Fitting trend lines to historical prices may give heart-warming plots but is not useful for predictions, unless the trends reflect some underlying fundamental variable.

Exponential trends may be caused by "infection" in a new market: as more people invest in it, the more the item is mentioned in the news and spreads by word of mouth.  Or they maybe due to the company growing, hence opening more stores/factories/products/whatever, hence growing even more. The exponential growth stops when  that market is saturated, there is no more room for the company to grow, or something else happens (e.g. devastating news) that turns investors away. 

In that chart I see three separate exponential trends, but since they are shifted (P(t) = A*Q**(t-t0) + B, instead of just P(t) = A*Q**(t-t0)) they do not look straight in the log plot. They span

  (1) from ~Jun/2012 to ~Jul/2012 (~2 months)
 
  (2) from ~Jan/2013 to ~Mar/2013 (~3 months)

  (3) from ~Oct/2013 to ~Nov/2013 (~1.5 months)

I can only guess about the underlying causes of those exponential growth periods, but the last two seem to coincide with the opening of the Chinese markets: (2) by BTC-China in Hong Kong, (3) by Huobi and OKCoin in the mainland.  Perhaps (1) is the opening of the European market?

I would guess that in each case the trading population grew exponentially because it was driven by the "infection" process above.  Perhaps (2) stopped by market exhaustion?  Spurt (3), as we know, stopped because of the PBoC decrees.

So, the apparent  multi-year exponential growth in that graph is actually due to three successive market opening events, each much bigger than the other, spaced roughly 8 months apart.   Each gave a shifted exponential, instead of a pure exponential, because it was added to the strady-state of the previous ones. 

To continue that trend, it would be necessary to have another "market opening" event, even bigger than China's.  Itseems unlikely that a large country like China, Russia or India will remove its barriers.  Perhaps the "new market" will not be geogrphic but economic/social (say, Walmart accepts bitcoin, USA declares Bitcoin legal tender or whatever). Who knows.

Of course.  But they do have that much volume, just as an exchange with higher fees or other handicaps may have less volume.

Obviously there are other useful measures, like book depth order, etc.  It would beinteresting to see them tabulated and compared.

Nevertheless, Huobi and OKCoin do seem to have greater liquidity and stability, a narrower spread, etc..  They do seem to lead the market most of the time.  So volume, independently of the reason, may be an important variable after all..

Odd that we don't see you here all the times you guess wrong...

I think we have a very long time until that happens.  

I remember when I was first learning about bitcoin in March 2013.  People would say how this alt coin was better because it had faster block times, or that alt coin was better because it was proof-of-stake and used less mining energy.  Or this coin has demurrage to prevent hoarding or that coin uses ASIC-resistant hashing, or this coin is "Turing complete."  What I've come to believe is that this was mostly attempts by alt coin pumpers to appeal to newbies.  It seems to make sense that a "second generation" coin would be an improvement, but the more I learn, the more I believe that there are no fundamental problems in bitcoin that can be solved by alt coins and design changes.    

I've now spent months researching bitcoin at the technical level and I never cease to be amazed at Satoshi's genius.  He seemed to give great thought to every detail.  

My only criticism (and perhaps I'm missing something) is the way the ECDSA signatures are included in the transaction hash (which contributed to the transaction malleability problem).  But maybe there was a reason for this too that I've missed.  Nevertheless, we should have malleability eliminated over the coming years.  

I suppose it's different everywhere, which is interesting. Admittedly I'm not much of a sports guy. In Michigan we don't use it much (except when we're drunk with close friends)

Slightly off-topic (and nothing personal), but a surefire way to tell who non-Americans/English are is how casually they throw around the f word. Unless you know the person well or are extraordinarily angry about something, it's a huge sign of disrespect. I feel like it's the least understood English curse word--it has so many functions yet it's very taboo in colloquial speech.

Buffet once said - trading is process of redistributing wealth from least patient to most patient 

Why am I announcing this in speculation?

A sane rich guy would put his money in whatever asset was resistant to seizure if seizure was his primary concern.

Cosmofly obviously loaded with BTC and has powerful friends in BTT. Everyone post with critcism got deleted even mine. I even posted pic of his beautiful girlfriend but that got deleted.

Reminds me of the mighty repitelia same used to happen!