They have their own problems. They have multi-hour holes in their data, and the price chart for 7 days or more shows a flat line at 0, apparently because they have some junk transaction around $300,000/BTC in their data throwing off the scaling.

The graphics are pretty, but the data isn't reliable.

No, the volume of buyers has dried up. There's very little market depth on the buy side right now. The current buy-side "wall" is at $8. and it's small by the standards of a day or so ago.

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/ is "down for maintenance". They really should avoid doing that during periods of high volatility.

There's no market depth right now. There's only 3000 BTC of depth between $8 and $11.  A day ago, there was 30,000 BTC of depth. So small trades can kick the price all over the place. The price has ranged from $9.7 to $10.5 in the last two minutes.

Now that the market depth has updated, this looks real. Highest bid is now $9.25, last trade is $9.37.

Mt. Gox is behaving strangely, yet again.  Highest bid $10.11, last trade $8.99.

Just hit single digits at $9.98.

Those clowns at "Global Standard Bank" set a buy and a sell price for Bitcoins every day. Today, they're still buying at $13.51.  However, considering their embarrassing record of phony bank building pictures and calling themselves a "bank" without registering as one, I'd have serious doubts about whether they'd actually take the loss and pay up.

Well, what did you expect?  There was a speculative bubble in something with no intrinsic value, and it collapsed.

Go read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds".

Classic financial bubble pattern.


Bitcoin, last 6 months.

Any questions?

There's always a bottom at 0.

Mt. Gox, last 45 days.

The overall trend since the Mt. Gox screwup in June has been downward. This is normal after a bubble.

As I keep pointing out, it takes about $100,000 in new cash every day to feed the beast. It's not coming in any more.

Market depth, Mt. Gox.

There are far more sellers than buyers this week. The sell side keeps building up, but little new cash is coming in on the buy side.

Remember, it takes $100,000 a day in new cash to keep up with mining. If the supply of suckers investors dries up, Bitcoin must drop.

Everybody with serious investments is watching the US debt deal. No time to play in the Bitcoin sandbox today.

Look how thin the market depth is.  The price is going up and down on dinky trades.

The volume isn't there for that. The entire Bitcoin world has roughly the volume of one average supermarket.

In the end, not much happened.

Mt. Gox, last 3 days
The price dropped about $0.10/BTC over 3 days. For about 12 hours, Mt. Gox seems to have had problems.

It's not clear if the above chart reflects any "rollbacks" performed by Mt. Gox.

We're now up to 3 weeks at $13.50 +- 0.50.  Stability continues.

You could now price something in Bitcoins and not change the price very often.

They're in a hacker space, Foundry Coworking, at 1312 Locust St, Des Moines, Iowa. So says the Iowa state corporation registry. If there's a problem, that's where you send the process server or collection agency.

Bitcoin oriented companies remain rather low-rent. Dwolla is in a low-cost hacker space. Mt. Gox used to be Magic, the Gathering Online Exchange. "Global Standard Bank" put up fake pictures of their supposed premises and got caught. Of the ones outside major countries, Tradehill is in Chile, and Liberty Reserve is in Costa Rica. All these outfits have potential liabilities in 7 figures if they screw up, and no indication that they have the financial strength to deal with them.

Its 15 minutes of fame are over.

Mt. Gox, last 5 weeks. (Again, starting after the Mt. Gox screwup.)

After three weeks of slide and turmoil, we've now had two weeks of modest stability, at $13.50 +- 0.50.