large trading volume in middle december

[wachtwoord]

Does anyone know what caused this? http://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?timespan=1year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&scale=0

(I tired to use the search function but couldn't find anything)

[likuidxd]

Maybe the same thing that causes this?

[notme]

Maybe the same thing that causes this?

Rampant consumerism to the point of insanity?  At this rate I don't know if I'll ever leave these beautiful hills.  I'll take my chances with the bears and rattlesnakes any day over the lunacy I see from you flatlanders.

[Stephen Gornick]

That is one challenge when working with a pseudonymous digital currency -- even simple metrics like "total [real] spending volume" are very difficult to report on accurately.

Some of that was funds from addresses with large amounts of funds.  Sending 0.01 btc from a bitcoin address that has 10,000  BTC on it may make it look like that was 10K of funds moved, not 0.01 BTC of funds that moved.

Additionally, with the bitcoin client released with encrypted, those volume metrics could have been transfers to accommodate having an encrypted wallet.

If there was a jump in the adoption rate of Bitcoin, with it being used in a significantly greater manner then the number of transactions would have jumped as well: - http://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

[wachtwoord]

Yeah it is probably what you're saying. I encrypted my wallet as well and moved everything to a newly created address. I just didn't know this was what they were measuring, I thought they measures the sum of the transactions on all major exchanges.

If this was the case, because of the constant number of transactions, a small amount of people traded large amounts of coins right when the exchange rate seemed to be at it's lowest point (a vally, not saying it won't drop further down the line ). So, I was curious of some major player entered the speculation playing field.