Finally you said something that might even have a grain of truth to it. Then again, what's to prevent a Chinese exchange from letting vendors open trading accounts set to immediately liquidate any BTC sent into them?

On the topic of wall-watching, there's one to see at Bitstamp... Someone's rolling a 900k BTC bid wall upwards, the price seems to be getting pushed along so far.

You don't. You place a limit order. If you really just want to buy or sell at any price, set your price absurdly high or low. Otherwise, set some sane max or min price and know you won't get shafted due to slippage.

What market, mtgox btceur?

How many alts does this person have?

The race is on to get your QR code into Google maps' satellite view, I guess. The bigger, the better!

What is this? It sounds like an even worse idea than the physical bitcoins we already have. As I understand it, you don't even get control of the private keys, the coin is just backed by a promise to pay the holder in "virtual" Bitcoins if they visit the damn island. What the hell?

Ironically the article seems to get the "virtual" vs. "real" distinction the wrong way around. The only virtual bitcoins here are the ones imaginarily controlled by these coins. This makes so little sense I wonder if the author got their facts wrong.

I don't particularly believe one way or the other at the moment. Looking at the charts for the last few hours, the swings seem to be much wider than before, but it's pretty early to say.

What I'm getting at here is:

-The general consensus answer I've seen here is that speculation is good since it provides liquidity.
-Similarly, the general consensus answer seems to be that liquidity decreases volatility. (makes sense on the face of it)
-Ergo, increased speculation should lead to decreased volatility. And lo, we have a live experiment!

That's all, really. If my point was fuddled before, I apologize. It is late.

Are you referring to my preferring to consider USD volume? If so, I'd like to hear your thinking there. It'd be pretty amazing to see both, BTC volumes from a year ago and today's prices right now. Yet today, selling enough to, say, buy a house compared to selling the same a year ago isn't a very big chunk of the daily trade volume.

Or maybe you take exception to my ribbing about the general idea here that speculation should increase liquidity, therefore decreasing volatility. I could have phrased that better to begin with, but my point was: if that's true, then given the barrier to speculate has now been significantly lowered, volatility should decrease. I guess we'll see!

Check the volumes in USD...

In any case, I was talking about this 0-fee business.

So... increased liquidity leads to decreased volatility, right?

I'm wondering if it's the same player who bought the 900+ BTC on the way to breaking 1000 USD on stamp. Pave the way past a resistance, sell what you can over 1000, sell the rest to cover whatever you didn't manage to sell yet. If this is the case we shouldn't see much more than 900 sold this way. Otherwise, who knows.

An 80 BTC or so ask seems to keep popping up just below 1000 on bitstamp. It gets bought up, a minute later there's another. Stealth wall?

There seemed to be a 2k or so sell wasll at 1000 on stamp for a second there.

Is it just me, or are "posturing" walls that get pulled quickly when they are at risk of being eaten much more rare these days than they used to be?

I was just wondering, has anyone analyzed historical data to see how much variance in price there is between weekdays and days of the month? Is there a weekday that's demonstrably higher than others? Or even a day of the month?

Actually, the real news here is that a flight attendant spent the equivalent of 250,000 USD on a space flight. I'm not sure which is more newsworthy, that she's obviously gotten rather wealthy on Bitcoin, or that she's apparently still working...

 Considering the sums involved, accepting Bitcoin makes perfect sense for Virgin Galactic. You're not exactly going to be paying that with your credit card in most cases.

I wonder what international wire fees for that sum would come to, as well...

Re: trendlines, I see no way to know what they will be in the future. Now, you can get an average trend for what has been, but extrapolating that into the future seems iffy. It's possible the market up to now has consistently been either mostly above or below whatever the trendline will turn out to look like 5 years from now. Has anyone backtested this?

You're right, I guess some sleep here would help. The only way this would be old money is if there was a lot of USD sitting on gox off the orderbooks, waiting for a crash.

After a big bout of selling at record highs, there's a record sum of USD on gox books? That doesn't sound like new money to me.