The depth chart on bitcoincharts froze before the big sell off.. I'm starting to suspect them of manipulating the charts.

The true believers in bitcoin should be buying up all the bitcoins they can while they're this cheap.  There is no asterisk on Bitconica's buy side, and anyway, true believers would use their own cash to reaffirm their convictions.

indeed, I can recognize the hand of a 6 month old in your chart.

Give it some time for short attention spans to kick in and new marks to enter the game. New marks are key, their wide eyed bullishness will make those once burned anxious about missing the Next Big Move. Then lather, rinse, repeat.

Relevant joke:
A man noticed a farmer walking with three-legged pig on a leash. It looked very odd. He said, "Farmer, why are you walking a three-legged pig?"

"Why, stranger, this is no ordinary pig," the farmer replied. "One night our barn caught on fire, and before my wife and I even woke up, the pig had called the fire department, and herded all the other animals out of the barn. The next week, a burglar got into the house, and the pig had him tied up and the police were on their way before I even realized what had happened. Then just last week, I fell into the duck pond and was like to drown, except this pig jumped in and pulled me out. Like I say, this is no ordinary pig."

"Well, that truly is a remarkable pig. But tell me, how did he come to have only three legs?" "Are you kidding? A pig this good, you don't eat all at once."

There's been so much discussion lately about price stabilization, welcome to the Pax Manipulus  

no one thinks the price is going up?

FWIW, I've run a local DNS server since my client was OS2 2.0 and my connection was dial up, with a slow connection it did a lot for reducing perceived latency when web browsing.

These days there are a lot of alternatives, but the standard is a program called BIND, which can be had for just about any platform. Linux distributions provide it universally, and it's pretty tolerable to set up on Windows as well. It does things beyond simple caching that the built-in Windows DNS cache does not.

http://www.isc.org/software/bind

The simplest thing to set up with BIND is a caching server with forwarding, the last time I installed it under Windows ( sometime in the 1990s ) this was the default configuration. You do have to add the IP addresses for your forwarding servers ( e.g. your ISP ) and then point your local IP configuration to query the local name server at 127.0.0.1 .

The reason I mention all this is that I had a hard time replicating the problem described here, I'd never seen it. It had been so long since I did my set up I had to consider why.

As it turns out, my DNS forwarders are Comcast and Google. Here's a portion of my named.conf, one of the configuration files for bind ( the program executable is usually "named" or "named.exe" ).

        forward first;
        forwarders {
                75.75.75.75;
                75.75.76.76;
                8.8.8.8;
                8.8.4.4;
        };

Beyond that BIND will identify the authoritative name servers for a given name and query those directly, in this case NS1.XWAYLAB.COM and NS2.XWAYLAB.COM for bitcoinica.com .

So, using BIND can provide robust name resolution from multiple sources, it worked transparently for me with the bitcoinica .com DNSSEC issue present, most likely by using Google to resolve the authoritative servers and then using those to resolve the actual name.

zone "bit" {
        type forward;
        forwarders {
                178.32.31.41; // French bit DNS
                78.47.86.43;  // German bit DNS
        };
};
zone "onion" {
        type master;
        file "named.empty";
        allow-update { none; };
};