Nice thought, nice pic

Looking at these rally angles on the same chart as above (but for gox over its history) every time was in different circumstances and though they may look similar there are so many different factors at play, whilst we can convince ourselves we 'know' how this is going to turn out I think we're largely kidding ourselves (pretty TA charts or not).  I really don't know where this is going nor for how long other than that there appears to be a momentum up right now and I would tend to agree it's more likely to continue for the time being (with minor corrections) than not.

$200 within ten minutes or a correction?

Not wanting to piss on your parade but with the gox price becoming less relevant by the day (considering total CNY vol and bitstamp) 'gox hitting $200' is thankfully MUCH less of a big deal than last time.  I'm hoping the fact of this rise happening over multiple exchanges and currencies makes it less likely that speculation gets too carried away than before simply on the basis of a nice round number on one exchange.

I'd much rather see the price chill out and correct around here or a bit lower for a few weeks at least.  However, with the bottom chart as one of my trend indicators I'm not intending to volunteer my bitcoins to sell to take the heat out of the buying frenzy any time soon so we'll just have to wait and see

^^ +1 I like it It's all in the context.

Wouldn't $169 on Gox as 'market cap' be even less meaningful than before due to Gox's premium existing due only to choked fiat?

If only houses in earthquake areas 'collapsed' in this manner!!

I accept there is a realistic probability that this is the case (as I acknowledged).  However, we should know this pretty soon if it is the case because the publicity will force the hand of the mother company to do some research as to its legitimacy.  They could embrace it, just let the experiment run even if it wasn't deliberate or, if China really doesn't want Bitcoin to be more than a minuscule novelty, instruct them to quietly drop it.

Even if they take all the preparatory steps and design this perfect law to criminalise Bitcoin's use for legit businesses if things keep going as they are they will not dare take the step of implementing it for fear of losing out to the rest of the world which appears to be in the process of reaping the rewards of crypto's agility in facilitating commerce.  As I said on the Baidu thread, fear of losing power to other nations is a massive motivator for the US - even more I think than losing power to its own citizens - which is what Bitcoin has the potential to empower.

A few of thoughts regarding this:

Unless, as suggested above, this is something the Jashule team have gone ahead with independently of the mother-company what I'm liking the thought of is that Baidu, in doing something as controversial are in my opinion almost certainly have checked out with govt officials whether there was any imminent ban.

Much more than the number of customers or amount of bitcoins that are used to buy their services for me is that this may be seen by other companies who have been considering it but with caution.

I love that it comes the day after the Chinese official guy talking about the need to de-Americanize global finance so that the whole world doesn't have to hold its breath when US politicians are throwing toys out of their pram.

I love it that if it is true that this is a sign that China may allow cryptocurrencies to thrive (I know that's many ifs) then it puts real pressure on the States to get its act together. If there's one thing we can be sure of it is that fear of losing out on the global power stage is a massive motivator for the US.  If they realise there is a minute chance what is happening is a major redistribution of wealth they have a big incentive to get their act together and put a stop to the red-tape jungle that is all the various states with their own petty money transmission laws.

In the meantime the rest of the world has a chance to catch up a bit on the headstart the US had with Bitcoin.  And even though many of the early hoards may be owned by Americans, being of the crypto-libertarian kind this may not benefit the US power-hungry ruling classes much anyway

I'm struggling to think of anything bad about this other maybe than there's a danger of news and wild speculation getting out of hand and landing us in a massive rally followed by another severe correction.  But even if/when that happens it doesn't destroy the protocol, Bitcoin will prevail

What's the difference between an old-time bitcoiner adding a fresh $1,000 worth of bitcoin to his porfolio/trading account than a new person coming along with $1,000?

Aren't you jumping to conclusions here?  These are only allegations atm.  The BBC even says '...the court documents note that Canadian law enforcers have said there was no record of a homicide taking place in White Rock, British Columbia at the time.'  There are many possible explanations for what we see (including the authorities planting stuff on his servers, desperate that he doesn't become a martyr for the libertarian cause).  Time may tell, but we may never know for sure.

I am hoping those in charge of purchasing coins for the trust would have a longer-view than that and will buy as cheaply as they can for as long as they can providing demand for the BIT continues.  If they are as bullish about bitcoin as they appear to be I guess they will share my belief that there is no need to push the price up.  It is better for their customers longer-term to have acquired more cheaper if they are planning on holding long-term.  The longer these low prices continue the higher the proportion of the bitcoins in existence the trust will have acquired.*

Also, buying on exchange with the purpose of artificially pushing up the price when they could buy cheaper is ridiculously short-term.  If those from whom they could have bought cheaper then go to the exchange it will bring the price back down.  That is not good for prospective investor confidence.

* Personally I would prefer a higher proportion of these low-priced coins in the hands of the creative and the innovative as opposed to professional wealth accumulators.  I have let all the good people I know know and if they've decided not to participate that's their lookout.  However, I digress...

Could also just be someone painting the ticker for vol, bringing stamp usd 24hr volume up to 50% which looks impressive for anyone not realising there's only peanuts being traded virtually anywhere atm.

I'm sure this must have been posted before but the sensationalist and water-muddying articles in the mainstream press of late keep concerning people so...

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/black-budget-what-exactly-are-the-nsas-cryptanalytic-capabilities/

Thank you.  Don't know how that happened.  I think you're likely to be correct that it was an anomaly in either the data on bitcoincharts.com or my screenscraping of it to my spreadsheet.  Here's how it looks now:

Edit: Please see posts below.  It is likely this was not correct!...

Now here's a situation I've not seen before!



Interesting times

Ooh, this I find fascinating - OK, I know it's small volumes overall but interesting nevertheless:

Looks like we're on an all time high on the weekly 2week weighted average chart (the one I look to to take out noise).



I much prefer the slope of this rally than that of April and on Bitstamp alone the volume is also looking healthy too though I'd rather see the volume over all major exchanges (which I take to be substantially down) for more confidence this is for real.  However, I am not one of those concerned about 'manipulators' nor that the price is too high.  I'd just prefer the increase slowed down a bit to give more groovy people the chance to jump on board before the institutions do

Putting aside the possibility this buy was on 'insider knowledge' (it's not that rare to see buying of this nature on this scale) I'm not persuaded by the suggestion this is someone new entering the market (why the dickens would they want to buy at gox prices?).  If it is money that was already on gox likelihood is it is money that came from the sale of bitcoins sometime in the last four months.  I'm guessing I was not alone upon seeing the first drop deciding simply not to buy until I was reasonably confident the downtrend had finished.  I recommenced buying ten days ago.  I certainly wasn't the bravest nor the first but I'm also guessing I'm far from the last.

Remember a huge amount of USD was taken out of bitcoins in late April/May, some of it for good but much more I suspect on the wait-and-see principle.  Now it's looking less likely by the day that something disastrous is going to happen to the currency itself (a gox collapse excepted) so deciding just to go for it one night/morning (depending where these few buyers are) doesn't seem so unreasonable a behaviour.

Granted if they wanted to get the most bitcoins for their money they could have spent some time watching the walls and trading as many here do but not everybody has the time nor the interest to be playing that game.  On the bigger scale of things if they got out at a fair price to protect their assets with view to getting back in after the downtrend and are expecting this thing to resume exponential growth losing a few percentage points on slippage getting back in is not a big deal.

Of course I could be totally wrong and this may be the 'hammer' as I'm sure someone will be only to happy to remind us...

But this is how my preferred long-term wma weekly is currently looking: