read Satoshi's white paper but it is still unclear to me who counts as a node.

For example, which of these are nodes and which are not: a mining pool, an individual in a mining pool, a solo miner, and an individual running the client but not mining.

Thanks.

[deplored]

I was reading Money A History edited by Jonathan Williams today for fun. This passage on 17^th century goldsmiths first lending against their gold deposits stood out (my emphasis in bold):

In 1676 an anonymous pamphlet was published on the Mystery of the New Fashioned Goldsmiths or Bankers. The writer deplored the goldsmiths’ move into the ‘unlawful practices’ of lending money at high rates of interest, claiming that they would charge double or treble interest for discounting bills of exchange, according to whether ‘they found The Merchant more or less pinched’. Such men surely could not be trusted, and the writer hoped that ‘people will suddenly come to their wits, and begin to examine why a Goldsmith-banker should be better Security than another man, or fitter to be trusted for ten times more than he is worth…

So the modern advent of paper lending initially received a great deal of backlash. Sound familiar?