Bitcoin stabilizing around $15.

[Nagle]

Bitcoin today (USD, TradeHill)

We're getting past the drama phase. That's what a useful currency is supposed to look like - flat and boring. When the chart looks like that, merchants can price products in Bitcoins. Merchants typically deposit their day's receipts in a bank once each day. If the price of Bitcoins is steady over the course of a day, merchants can convert to a real currency once a day, pull out the cash, and put it in their bank account.

There's a reasonable amount of market depth behind that, too.  At first, trading on Tradehill was very thin, but now there's a a few thousand Bitcoins of market depth on both the bid and ask sides. That's not huge by financial standards, but it's enough to allow some modest real-world businesses to convert their daily take.

Back in the Mt. Gox era, we were seeing $30 and $8 in the same week. That had to stop.

This is real progress.

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[SlipperySlope]

It took a few days for traders, merchants and miners to move funds and bitcoins to TradeHill.  Volume picked up only today.

When Mt Gox gets back online, prices may firm up, provided that the site exhibits solid security.

[Bit_Happy]

Stable does have advantages Nagle. However, BTC went from ~$1.5 to $32 in a little over one month, so more wild days are going to happen soon. That is part of human nature (greed vs fear) and cannot be changed, or avoided, after such a sharp run up.
It is stable right now, since the action is really still based at MtGox which resumes in < 24 hours.

Buy Low Sell High | Good luck figuring out what the Low and High will be.  

[dinzy]

There is still around a 12% change from high to low which is an order of magnitude higher than a crazy day for 'real' currency. 

[hawks5999]

all numbers right now are useless since the majority of people can't get to their accounts at mtgox.

[phorensic]

One thing to note is that the chart on Tradehill's site is scaled differently than most other trading charts.  If you notice it starts at 0 at the bottom.  This can make it look artificially flat compared to something like SierraChart that is auto-scaling the min/max range.

[stakhanov]

Not that flat actually

[tomcollins]

I'm guessing a lot of people have money or BTC stuck at Mt. Gox now.  Once people who were actually trading get back going, we'll see where the market takes it.  $15 is just a sign of no volume.

[Synaesthesia]

Bitcoin world, where one day of stability is a big deal 

[frutza]

At this time, the success of Bitcoin is driven by speculation not its use for payments. Speculation is most profitable when the markets fluctuate a lot, and less profitable when the markets are stable. In a (rather small) economy like Bitcoin, it is still possible for a few players with lots of liquidity to move the market at will, so please do expect a lot of fluctuation when MtGox comes back. It will take a while until MtGox will regain trust, but once that happen, the bubble will return. Ride it wisely!

[hugolp]

Bitcoin world, where one day of stability is a big deal 

 

[frutza]

That was the day when the big players were in vacation, or busy with other things 

[Elokane]

There were a few days where the price on MtGox was stable at 19-20. This is meaningless. :/

[Alex Beckenham]

As others have alluded to, once Mt Gox re-opens prices are going to go nuts.

I reckon there are so many people that have no idea if the reopening will mean prices drop sharply or skyrocket, that it will likely swing wildly.

[Tronlet]

The stat displayer you're using is ridiculously zoomed out in terms of min/max, as people have previously stated.

Note how jagged and unpredictable it is once you zoom in a bit.

[marvinmartian]

Difficulty level will play a big role.  It's ironic that Mt. Gox is going to re-open the same day difficulty finally crests 1 mega.

I predict that the price of bitcoins MUST rise in order to keep pace with the rising difficulty level.  I contend that the recent spike to $30 was correlated to the recent huge jumps in difficulty.

The miners of Arrakis will have their day.  ;-)

[Meman]

I predict that the price of bitcoins MUST rise in order to keep pace with the rising difficulty level.

Hard to say. The higher the difficulty, the more miners will stop mining or stop buying new equipment. So there should be less BTC offered on exchanges. This will rise the BTC price, if(!) the demand for BTC's stays constant. There may also be a time gap (some days) between the dificulty increase and a possible influence on the BTC price.

[Vandroiy]

(...) between the dificulty increase and a possible influence on the BTC price.

How would difficulty have an influence on BTC price? You got it the wrong way 'round, man. Price determines difficulty.

Also, the amount of BTC available to exchanges is based on production rate, and difficulty adapts to keep that constant. Miners might as well be Satoshi secretly writing magical BTC bucks with his quantum computer, the market would not change as long as the effective minting rate does not change.

Edit: oh, @topic: please use the word "stable" when more than two months have passed. Normal people will shake their head when one says "stable" because the market didn't explode in antimatter fireworks for a day.

[hawks5999]

^^^^^^^^^^^+1^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ for a proper understanding of stable.


On the difficulty/miners/exchange side I was going to make a similar argument but the truth is that prior to this difficulty change >10/hr were being produced. Now it is down around 9/hr with the difficulty targeting 6. If difficulty gets it down to 6 there will be fewer coins produced by about 40%.
If the difficulty misjudges the supply of new hashes on the network and the supply remains high... well the difficulty will have it's work cut out.

Reminds me of:

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."

-Rick Cook

[Tronlet]

I'm guessing a lot of people have money or BTC stuck at Mt. Gox now.  Once people who were actually trading get back going, we'll see where the market takes it.  $15 is just a sign of no volume.

Less volume typically means more fluctuation, doesn't it? Because individual trades have more of an effect.