As long as the price keeps bouncing up and down, bots are feasting on simple trades.  I recently unleashed my custom written bot and it's doing rather nicely.  The only time I lose out is when the market has a massive surge up or down and doesn't retrace its previous levels (eg. trades at $5 are a pipe dream today).  I wonder how many purely human traders there are in the market?

Hey, if it's real I'll order one.  I appreciate the early adopters testing the waters by ordering.  Their reward is $100 off the product's final price if it is real ($499 vs $599), or chargebacks through PayPal if it isn't.

Bid 'wall' is gone.  I'm not surprised in the least.

Depends on the trader's motivation.  It's in no one's interests to see bitcoin fail.  I would define failure as the value either falling to cents per bitcoin, the depth disappearing or the volume traded per day falling to low levels.  Bitcoin itself won't "fail" as long as 1 miner is left mining.  But it can essentially fail through lack of liquidity.

We could put the question a different way: Do most share market traders actually care about supporting the companies they are trading?  Or are they just there to extract as much money, and as quickly, as possible out of the moving share price?

None.  It's purely psychological.  Try firing a few hundred bitcoins into it and watch it crumble.  Someone is trying to say 'look, bitcoin won't fall below $2.50'.  Trouble is, they did exactly the same thing at $3.50, $4, $4.50, etc.  Look where that got us.

I've just shut down my (deepbit) miner for another day, as 'free' power from my solar PV array has finished for today.  I wouldn't discount the possibility that a large proportion of miners on deepbit have 'free' power (solar PV, or stealing it from someone else), are on fixed power contracts (which will go up long after they finish mining due to the lag effect), or have some of the cheapest power on Earth and don't mind having hundreds of dollars in hardware producing cents per day.

Then there are the optimists, who see the current crash as temporary.

Bitcoin also had a few 25%+ intra day upward swings on the way down too.  Just one or two of those events could have wiped out any position with Bitcoinica.

The market is too small and immature to provide a serious short selling service.  I doubt one will thrive with the current volatility.

Sounds a bit like most financial markets.  The one really important distinction between a classic pyramid scheme and bitcoin is that a pyramid scheme usually has an entry fee to pay the people further up the pyramid.  Bitcoin software has always been free.  There's also some valueless product being sold at the heart of the pyramid to make it look legitimate.

I'm sure no one actually expected a rally after such a large drop.  A real rally, not the $2.26 -> $2.64 rally.  It's still a handy profit for the very few people who managed to catch it.

Right now bitcoin is a great day trading tool.  It's sadly not something I'd want to hold for more than a couple of days.  30% drop yesterday.  Yikes.

The Debt Collector: Bring out yer dead.
[a man puts a bitcoin on the cart]
Large Man with Bitcoin: Here's one.
The Debt Collector: That'll be $2.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.
The Debt Collector: What?
Large Man with Bitcoin : Nothing. There's your $2.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I'm not dead.
The Debt Collector: 'Ere, he says he's not dead.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Yes he is.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I'm not.
The Debt Collector: He isn't.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I'm getting better.
Large Man with Bitcoin: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
The Debt Collector: Well, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I don't want to go on the cart.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Oh, don't be such a baby.
The Debt Collector: I can't take him.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I feel fine.  Look at me! Already up to $2.60 and starting another bull market!
Large Man with Bitcoin: Oh, do me a favor.
The Debt Collector: I can't.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Well, can you hang around for a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
The Debt Collector: I promised I'd be at the Satoshis'. They've lost nine today.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Well, when's your next round?
The Debt Collector: The Weekend.
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I think I'll rise in value!
Large Man with Bitcoin: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Isn't there anything you could do?
The Bitcoin That Claims It Isn't: I feel happy. I am valuable!
[the Debt Collector glances up and down the street furtively, then silences the Bitcoin with his a whack of his cluestick]
Large Man with Bitcoin: Ah, thank you very much.
The Debt Collector: Not at all. See you on Weekend.
Large Man with Bitcoin: Right.

Why compare today's bitcoin price to 2010, when hardly anyone mined or even knew about bitcoins?  The vast majority of miners joined in April and May, when prices were already above $5.

Wow, I leave for a couple of hours and someone broke bitcoin.  $2.26.  Just... wow.  I'm honestly surprised the market has capitulated so fast and deep.

Some posters have blamed the bears on this forum for the fall from $20+ to $2.  Well, if a few bears are enough to crash an entire market then bitcoin has very serious problems. 

Can we finally bury the notion that bitcoin is in a bull market?  Even the fanciest log graph isn't likely to put a gloss on 90% price drop from peak.

At least now we should see miners quitting en mass, and returning the difficulty level to something more realistic.  50% off would be nice.  I can't believe the majority of miners left out there are power thieves or on fixed contracts.

If difficulty doesn't suffer another hefty drop in the next two weeks, miners are irrational.  The bottom appears to be falling out of the market and it doesn't make sense to keep mining at a hefty loss.

Time to change the title again 

For a currency where everyone can see everyone else's transactions, there seems to be precious little information about who (as a general group, not individual) is dumping bitcoins right now.  Early adopters getting out?  People who speculated in June/July/August and lost cutting their losses? 

I have just been informed on #mtgox IRC that websockets are read-only.  Have been for a number of weeks.  Subscriptions don't work and it's not possible to view your own executed trades.

It's possible get around this limitation, but it really makes the system slow and a bit cumbersome to use.  It would be so much more convenient to get instant confirmation of your own trades.

MtGox has 90% of the market anyway, with TradeHill making up most of the rest.  I don't really see an exchange with maybe 1% market share closing as being particularly bad news.

The last acknowledged exchange hack was several weeks ago of a minor exchange.  A few thousand bitcoins at most. 

If MtGox has financial problems then we can stick a fork into bitcoin and declare it done.  Without MtGox people would have extreme difficulty in converting their bitcoins into cash (and vice versa), and the price would collapse to cents per bitcoin overnight.

Massive dump of bitcoins to $3.12 and a weak rebound to $3.20.  Is this it?  Are early adopters who didn't sell off months ago, now in sell off mode?  No recently announced hacks, no bad news, so it seems someone with a lot of bitcoins is exiting the market.

That works fine.  I wasn't sending the \x00 and \xFF at the beginning and end of each message.

I can successfully unsubscribe from the depth feed using:
{"channel":"24e67e0d-1cad-4cc0-9e7a-f8523ef460fe","op":"unsubscribe"}

However when I try to resubscribe I get the following error:
{"message":"Unknown command","op":"remark","success":false}

I have tried all sorts of combinations of subscribe messages, but none seems to work.  I also can't subscribe to my own channel.

The following all fail:
{"channel":"24e67e0d-1cad-4cc0-9e7a-f8523ef460fe","op":"subscribe"}
{"channel":"24e67e0d-1cad-4cc0-9e7a-f8523ef460fe","op":"mtgox.subscribe"}
{"op":"subscribe","channel":"24e67e0d-1cad-4cc0-9e7a-f8523ef460fe"}
{"op":"mtgox.subscribe","channel":"24e67e0d-1cad-4cc0-9e7a-f8523ef460fe"}
{"op":"subscribe","24e67e0d-1cad-4cc0-9e7a-f8523ef460fe"}
{"op":"mtgox.subscribe","24e67e0d-1cad-4cc0-9e7a-f8523ef460fe"}

I looked at the haskell code and tried that subscription message first, then tried various other combinations.

hPutFrame h $ "{\"op\":\"mtgox.subscribe\"," ++ key ++ "}"

Thanks for that.  I'll try putting \x00 before my message and \xFF after and see how that goes.